Balls

Just a small piece of advice if you ever see a dead kangaroo by the side of the road.

Okay, this won't apply to a lot of our readers, since you don't have roos in your country, but it may have some relevance to other animals too.

How can I put this in a nice way that won't offend our more masculine readers? Some animals are proportioned differently to humans in the bollocks department. The reason I'm making this statement is because of the rescue we got called out to tonight. It's okay, David Attenborough's Life of Mammals finished last Monday, so we weren't bothered about having our TV viewing interrupted.

It was a report of a kangaroo that had been hit by a car. The person reporting it was worried it may have a joey* in the pouch.

The three of us, Donna, our friend Lesleigh, and I drove about five minutes away with our rescue kit ready, including my university disection kit in case we had to cut a joey out of the pouch. We drove around looking for a dead roo and finally found one underneath the Armco, pulled over, and jumped out to check it over.

I grabbed it by the tail and pulled it further from the road. Rigor mortis had already set in, something we have a bit of experience in with rescues this weekend. While Donna and Lesleigh were walking down with the rescue kit from where they'd parked the car out of the way, I pulled the poor creatures legs apart for a better look.

Standing up, the animal probably wouldn't have come up to my waste, but between its legs were a pair of male parts of the anatomy the size of my fist**. There wasn't going to be a joey here.

We couldn't find any other kangaroos in the area, so we assumed this was the one that had been reported.

So next time you find a dead roo and you think that big lump is a joey in the pouch because you think they're too big to be balls, doesn't mean they aren't balls.

It doesn't make you any less of a man. Honest. They're built different.

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* Joey refers to the baby of any marsupial, not just kangaroos. They do tend to look very similar when they're really young though. We often get asked if we look after joeys. Well, yes we do, just not the kind of joeys you're thinking of.

** Okay, maybe not the size of my fist, but definitely a big handful. Check out page ten of the last BARN newsletter to see what sort of proportion I'm talking about. That's a ringtail that Mandy's holding.