Sometimes you read about a kid who has invented something useful and you wonder just how on earth they ever came up with such a clever idea that nobody had thought of before. Or maybe they came up with a better way of doing something that had already been done.
A few weeks ago I invented something that was useful and I realised that it is not actually as hard as one would think.
Those pesky ants kept getting into our cat’s bowl. The poor cat did not fancy eating his pellets when they had wriggly little pepper tasting insects on them. (Ants do taste like pepper you know – pepper gets its flavour from a mild acid and ants produce acid – but I don’t recommend eating one to find out.)
We had to recycle pellets to the birds every single day. Worse – because he has a kidney problem – the pellets that he chomps are rather expensive.
Mum was all for just spraying poison on the walls so that the ants can’t even get to his dish but I thought that was a bit mean.
So I started thinking…
Ants don’t like water. Well – they like it to drink but they don’t really like swimming in it. Right!
I took a dish and put some water in it and put the cats bowl on top of it.
Turned out the dish was a bit small and the ants made a little bridge of themselves and still got into the food.
So I took a bigger dish. This did not work so well either because that cat of ours is a messy creature and he knocked half his pellets into the water. They swelled up and also got wasted. Even the birds did not like those squishy suckers.
Eventually I found a dish that was just the right size and ever since then we have hardly squandered a single pellet.
There was a process that I followed.
First I thought about the problem. Then I evaluated the situation to see how I could fix it. Then I tried different solutions to see which worked best.
I felt very chuffed because I had fixed the ant problem. And it wasn’t even really hard either.
I discovered that they do sell cats bowls with a little moat around it for water – but still – I made a plan and it worked.
Be inventive!
Sibo