22 February 2011

Stop and smell the...roses?


All around campus there are beautiful flowerbeds planted with...upside-down foam paint brushes?  Quite the mystery.  Thanks to the 100-Hour Board, I found out the reason why:
"So what does all this mean?...To a deer, flowers are just like candy. They're bright and colorful, and maybe they don't taste very good, but neither does most cake frosting to humans. Pansies and other flowers cost a heck of a lot of money (you would be shocked to find out how much BYU spends to make campus look nice), and the friendly gardeners of BYU Grounds want to protect their investments of time and money. Here's where the foam paintbrush sticks come in. Deer and wolves aren't exactly friends. Wolves, like dogs, tend to pee on everything to mark their territory. Deer can smell their urine, and know to avoid areas where there are lots of wolves. So what do the gardeners do to protect the flowers from deer? They soak the little foam brushes in wolf urine and plant them in the beds alongside the flowers to keep the deer out. I am not making this up. Kind of neat, huh? 
"At this point, you may have a couple of questions. First, you might be wondering how they get wolf urine in the first place. Well, I can tell you that it comes in jugs and it costs about $40 per quart. As to how it got from the wolf to the jug, I have no idea and would prefer not to think about the specifics of how one (likely a zoo keeper) harvests the stuff....So, we get wolf urine in our flowerbeds. It's not cheap, but it works better than the other methods."
I'm not sure whether I should be impressed, grossed out, and intrigued by how many other wolf "products" are being used around campus.  But now you can be conflicted too.

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