Thanks to those who've been praying for Queen Cat Serena. She's still ill, but she seems to be recovering. It seems as if she's observing and reporting on her own progress: she deliberately fouled a box of newspapers one evening, instead of going out to the sand pit, to make sure I knew she was digesting food, and deliberately danced on my midsection this morning at 6 a.m. to make sure I knew that much of her weight loss came from dehydration. She normally weighs about twelve pounds; early last week she felt as if she'd dropped to seven or eight pounds; now she feels back up to ten, at least. So here is this Web Log.
Such as it is. Parts of Kentucky and West Virginia got cyclones. Kentucky saw an actual funnel cloud. We, as usual, had rain and some strong gusty winds, but that's enough to knock my town out of the Internet for hours. And Pastel died, and Silver came home but she's not quite her normal healthy self either. It's all been very distracting. The Internet goes up and down, up and down, and nothing on it is as interesting as the two awesome resident cats.
Animals, Resident, Illness of
What's happened to them, anyway? We'll never know. Local vets weren't prepared to do blood tests even if anyone could have afforded them. By now blood tests aren't likely to tell us much. Very sudden, family-wide, drastic illness in cats can be caused by a virus infection as well as by poison.
Those who don't want to believe that a local person, a man born and brought up as a Virginia gentleman, could stoop to poisoning neighbors' pets want to believe the cats were stricken by a virus. It was not, however, a normal virus.
Most of these cats (though not Pastel, or her kittens) had already had feline enteritis, which is what older vets may still call "parvo" because it resembles the effects of parvovirus on dogs. Cats don't get canine parvovirus, nor do humans.
Feline enteritis can have other causes but it's usually caused by the more common, less virulent, form of the virus that causes feline panleukopenia. Veterinary science currently believes that most outdoor cats have survived feline enteritis during their first year; Serena and Silver did. (Neither was ill for very long; both responded well to a solution of powdered charcoal in water.) Many cats don't survive "pavo" but those who do are immune to the virus for life.
Enteritis means inflammation of the intestines as shown by diarrhea and/or spastic bowel activity, often with visible red blood in anything eliminated. Bowel movement may be painful. Young kittens often show this disease by resisting being cleaned by their mothers, or by passing something other than the clean, healthy, white "cat's milk cheese" the mother cats can eat. (This causes mother cats to stop feeding them, either because instinct ties cleaning the kittens into the lactation cycle or because instinct warns the mother that starving out the virus is the kittens' best chance to survive, and from observation I suspect the latter. The mother cat who evicts infected kittens from the nest or abandons the den altogether is likely to come back to check on her babies; if they've recovered she will resume feeding them.) There is no cure but, if dehydration can be prevented, most cats and kittens have a good chance of complete recovery with immunity to reinfection.
Panleukopenia refers to the effect the strong form of the virus can have on the cat's white blood cells, which basically means that the cat suddenly becomes very ill all over. The infected cat's temperature may run high or low; it may show diarrhea or constipation; its eyes, nose, and mouth run a watery or frothy mucus, which can cause fatal dehydration; it loses strength and is obviously miserable. According to virologists, this is a stronger strain of the same virus that causes enteritis or "parvo," and the treatment is the same. About ninety percent of infected cats die but again, if they can take water at least from a syringe to prevent dehydration, and fish or chicken broth to maintain electrolyte balance, there is a good chance of recovery. Some cats who survive panleukopenia lose the use of eyes or limbs and may show other neurological damage; many really get well and are themselves again.
Panleukopenia sounds like what Pastel had, except that the standard treatment did her no good. I gave her water. And charcoal. Something caused water to drain out of her faster than she could take it in; when allowed to go out and lie in the sun she tried to sip fresh water but was frothing too much to swallow. Serena and Silver showed similar symptoms, but, thank God, they didn't reach the stage Pastel did. Both are still on their feet. Well...Serena always "said" Pastel had an inferior father and weaker genes; Serena did not originally think Pastel was worth rearing.
Streptococcal infections, also, Pastel and Serena unmistakably had. Pastel willingly took charcoal, and washed out the little streppy-bugs; she stank when she literally went down with the disease; she did not stink during the last two or three days. Cats normally have high resistance to strep infections. It seems extremely unlikely that what made them so ill was a bacterial infection.
Serena started to stink, too. I offered her charcoal. She refused it. One day she refused it with a slap that opened a bleeding wound on my hand. "That hurt!" I said. "Cats don't win fights with humans. You're having charcoal whether you like it or not." I wrapped her up tightly in blankets, poked a syringe into her mouth, and gave her a dose. She spat it right into my left eye; so if I ever lose all immunity and start to show signs of panleukopenia, yes, I've been exposed; humans are born immune. I yelled some things that may have included words specifically forbidden by the Aunts' Union, I was too busy wiping my eyes to be paying close attention, and Serena was probably too exhausted by that effort to keep up the fight because she took the rest of the contents of the syringe without a fuss. And she smelled better, her eyes cleared, and she was stronger, within an hour. After a second dose, the next day, she was on her feet, eating and drinking and soiling newspapers, though still tired and sleepy. And smelling like an animal blessed with the miraculous power to clean her hair with her own spit--not a fragrance humans would want to use as perfume, but vastly preferable to strep.
But they'd all had enteritis, as kittens. According to "the science," they couldn't have natural panleukopenia now, unless something was added to it. Either an artificially enhanced, super-virulent form of the virus (which some believe was the difference between COVID-19 and ordinary coronavirus) has been developed, or something else destroyed their natural resistance.
We'll never know with absolute certainty. Even Pastel's body, which was not frozen, probably washed everything out before Pastel died.
But we do know who (1) specifically threatened to set out poisoned meat for the cats, (2) has deliberately used legal spray poison to harm me, (3) lost all of his closest relatives in inexplicable ways despite the rest of the family being long livers, and (4) was spraying poison, fouling springs, and damaging property when the medically inexplicable loss of the bees, illness of the beekeeper, and "infection" of Grandma Bonnie Peters' scraped shin occurred. If Wrymouth Calhoun wants not to be called to account for any thing that lacks very obvious natural causes, he needs to be confined and supervised a long way from this neighborhood. What my cats have had was not natural panleukopenia and there's no other suspected cause, human or otherwise.
Serena is still sniffly, still sleepy (for her), still lying by the fire instead of hunting; she's been very ill, but she now looks likely to live through the night.
Animals, Tame
Adorable alpaca, photographed and apparently owned by forum participant Abenaki, from the Mirror:
Alpacas can become pets but, as a knitter, I tend to look at them and think "Mmm, yarn."
Animals, Wild
Migrating East Coast birds. These birds are almost never seen in Gate City but sometimes pass through Washington.
Business, Local
Reminding local lurkers who are virus-free and ready to socialize again...we have a nice sit-down restaurant in Gate City again.
Source of meme? Google traces it to Memedroid.com.
Books
Good thoughts about C.S. Lewis Pilgrim's Regress. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress was a classic, well crafted study of how Christians' lives vary but we all encounter many of the same things on the pilgrimage of life. Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress was a rather esoteric personal memoir of how Lewis was interested in, but discarded, various secular philosophies that opposed Christianity in various ways. And it's true that, in his late teens and early twenties, one of those was the hedonistic view of sex that continues to appeal to young men: that feeling that the purpose of life is to have as much sexual pleasure as possible. It's true that, although the "brown girls" were called "brown" primarily to suggest soil (earthy soil rather than "black" evil), and any real-life counterparts they had may have had pale complexions, and although Lewis didn't write about his reminiscences in detail, the typical temptation for men like Lewis was to exploit domestic servants...but in Lewis's time the economic "class" distinction in Britain was not race-based, but applied to the members of the same families who did and did not inherit wealth. Lewis used cliche phrases from older literature, and in some older English literature "brown girl" was an epithet thrown at either past loves the young man hadn't married, or the rich girl he did marry, by resentful blondes. "Grey girl," as a description of a character that had not been washed whiter than snow in the blood of the Lamb, might at the time have sounded more like a young Quaker.
I really don't like the idea that old books should be judged by current standards of political correctness. We need to accept that not even Frederick Douglass wrote, or could have written and been understood, about "the races" in the US in language that we would use today. We need to accept that good books written by good men parroted then-trendy idiocy about women. We need to accept that when Victorian writers thought a "too good," humanitarian urge to invite poor children to a party was likely to lead to the very good child's death from tuberculosis, or "trying too hard" to sound grown-up was a cause (like internal parasites, only more unlikely) of failure to grow and thrive, or humans' technological progress was likely to cause humans to evolve into "the superman," they were writing (and talking and thinking) like ordinary decent people who hadn't questioned things they'd been told, neither better nor worse than twentieth century people who believed Socialism could work, nor than people today who believe any of the "trans-humanist" schemes can be used for good purposes.
We should not complain when old books express the errors reasonably intelligent people were making at the time. We don't have to agree, but we do need to understand, that Jack London called the dog White Fang was forced to fight "Cherokee" because to Jack London and his audience "Cherokee" meant "vicious," and Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Indians" were inexplicably hostile and degenerate half-humans, and Hippocrates' original Oath required doctors to swear by Greek Pagan gods, too, because writers are not immune to the misbeliefs of their times. What we have to avoid is allowing old books to be destroyed or even discarded because they reflect the thinking of the time when they were written.
C.S. Lewis did not, in fact, hate women but neither did he find it easy to learn to like and respect them. No woman in his early writings is a real character; the women in The Pilgrim's Regress are types and symbols, not capable of being confused with real people. (A "girl called Glugly," who appears at a party as a type of the worst trends in the arts of the 1920s, does seem to be based on a human rather than a mythical figure, but she appears only as a type of all the worst "artists" of the 1920s, who makes one speech that sounds like babyspeak and does something like a spastic fit that she seems to believe is a dance). That Lewis did learn, that he was able to appreciate Helen Davidman and create fictional characters like Lucy and Orual, is a testimony to the effect Christianity had on him. At the time when he wrote The Pilgrim's Regress he undoubtedly was still thinking of individual women primarily as temptations, except for the friend's mother he adopted, who seems to appear in The Screwtape Letters as a different kind of temptation--the temptation to behave selfishly toward housemates. He didn't like Jews or Americans much, either. But as a Christian he practiced good will toward women, Jews, and Americans and so eventually found True Love with Helen Joy Davidman, who was all three.
Those who've been reading Hunter Chadwick's e-books, or who would like to discover them: How do you rate the mix of understated romance with friendly and family love in his books? Would you prefer more "sweet talk," more attention to how people look, more kissing and canoodling, or do you find his discreet, family-friendly mentions of romance just starting to build along the course of an adventure just fine the way it is? I may have been the first to weigh in at this page, but I'm an old aunt who doesn't even earn enough to buy printed books no matter how much I liked the e-book. Your opinions count too. (But please consider the possibility that, if you don't live with children who are old enough to read your books now, some day you might.)
Hurricane
Many people hate Trump, and they have reasons, but never forget whose administration allowed this to happen:
Politics, Advice to Democrats Unsatisfied with the D Administration Who Campaigned as R
I saw it on the Mirror. Let's just say I know it's what the late Zahara Heckscher would have done. I don't know whether she would have been Kennedy partisan enough to vote for Trump, but I do know she would have carried on being a true humanitarian, regardless. She always did.
Politics, Good News in
Trump did not white-eye. This web site congratulates Secretary Kennedy and hopes he will remember that it's not possible to talk about "healthy food" until glyphosate and many other chemicals are removed from the food supply. And it's not reasonable to expect low-paid, rent-burdened working parents to pay for farm-quality food at the supermarket until the dollar has been deflated and the short-term repercussions of that have smoothed out. And if we really want to end childhood chronic diseases, it's going to take longer than four years to get every child into a fully detached house with room for a garden and at least chickens, if not goats or cows...though that's certainly a goal to be kept in mind. A glyphosate ban will certainly reduce the incidence and severity of childhood chronic diseases, but really, every child deserves parents who will choose to postpone childbearing until they can give the child a room and a garden of its own.
More belated good news for Glyphosate Awareness peeps and allies:
With a strong nomination for the Understatement of the Year...
"The fact that V-Fluence and the industries it serves resorted to these underhand methods shows that they were unable to win on the level of the science.”
Property Rights
Some important considerations...
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