Other animals in coalmining

[dazb]

What about other types of animals being linked to coalmining, anybody any stories?
Canaries, dogs, oxen, cats even goats apparently!! Rats, mice, snakes, fleas, cockroaches and terrifying wood-hornets. Blackbirds in the pit bottom of a deep shaft mine is one example that I remember.

[ejb]

Bloody mice,or "moggies" as they called them in St Helens.
You'd be sitting somewhere having your snap and you'd see the bits of dust falling from the lagging boards opposite,so you'd pick up a stone,very slowly,and then hurl it at the mouse,but they were always to quick to hit.
Maybe a catapult would have been better.
I did hear that they'd tried introducing cats down a pit,but stopped when a couple got run over by locos.

[John]

Wongawilli Colliery in NSW, we had a large rat population, don't mean Under Managers either!
Coming out in the early hours of the morning a rat was running along the rails, we squashed it with the track mounted personel carrier we were travelling in.
One of the fitters caught and tied a rat by it's tail over the belt, just high enough so as an empty belt would give the rat a rest. Then when coal was coming down the belt, the rat had to run like hell or have it's head bashed by lumps of coal.

One of the fitters forgot to lock his tool box one shift, the fitter on my shift decided to catch rats and open the tool box lid and toss the rats he caught in the toolbox. End of shift and a million rats later he locked the unsuspecting fitters tool box up.............I'd have done a free double shift to be there when the poor fitter opened his tool box and had a million rats jump out ;D ;D

We had a strike when I was at Angus Place Colliery in NSW. We had to provide two electricians per shift for safety, one surface coverage and one to go down with a Deputy to examine the pumps cables etc..I went in with a Deputy, we walked down the belt drift and his dog came down for a walk with us......First dog I'd seen U/G!

We used to get snakes hang around the main drift at Wongawilli Colliery, don't recollect any going into the drifts, although we did get a couple of lyre birds hang around too, they used to catch and eat the snakes.

I used to catch mice at Angus Place, meggered one one shift to the amusement of the miners. Amazing what effect 1000 volts has on a mouse with one lead clipped to it's tail and the other to the metal top of the table, when the mouse is lowered onto the table top

[dazb]

An old collier once showed me a really effective way of catching mice with a little bit of an horrific, but perhaps logical twist to it; set a glass milk bottle vertical in a hole in the gate (a pile of “muck” up to the neck of the bottle did it), a piece of bread in the bottle and just leave it, so realising the logic of this trap, mouse senses snap, climbs in, gobbles bread and can’t climb out………………..so then I ask, how do you kill the mouse?............”You don’t” he says, “Just leave it and others will enter the bottle to investigate”………………”So do you wait till there are a few and then kill them?”……..”Narr, you wait until there is only one of them, a big fat smelly one who has eaten all the others in the bottle”…………………”Good idea” says I “So then you kill him?”…………………..”Narr you let him go, he is then a confirmed cannibal and will go back and eat all his cousins”…………..made sense to me.

[John]

I've heard of that one Daz, Dave George when I was at Clifton told me he used to set a milk bottle in the ground before the annual shutdown. When he came back and checked it two weeks later, there was loads of bones and one fat mouse. Never asked him if he released it though. ;D

[Clive]

At Green Clough, which was on a farm the mamgers dog used to follow him down the pit. It was a bit dissconcerting for a start to turn around from the face and see two green eyes 2 foot off the floor till you got used to the fact it was a labby bittza and not king rat.

At The Brig the owners son lived in a caravan on the pit top and he had a pit bull called Toad. This would hang round in the baths whilst we were showering. Always felt a bit edgy pushing past en rout to the clean lockers with the pit bull at knacker level.

A few years earlier his daughter had a poney. As it was winter he let it in the cabin whilst we were down the pit on backshift. When we came out our cabin was full of horse s**t. Still.....The managers cabin was full of Bull s**t.

[Sam from Kent]

At Tilmanstone we were plagued by crickets. We then had an infestation by stinging insects and some were sent away to be identified and it transpired that they were South African Wood Wasps coming in in the timber. The union had a fit as it was at the time of Apartheid