Introduction

As a child, the naturalist Frank Buckland learned to differentiate different kinds of animal urine by taste alone. His house seems like it was riddled with animals - including a parrot that kept on calling cabs from the front window as soon as they arrived. And there was a laughing jackass which I think is a cucoburra, chasing live mice up and down a glass jar with a battalion of cats waiting underneath. Do you know what that... What a little bit of a... Oh, yeah. That's... Do you know why? Because he fell over in the night while trying to get his pet tortoise to walk across an open slab of dough so he could look at