Tortie Tuesday: Silver Learns Quickly

With a name like Silver, obviously the cat featured this week is not a three-colored "Tortie." But her mother, Ruling Queen Cat Serena, is a beautiful three-colored "Calico." (Regular readers know the difference. Calico cats are mostly white, usually with discrete patches of orange to buff and black to gray fur. "Torties" are mostly black, usually with large sections of orange and black fur mottled together like a tortoise's shell, sometimes without visible white spots. Serena's mother, Samantha, was a Tortie.)

Anyway, here's another Cat Sanctuary Interview, with the cats' "comments" generated from observed facts and cats' nonverbal communication:

PK: Humans have some very good news to report, although I personally have just heard that a friend has liver cancer and expects to have only a year or two left to live, so I'm not actually feeling as good as the progress of global Glyphosate Awareness might lead people to expect. Cats, can you take over and share some good news with our readers this week?

Serena: Well, if the stuff that's causing this week's bad news has been taken off the market, that's very, very good news! Even if your human government has been negligent in allowing people to use up their existing supplies along public roads, so everybody has been "under the weather" again...

PK: Yesterday was another day when, although quite productive at home, I didn't dare to go out in public. I definitely would have looked ill enough, and felt sick enough, to trigger coronavirus panic.

Swimmer: What is this "coronavirus" twaddle all about, anyway?

PK: Coronavirus has been floating through the air for years, Gentle Readers. I just happened to flip through an old news magazine that had been stored in the barn for more than thirty years. It mentioned that coronavirus had been identified as different from "the common cold," or rhinovirus, before 1987...and that, of the two, coronavirus is generally less of a nuisance to healthy people. Neither one normally causes noticeable symptoms in healthy adults. COVID-19 is a new, more virulent mutation of coronavirus that has killed a lot of people...but very few of them had been healthy. Nor has COVID-19 killed more people than cold and flu virus normally do every year. It's just another way natural selection culls out the weaker members of the human population. I'm not trying to suggest that some of these people are not dearly loved and sorely missed, or even that maintaining a healthy social distance as we go about our jobs wouldn't have been an excellent idea many years ago...but there is really no reason to panic. Coronavirus is just another kind of head and chest cold. Most of us will eventually get it and, as with polio--which killed a lot of children by slow torture--most adults won't even realize they've got it until, for some reason, they have a blood test that shows they have.

Silver: Well, at least it's given you more time at home to play with us, anyway.

PK: Yes, and the weather has been incredibly good to us. A few white violets are still blooming in the not-a-lawn at the Cat Sanctuary today, even after last week's first ninety-degree afternoons. I've seen magnolias and violets blooming on the same day...not something I expected to see in nature, but yes, like the snow on the fourth of July a hundred years ago, it's happened.

Serena: Have you noticed I'm using "cuddle time" as a reward to improve your game?

PK: I have. You're a smart cat, worthy of your awesome ancestors, Serena ni Burr mac Irene ni Candice ni Bisquit ni Polly ni Patchnose.

Silver: Well I am too. I caught a bird...

PK and Serena: Bad idea! Very bad! Any bird a cat can catch, once its feathers have grown in, is a sick bird. At best it'll make you sick. Depending on what was wrong with the bird, it might kill you. Best not to touch a bird at all, even if you find it dead on the ground.

Silver: Well, I found it twitching feebly on the ground, so I put it out of its misery. But I didn't eat it. I brought it to the human.

Swimmer: Who immediately put it in the trash barrel, then kept a fire going until you couldn't find any trace of bird bones in the ashes.

PK: Because bird bones are brittle and splintery and might choke any cat or possum who tried chewing on them.

Silver: Yes. But then as a reward for bringing something that was unfit for us cats to eat for human inspection, rather than eating it and being sick, the human gave us a tin of chicken! Hurrah! Clever me!

PK: Whenever glyphosate has been sprayed you will usually find songbirds on the ground, afterward. I hate when that happens. This one was a native song sparrow. It showed no sign of the greenish mold that's usually visible between the feathers of dead songbirds I find on the ground in between glyphosate poisoning episodes. Apart from the broken neck its outer surface was completely undamaged.

The Bible tells us that God notices the sparrow's fall...I only wish that were more literally true. I believe that that sparrow was worth more to this world than the fools who sprayed glyphosate along Route 23.

My friend with cancer...I don't want to share any potentially identifying details yet, but this person had glyphosate reactions, predictably, whenever I did. For years. Hers were different from mine, but occurred on exactly the same schedule; that was one of the factors that convinced me that what was making me sick had to be glyphosate. And I warned her that plant-based food, basically any plant-based food grown on a commercial farm in North America since 2009, was part of the problem. And she wanted to be a vegetarian anyway...and she loved her vegetables...and her symptoms became chronic, and finally they became disabling, and a few different doctors ran different tests, and now it's liver cancer. Which glyphosate may not directly cause, but most definitely does promote. And like virtually everyone I'd describe as a friend this person is over age 55, but I blame glyphosate for the way she's suffered before she died.

This post goes out particularly to Governor Northam, who claims to be so concerned about protecting people from coronavirus. I'm not sure whom he's protecting. I would like to believe, giving him the benefit of the doubt, that he honestly thinks he's buying time for some dear friend or relative of his to live, and that that may even be true. But even for that person, Governor, glyphosate is doing more harm than coronavirus ever will. You'd do a lot better to forget about the virus and just ban glyphosate.