Lest Leaping Dogs, Sly ...

... among them a beautiful young woman from Geneva, New York, who told me, in another Bermuda landscape with figures, 'We are not going to hide our heads in the sand like kangaroos.' ... Any creature coming upon a kangaroo upright would not be frightened by its comic head and little forelegs, but a sudden view of its strange and enormous rear quarters, protuding from the earth, would surely be enough to give pause to a prowling tiger or a charging rhino. (Quibblers who have pounced upon the fact that there are no tigers or rhinos in Australia should remember that these kangaroos are Bermudan kangaroos.)

James Thurber, Such a Phrase as Drifts through Dreams.

Thurber can mock all he like, but I think this lady makes a good point. It's high time we stopped sticking our heads in the sand like kangaroos before the ostriches come home to roost. The tigers are already loose in the top paddock, and we may just have to shut the gate before the jellyfish bolts and we're left with a marmoset in the room. I think the poet William Taylor-Coleridge sums it up best:

Let sleeping cows lie
Until the elephants come home:
I shall always dove you,
Wherever ewes may roam.

So there you go, gentles and ladymen. At the risk of me phrasing parrots, I have to say, there's no use splitting hares about it any longer. Someone has to draw a lion through the sand, and I guess that someone just has to be me.

UPDATE! - I'm sorry I've been away for the past day, but I've been having an etycmological catastrophe! Someone cried havoc and let slip the Hogs of Dore, while the Wildbats roamed the hills and began to prey on the helpless cats in the belfry! I tried to shut the gate, but the boars had halted, and before I could do anything about it, the quick brown cocks had jumped over the lazy frogs!