The first fact that you need to know with regard to this post is that when you live in a world of numbers, there comes a point in some days when they appear to dance around the page like agents of chaos. Sometimes you find occasional nuggets of whimsy such as palindromes, repdigits, or numbers that have other meanings like dates but in general, simple arithmetic of great strings of numbers is mind numbingly dull.
The second fact that you need to know is that earlier this year, there was a period of flash flooding that caused the Hawkesbury River to break its banks and this meant that people have had to rebuild and make claims on their insurance.
One of our clients has a property on the banks of the Hawkesbury River at Colo. When the flood waters rose, they flooded two of their sheds from floor to ceiling and they lost about a dozen sheep and two utes. They also lost the entire contents of the sheds due to water damage and this will take time before they realise the full extent of what that damage actually is.
In the last set of quarterly accounts, we came across some truly bizarre entries, where the client has written down stuff but not even the greatest of handwriting experts would have the slightest bit of a clue as to what the heck it says.
There is a line of narration in a green ten column account book which we think reads:
26/3 Unlimited... Wolves - Flood repairs. $1498.50
Presumably flood repairs means the expenses incurred in repairing the damage caused by the flood. It is nonsensical to assume that someone wants to repair a flood. The only way that I can think that one would repair a flood is by adding more water. Surely the name for a damaged flood is 'normal' or in extreme cases 'a drought'.
However "Unlimited Wolves" is also strange. I do not know why one would need to buy unlimited wolves, nor how one would procure an unlimited number of wolves for any price let alone $1498.50
The question of why one needs unlimited wolves is itself baffling. My boss offered up a semi-plausible explanation:
"if you had unlimited wolves, you could just use their absorbent properties to soak up flood waters "
- My Boss, 29th Apr 2021
I consulted an expert on this subject and they arrived at an interesting conclusion.
"Wolves don't have absorption properties
They're just big dogs that go AAAWOOOOOO"
- Expert, 29th Apr 2021
"Have you ever tried mopping up flood waters with unlimited wolves? I bet you have not."
- Me, 29th Apr 2021
"I have not as wolves are neither absorbent, nor friendly to Australia's ecosystem.
You cannot import wolves for flood purposes, let alone unlimited wolves.
In conclusion: what the ****"
- Expert, 29th Apr 2021
This is an apt conclusion to a baffling problem that we have and it opens up all kinds of enquiry.
- What exactly are the rules behind importing wolves? If you can not import one, then you can not import unlimited wolves.
- How absorbent are wolves?
I will take it as unchallenged fact that unlimited wolves are not friendly to Australia's ecosystem but given our history with rabbits, lantana, and cane toads, that seems like an issue that we've already decided that we don't care about as a nation.
Also, unlimited wolves within a very small space has the ability to create a black hole. This blog has previously asked about the possibility of a lion based black hole¹; so the idea of an unlimited wolves black hole is not entirely alien. This then opens up the question of who would win in a fight - a lion black hole or an unlimited wolves black hole? The answer is nobody. Even if the two black holes melded and achieved some kind of melded unlimited wolves/lions consciousness, it would be a very bitey and fighty consciousness; which would probably also go AAAWOOOOOO².
Wolves are not considered as legal pets in Australia; which means that under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) only organisations that are open to the general public for the primary exhibition of wildlife, ie. zoos and wildlife parks, can apply to import or export CITES species and Australian native species. You can not for instance import an elephant, even if it is a working elephant.
You are allowed to import Goats, Sheep, Deer (which includes Elk and Moose), Horses (which curiously includes Zebra), Bovines (cows, bison, yaks, etc). under livestock provisions but they fall under the authority of the Department of Agriculture.
Having said all of that, you don't actually need to import any wolves as the full trinomial name of the Australian Dingo is Canis Lupus Dingo. Not only do you not have to import dingoes because they are already here, New South Wales is one of only two states where people can keep pet dingoes without any permit. If we can keep dingoes without a permit and do not need to import them, then unlimited wolves is completely legal.
In answering the second issue raised by my expert that wolves are nor absorbent, there is in fact an empirical standard for measuring absorption.
ISO 20158:2018 is entitled "Textiles — Determination of water absorption time and water absorption capacity of textile fabrics". A textile is a flexible material made by creating an interlocking network of yarns or threads and the hairy coat of a wolf certainly fits this definition. I am reliably informed that a hair in good condition can absorb more than 30% of its own weight of water.
This is where maths comes in. A 20kg dingo will have roughly 0.5kg of hair. That 0.5kg of hair will be able to hold about 150mL of water at saturation. The flood waters which caused the Hawkesbury River to break its banks were 57,000 megalitres of water per day for four days; giving us 228,000 megalitres in all. That means that you only need 1,520,000,000,000 dingoes to clean up the flood waters. For $1498.50, getting more than 1.5 trillion dingoes seems like amazing value to me.
In the end, all of this turned out to be very disappointing because when another email came through with the relevant invoices, it was for a company called "Unanderra Walls" and not "Unlimited Wolves". Most of the invoice from Unanderra Walls had to do with the installation and painting of plasterboard walls and wasn't even remotely wolf related. In an instant, we went from the possibility of unlimited wolves and water absorption, to zero wolves.
How boring.
No AAAWOOOOOO.
¹Please see Horse 2827 - Questions 4 & 5 https://rollo75.blogspot.com/2021/04/horse-2827-holiday-fun-quiz-pull-out.html
²Although seeing as light itself can not escape a black hole, sound would also not escape either; irrespective of whether or not there is a medium for it to travel through.
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