Great Coalition

Less than an hour ago Angie Merkel signed the coalition agreement between her party CDU (=Conservatives), the SPD (=Labour) and the CSU (= Bavarian conservatives). Tomorrow Germany will then have a new government, nearly 3 months after the election.

She started her speech by quoting Germany's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer:
"If two people always have the same opinion, then neither is worthwhile".

On Friday I read a quote and mentioned it to MrB:
"When two beekeepers have the same opinion, then one of them doesn't know what he's talking about"

In the case of bees, I have to agree with the quote. We both agreed on the best varroa mite treatment on Friday, but I just nodded as I hadn't got a clue.

Probably one if not both the above quotes apply to our animal feeding. Angie (not Merkel) believes in two rules: quantity and the best possible (measured by her eyes and nose). Thus humans (me) get tinned carrots & peas frozen too expensive the horses get fresh carrots, maize, apples etc.

For the dogs she cooks a weekly pot of bones and scraps (the look good enough for humans) from the butcher and feeds this together with the cooked dog food she buys from the butcher. We fundamentally disagree on the approach as in my opinion the fat content is too high and so I give far less cooked meat and more dried food. However I can only do this on 3 days of the week and as Angie had holiday last week, she has fed the dogs for the last 11 days.

It was very clear to see yesterday how fat Flash had become and he could hardly walk this morning. He even refused to go out to do the morning horse feed, something he has never missed for around the last 4000 days. After mucking out, Luna and I managed to get him outside but he didn't want to go for a walk, constantly looking towards the horse stable. I gave in and went to the horses and sure enough he did his daily inspection and showed them who was boss. In the Blip you can see him living dangerously on icy ground telling Sultan to move. (He did try saying "please" first). As soon as I said we would now go for a walk he wouldn't move. I walked away with Luna and he eventually followed but very reluctantly. During the walk he got a little better (probably the joints were warming up) but after an hour he eventually did his business (lots of cereal type grains in it) and then he vomited twice. I am sure the food he has been getting is just not good for him. Angie had been feeding some Frolic (expensive) dried food to them and on checking the contents later saw it has a very bad Calcium/Phosphor ratio of almost 1:1 - should be more like 2:1. Frolic also has added sugar.

So when we got home, a small portion of cooked meat, a bit of the liquid from the cooked bones/meat and a good portion of Aldi dried food. Both dogs lapped it up. Now two more days and hopefully there will be some improvement.

The dog food story is the same for the chickens and the horses. The chickens are so fat they can't lay eggs (this really is caused by overweight) and the horses can barely move their layers of fat.

One conclusion one could make from Mr Adenauer - if two people have different opinions, one must be right. Well not too sure and even less sure my views are right but as the Labour leader (now Vice Chancellor) quoted in his speech (from the former Chancellor Willy Brandt) "Politics is made of compomise, but Labour compromise's are the better ones".

From the weather forecast seems the UK is in the clouds while we enjoy the rest of the huge high over Italy. It's actually warmer the higher one is, so that in the mountains they are getting to double figures while we are still just over +3°C today. White Christmas is now unlikely except in the mountains. Too much "warm" mucky weather coming from the west England/France. We need good NW wind from Scotland/Iceland to assure snow.