#and the stray (i'm assuming it's a stray bc it has no collar) is one i'm familiar with and was alert and behaving normally

[catchcrows]

man, something about interacting with wildlife in western europe will never not be so, so fucking weird to me

like it truly does feel like you have to make a concerted, intentional effort to encounter A Creature in a way that i've never experienced before (disclaimer here that i grew up and lived in cities where The Outdoors started well within city limits and we regularly had deer and cougars and coyotes just fucking meander through town, i'd probably feel differently i grew up in the middle of nyc or something)

jfc let alone how wild it was to live in the manicured garden island of the uk, although even in belgium my colleagues tell me that you really have to be deep in the woods to encounter a wild animal larger than a cat (and fucking forget about large predators/herbivores)

anyway! was pondering this again bc i got got by a stray cat a few days ago (unhappy accident, i was sat on a bench and a cat jumped up bc it didn't realize i was there and got startled, but immediately wanted to be pet the second it realized i was Just Some Guy). so i went home, cleaned and disinfected it.....and then spent an increasingly baffled twenty minutes trying to find what my options were for getting a rabies vaccine course and only getting options for rabies vaccinations upon return from foreign countries, before i remembered that belgium is considered a rabies-free country lmao

ffs my colleagues looked at me like i was asking them directions for the oregon trail when i was telling them the story