individual - committed & patriotic Public Servants

Surely you jest :) :) :)

The vast majority of public servants I've encountered would experience considerable difficulty fitting in time for anything remotely productive with their onerous schedule of flexi-time breaks, smokos, meetings etc. I don't know that any in this part of the world could actually be described as committed although maybe they should be (to a morgue, because they generally don't look like they have moved in recent history)

I've never had occasion to use Dettol, always been plenty of crows around, but do you find you need to wear safety glasses in case the beasts spit ?? I've had a few people warn me about that, apparently its not something victims are keen to experience twice.

Toads don't spit, but if seriously vexed they stretch their shoulder muscles and squirt venom from the sacs situated there. This is very sticky and toxic and can cause blindness, apparently. I live 150km north of Brisbane in the sticks and we have periodic invasions of toads that the crows ignore, preferring instead to steal from the hens. I go out with a sack at night - they sit still when spotlit by a torch - and toss them in, then if there are more than half a dozen, put them in a bucket of water with the lid on and they drown overnight. If there's only a few, I hold them upside down over a brick so that when I smash their heads in, the poison doesn't spray over me, then it's easy to skin them and use a pair of strong scissors to chop them into pieces that the hens love. It's very quick so the toads don't suffer.
I'm pretty sure our dragon lizards disappeared after a plague of toads a few years ago. Toads get in the ornamental pond and drown the goldfish. After the tadpoles hatch, sometimes there are literally thousands of thumbnail sized toads hopping up the paths from the dam, easy prey for large birds, but sadly even the tiny ones are toxic.

We put the torch beam on them & spray them from about 6 feet, they mostly do one hop or two & then remain still for good. I actually did an experiment some 20 years ago. I knocked one toad over the head & sprayed the other with Dettol. Next day the Dettol one was sitting there like a Buddha & the other had disappeared. I think I effectively prevented any further breeding for those two & not a single Dollar wasted on research.

I chopped the head off a large toad a few years ago and buried it about 10 cm deep. In the morning it was sitting up like Jacky beside the hole, perfectly alive although headless. It had dug its way out but having no head wasn't sure where to go from there. This is not a fable, it really happened. It seems they keep most of their brains in their spine.