Durban – South Africa’s load shedding has got so bad that the country could easily be compared to the mythical land of Westeros, whose people suffered the ‘long night’.
But out of the darkness, and utter boredom if you ask me, a frog whisperer has emerged.
And his power? His pet dog’s favourite squeaky toy.
Terry van der Walt, 63, sub-editor at Independent Media, recently shared a video of his load-shedding stories (what people get up to in the dark).
“When there’s load shedding I defiantly head into my garden, use battery storage on my new phone with gay abandon, and then make music with the frogs whose tone matches Kismet’s favourite squeaky toy. Watch me entice them,” the 63-year-old captioned the video.
In it, Van der Walt can be seen and heard communicating with a frog in his back yard using his dog’s favourite toy.
He said he discovered his dog Kismet outside a few days ago, playing with the toy and could hear the frog communicating back and forth with him.
“I was sitting outside, minding my own business the other evening when Kismet was playing with the squeaky toy but it was just going off way faster than his little jaw could move.
“I went and had a look, and it was him squeezing it and the frog going off in the background. So I went outside and improvised with my thumb.
“The frogs have become so comfortable that they have laid eggs in the bird bath,” he said.
Despite the country’s ongoing rolling blackouts over what the government has now decided to call an “energy crisis”, the 63-year-old remains hopeful, saying “as it turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks, you can even teach frogs to croak”.
IOL