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You can also mail a U.S. postal money order to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322.
Though I'm getting a bit concerned about Freelancer.com being a legitimate site at all. Much as I'd like to believe that some sweet day I'll actually receive the payment I was promised for this post, I see site managers trying to embezzle the money they're supposedly just waiting to send until I've earned a little more. I really think the FCC needs to do something to prevent the abomination of job "agencies" taking bribes to recommend people for jobs from getting started in these United States...as in, if a writing or other online job site even tries to sell prospective employees anything, even a physical object they actually intend to deliver, before the employee has collected a payment, we need a law requiring that job site's address to redirect to a message that THIS WEB SITE IS TRYING TO EXPLOIT THE UNDEREMPLOYED AND HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN, for about a year. Job sites should not even be allowed to display ad links on pages people see while logged in as sellers-of-services.
Now on to today's topic, which is the "Torties"--cats on whose coats black, orange, and white hairs form large patches of mixed, brownish-looking fur rather than distinct black, orange, and white spots, especially on the back. As regular readers know, my Queen Cat Heather has mostly a light-colored "heatherspun" coat, great camouflage at this time of year, with distinct black and orange rings and a cream-colored tip on her long tail; she's a long, lean cat whose normal weight is nine to ten pounds. Junior cat Samantha is mostly black with some distinct orange spots and some black-and-orange "tortoiseshell" spot, on her back, and white feet, and a white tip on her long black tail; she's a spring kitten and weighs four or five pounds.
Samantha has a nervous personality, probably shaped by growing up in a house that included middle school boys. Whenever she's scared she goes into an off-putting threat display of growling, nipping, and slapping with her claws out. Although she was brought up as a pet and answers to her name, and although I certainly would never mistake Samantha's carefully harmless threat display for a real feral cat's fight for freedom--if sweet little Samantha been taken to a shelter that follows the current evil policy of the Humane Society of the United States, she'd be classified as unadoptable and killed.
Both Heather and I have recognized Samantha's obnoxious display as the bluff it is. If Samantha slaps Heather, harmlessly, Heather slaps Samantha, harmlessly, right back, and Samantha leaps back and cringes into a corner, and Heather nonverbally reassures her. If Samantha slaps me, mostly-harmlessly, I grab her by the scruff of the neck and tell her to calm down, which she usually does, and if necessary I put her in a nice safe cage. My "Aunt Dotty," who tamed feral cats when I was a child, used that technique to eliminate serious threat displays from feral cats (notably including Boots, the Tuxie, and Muffin, the Tortie, who lived with her for seventeen and eighteen years--and they were adult cats when she tamed them).
This morning, while Heather and Samantha were eating breakfast on the porch (because it was still wet outside), Samantha growled as I walked past her. Yes, and if I'd separated her from her food, she would have slapped me! HSUS shelters brand cats unadoptable and kill them for less...even though Samantha unmistakably nonverbally said that she wanted to stay with Heather and me; even though she comes when she's called and purrs when she's stroked and snuggles when she is or isn't picked up, just as if she'd been born and raised in my home.
They woke me several times during the night, chasing a mad squirrel that I heard yelling at us from an apple tree in the orchard on Sunday. A hawk was flying overhead, crows were giving their alarm call--that "Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw!" that's the "word" humans are most likely to hear American Crows utter. This squirrel was getting into the act and, in plain sight of cats and humans, about fifteen feet up the tree, it was shaking its tail and yelling "Wack! Wack! Wack!" like a rather hoarse, very loud and angry duck. I've not heard a squirrel quack like that before. The cardinals and a chickadee were also vocalizing, warning each other of every movement of the circling hawk.
(The hawk wasn't close enough for me to see its size but it did fly toward the afternoon sun so that I had a clear view of its mostly pale spotted undercoat--no red tail yet, if it's ever going to have one. It might be one of the smaller hawks that frequently do eat birds. Most red-tails probably do eat a smaller bird at some time in their lives, but it wasn't good for them. When red-tails eat birds regularly or by choice, they're sick, and can be classified as "chicken hawks" and shot for the benefit of the local population...although Virginia law does not yet recognize this fact of life. Red-tails are beautiful birds, usually able to take care of themselves in the wild but also willing to become pets; like cats they rarely try to eat birds and usually fail when they do try--but a sick red-tail that finds a family of songbirds or young domestic fowl is indeed a nuisance.)
Anyway the Mad Squirrel thought it wanted to move into the house, because the edge of the passing hurricane had blown some dead flybush down from the hillside above the house into a position from which the squirrel could bound onto the roof, and it was trying to pry up a piece of the roof, and Heather and Samantha and also Tickle were trying to kill it. At least one cat got up onto the roof. I was too sleepy to go out and see whether Samantha was really working with them as part of a hunting team yet, although, if she is, that would indicate that she's a social cat after all. (If not, she's the cleverest non-social cat I've ever seen.)
When I left this morning it was still too wet for pruning to be a pleasant chore, but I had to force myself out of the house. There are some cyberchores and writing chores I can do on this laptop when it's offline; I usually leave this one in town overnight and do other things with my own personal desktop computer, or in emergencies with the Sickly Snail, at home, but this weekend I had this laptop at home. I woke up at 5:45 from a dream of cyberchores, ready to tear into the cyberchores in real life...
Writer's id: "Eight o'clock already? Oh can't I stay home and putter today?"
Writer's ego: "You signed a Real Writing Contract on Friday! You need to use online time when you have it! It's not actually raining now, so load up that laptop, wrap it up in a blanket shawl, and get into town now! You're wasting online time!"
Writer's id: "Oh moooan, oh waaail...I want to finish these cyberchores! I want to do the housekeeping chores I didn't do on Monday! I want to prune the hedge above the house!"
Etc., etc., etc.
But I had received payment for regular blog posts this week, and while waiting for the client's input on the Real Writing Contract seemed a good time for a blog post. Well, it's Tuesday, a good day to post about the Torties. It's October, a time when many bloggers seem to like to post about a specific type of cancer.
Personally, as a cancer widow, I think my awareness of cancer is as high as it can go without becoming a source of carcinogenic toxic stress, so I don't usually get into "cancer awareness month" things.
But I had wanted to post an official comment about a nasty little meme that the Humane Cat Genocide Society, the evil modern HSUS that doesn't even promote Cleveland Amory's or Roger Caras's books any more, has been circulating. Even Mudpie's Human (isn't Mudpie the cutest Tortie in cyberspace? Or do you think beware-of-Petfinder-cookies Jade is?) has bought into the totally bogus idea that leaving our dogs and cats intact, the way nature intended them to be, is what causes them to get cancer.
Although dogs' and cats' mammary glands are usually flat and unnoticeable except immediately before birth and during active lactation, so they're called teats rather than breasts, the kind of cancer that forms in cats' mammary tissue is still called breast cancer.
Pet food is what the meat industry does with unusable "meat by-products," including the actual malignant tumors of animals that had cancer before being slaughtered. It's also laced with toxic preservatives, of which arsenic is probably the least toxic to humans, that are banned from the human food supply as being long-term carcinogens Pet food manufacturers get away with this because most cats and dogs don't live long enough to develop any type of cancer. Period.
Nevertheless, both cats and dogs, both male and female, occasionally get cancer of the mammary glands. In fact, although cancer in cats and dogs is rare, "feline breast cancer" and "canine breast cancer" rank among the most common forms of cancer found in these species. If you can keep your pet alive long enough for carcinogens to build up in its body, the mammary glands are among the most likely places for cancerous tumors to form.
Sex hormone activity does not cause cancer. Sex hormones are naturally present in all healthy adult animals of every species. The role of estrogen and testosterone in cancer is to encourage bodies to develop the type of tissue in which breast or prostate cancers form.
However, when cancerous tumors form in the mammary tissue of male or female humans or other animals, estrogen is the hormone that encourages the body to expand a cushion of fat around the mammary glands, so sexually mature females are more likely than males to develop breast cancer. This is true for cats and dogs as well as humans.
Most unspayed cats don't get breast cancer.
Many spayed cats do get breast cancer.
The cause of cancer obviously has nothing to do with whether a cat, dog, or human, is sterile, or a mother, or a father. The cause of cancer is hard to pin down because it seems to be a combination of chemicals, some naturally present in food, most found in pollutants such as chemical pesticides, perfumes, preservatives, and by-products of things like gas-burning cars, that enables the "oxidation" damage that turns healthy cell tissue into cancerous tumors. All of us have been exposed to enough carcinogens that we could have cancer already--and in cyberspace many people already know they have cancer. If we don't have cancer, that appears to be thanks to a healthy balance between oxidant and antioxidant factors in our bodies.
People who are seriously concerned about the health of cats and dogs are interested in knowing more about how antioxidants, and which antioxidants, work for cats and dogs--for one thing it seems that cats don't metabolize Vitamin C at all. Vitamin C from fresh fruit and raw vegetables is the primary antioxidant for humans. What is the primary antioxidant for animals that weren't designed to eat fresh fruit and raw vegetables?
People whose real goal is to extirpate domestic animal species--because that's part of the atheistic religion they were taught by people who coveted the food rich farmers were able to spare for domestic animals--are banging on their drums and screaming, "Hormones cause cancer! The ooonly way to protect your cat from breast cancer is to get her spayed before she can become pregnant! If you didn't have your cat spayed before she was six months old, and she got cancer, it's your fault! No matter how valuable your cat's DNA may be, how much you may want to preserve her bloodline, you haaaff to make sure she can't reproduce--because otherwise people will go on being able to enjoy the benefit of living with cats!"
Is anyone else calling them out about the cruelty of saying this to people who adopted an adult cat from a HSUS-approved shelter? No? "Humane" types are cruel, Gentle Readers. Some of them are downright sociopathic. This web site might even say diabolical.
Because spayed cats get breast cancer too.
Obviously nobody would publish advertisements telling people, "Protect your daughter from breast cancer now by having all her female organs removed before age ten"--although that type of surgery is possible, and has sometimes been recommended for little girls at unusually high risk, and is, in fact, about as effective for preventing breast/ovarian/uterine cancer in women as spaying is for preventing breast cancer in cats and dogs. Neutering little boys before age ten is a pretty effective way to protect them against prostate cancer, too. And in fact the human population really is expanding beyond anything that's natural and healthy on this one known human-habitable planet, and really needs to be checked.
I keep seeing more confirmation, and no contradiction, of my belief that animal studies are giving us an unmistakable message. Homosexuality is not found in healthy animal populations (although sterility is). Most naturally sterile animals are asexual; many are also asocial, and many are also unhealthy in other conspicuous ways. (Some animals also have social behavior that looks like homosexual flirtation but, on closer examination, is actually part of the species' heterosexual mating routine.) When animals that seem healthy show enough interest in sex to be actively homosexual, the population is overcrowded. If homosexuality, and asexuality and sterility, don't slow reproduction fast enough to check population growth, nature's next steps are uglier: animals become violently aggressive toward their own species, and plagues cause "colony collapses" in local populations.
This web site continuously urges people to be as nice about homosexual individuals as they are about naturally sterile, heterosexual individuals like the members of this web site...but this web site also urges people to notice our existence as a warning.
We don't recommend neutering children unless there is clear evidence of an elevated risk for cancer. (For example, if the child had survived leukemia and several close relatives had breast, uterine, ovarian, and/or prostate cancer.) We recommend neutering animals if and when you perceive that as your only viable alternative to killing young animals, if and when the animals develop medical conditions that make reproduction dangerous for them, if and when the animals have undesirable genes (such as the genes that produce Manx, Rex, completely albinistic, and "doll-faced" looks in cats), and if and when you feel emotionally attached to the idea of keeping a male animal as a celibate indoor pet (because otherwise his sexual urges will drive you up the wall). That's a lot of surgical operations...but we do not recommend having all domestic animals sterilized, frantically, manically, compulsively, before they can possibly reproduce.
That idea emits the vile stench of an anti-American, fundamentally anti-human agenda...that's been seriously proposed in the United Nations, and is still under attack by people like Glenn Beck
and Tom DeWeese
because versions of it are still being blathered about there. The position of this web site is that the U.S. needs to limit funding to the U.N. until the U.N. voluntarily adopts a moratorium on any further discussion of any idea in "Agenda 21" or on any further suggestion that might in any way undermine the sovereignty of any member nation, or imply that the U.N. has any right to exist as anything other than a mediation service.
and Tom DeWeese because versions of it are still being blathered about there. The position of this web site is that the U.S. needs to limit funding to the U.N. until the U.N. voluntarily adopts a moratorium on any further discussion of any idea in "Agenda 21" or on any further suggestion that might in any way undermine the sovereignty of any member nation, or imply that the U.N. has any right to exist as anything other than a mediation service.
Eliminating domestic animals in order to feed more humans in more densely packed slums is part of the Old Socialist utopian vision of an endlessly expanding young population supporting an endlessly expanding older population in endlessly "growing" luxury...and that vision is not viable. It's been tried, and although the humans can be packed into slums and fed for a generation or two, that's not a sustainable way for humans to live. It triggers natural warning signs such as the drastic increase in non-reproductive lifestyle choices we're seeing now in relatively "advanced" countries. If we don't heed those warnings, animal studies show us that the consequences will become really ugly. (For those who've never been able to warm up to anyone who was homosexual, much less the mouthy, deliberately obnoxious, Christian-phobic woman-haters most people mean when they say "gay"--if you imagine the consequences of continued overcrowding, I give you my word, "gays" will start to look positively cute to you, too.)
If only to spite the totalitarian power grabbers lurking in the U.N., this web site recommends that you consider not spaying your female pet, and, furthermore, when you see any whines about how "faaailing to have your cat spayed earrrly causes caaancer!!!", consider posting a reply like "Shuddup and spay yer idjit self." (More polite versions are appropriate if the poster is a friend who just succumbed to the urge to post without thinking; this web site leaves that to your judgment.)
Yes, it's possible for local animal populations to be overcrowded, and if you can see that happening in your part of the world--if you can look out into an alley and see lots of starving, quarrelling, disease-infested feral cats, not just an occasional straying pet but a feral colony on the brink of collapse--then it's appropriate for you and your neighbors to start culling the population more intensively.
But it's not appropriate for a part of the world like mine, where rats and mice are still much more of a nuisance than the occasional homeless pet. In fact, it's not appropriate to start blathering about a "cat overpopulation problem" in a place where anybody might have heard a rodent, including squirrels, nibbling on their house within the past decade. What that place has is obviously a cat underpopulation problem.
Lack of free-ranging, unaltered, naturally reproducing cats causes plagues that kill humans...so we all need to be asking ourselves whether we've seen healthy free-ranging cats lately, and, if not, whether we don't need more kittens in our part of the world. In some tropical island countries the answer may be no, but in the Eastern States it is unequivocally yes.
Confining cats to safe indoor areas is likely to increase their life expectancy as they get older and start sleeping long and deeply enough to be vulnerable to other predators. Sterilizing cats who need to be confined may help reconcile them to being confined, although at this stage of her life Heather is nonverbally saying, loud and clear, "Not more indoor time for the cat, but more outdoor time for the human is indicated!" But Heather is, as regular readers know, not a normal cat. She does understand things...When she was younger she strayed a long way from home, often, on long hunting trips. Now that she feels a need for a long deep nap that takes up a good part of each afternoon, she's staying closer to home. When the time comes, I'm sure she'll be willing to spend more time indoors--probably demanding to spend most of it on my knee. I believe most cats belong outdoors, because most cats are young; Heather has earned the right to a long retirement when, and not before, she reaches retirement age.
And I sincerely hope that, by the time Heather becomes "old," we'll be seeing some worthwhile information on what does cause and prevent cancer in cats.
Better food.
Lower pollution.
Tighter restrictions on the use of poisons to "protect" food.
And, by all means, prompt and complete surgical excision of all the reproductive parts of all cat haters, not necessarily excluding tongues.
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