OT: Chinese Authoritarianism

John Robertson wrote in news:abudnTEDQfyzT8nDnZ2dnUU7-L snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

Kangaroo not poisonous, but I would not tick one off if I were you. Tasmanian devil not poisonous, but same result. A sugar glider might poke you in the eye... :-) Then there are some pretty big crocodiles roaming about.

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There aren't that many venomous animals and plants. Admittedly the platypus does have a venom gland on it's hind leg and hollow spur near the heel, bu t it doesn't go after humans with it.

The koala is more typical (and you are much more likely to run into one). T here's nothing remotely like a grizzly bear. Sharks do kill about as many A ustralian swimmers as grizzly bears kill Canadians wandering around in fore sts.

Newspapers make a lot of fuss about both.

Bill Sloman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Ha ha ha.

Run, Billy, that platy' is gonna get ya!

Have you got any idea how hard it is to find a platypus? And how rapidly it makes itself scarce if detects a human in the vicinity? They are aquatic, so you don't see much of them at the best of times.

Echidna's aren't common either, but I once came across one in our school grounds - it promptly dug itself into the turf, presumably heading for an ant's nest.

These are rare animals. Marsupials are odd enough, but monotremes are even odder. They seems to have split off from the other mammals about 220 million years ago, quite a bit before the marsupial-placental split.

The creek that runs through Maleny is full of them - visitors see them every day. But most places, you're right.

That's similar to the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed ca. 20 million people, because it infected one of every three people on Earth (over 500 million infections). With high transmission rate of coronavirus, taking the hit is not a good idea.