Cat Sanctuary Update, Good and Bad

"Is that your cat?" asked the odd jobs man, looking down the road from his truck. I was out at the gate, having told him I was out of money and didn't have any errands to run. 

"My cats are right here beside me," I said.

"It seems to know where it's going," he said. 

"It does," I said. "It looks almost like the one we lost last winter."

Last winter, when Pastel died and Serena was very ill from eating poisoned meat, Silver seemed to be affected too. Serena didn't want anyone else seeing that she was ill. Silver didn't want to displease her mother. Meanwhile a neutered male cat I called Trumpkin, because he was orange and he didn't go home when told to go home, kept meowing around the house. Our Crayola, who eloped with him some time ago, had died and he wanted another wife. (It seems probable that Crayola was one of the casualties of the Bad Neighbor's setting out poisoned meat, and Trumpkin, though he didn't die, ate enough to be ill too.) 

Silver is a complaisant beta cat, the sort of social cat whose main goal in life is to please other social cats, with humans at the end of the list of the people she wants to please. That is: she behaves well, but when there's any question of whom to please, as it might be sharing someone's lap with another cat or posing for a picture with another cat's human, she invariably wants to please the other cat. Serena was telling her, "Go away." Trumpkin was telling her, "Come with me." I would have preferred to keep her here but, between Serena's and Trumpkin's demands, my wishes meant nothing to Silver.

So, with my reluctant permission, Silver let herself be petnapped and moved in with Trumpkin's humans. I never was sure who his humans were, but I became fairly confident last spring that they were the ones who'd moved away. They were new in the neighborhood and didn't stay long. I believe Trumpkin was theirs because, after they left, he looked and acted like a homeless cat. He became ill. Then he stopped coming around at all. 

What had become of Silver? Well...when she'd been making her decision to leave me, she'd come back from another house where she was obviously pampered. Having her very own lap to sit on might have meant a lot to her. She'd stopped traipsing back and forth through the neighborhood. Knowing that she'd been ill, I thought she might have died, but I'd cherished a hope that she'd moved away with Trumpkin's humans and become their indoor pet. 

But this cat looked like Silver...only smaller. Older. Sicker. 

"Some people in the neighborhood had a cat that looked a bit like mine, only with different spots--but I think it was a bigger cat, male," I said, considering the cat who was now shivering at the gate. "This one looks smaller than mine. Might be a cousin or a half-sister."

The cat limped up into the not-a-lawn and sniffed at Drudge and Serena. They were polite, but didn't want to get too close.

"That must be your cat, or the others would be fighting with her," the odd jobs man laughed.

"Social cats make friends," I said. "Something's wrong with her, anyway." 

I brought out kibble for all three cats, although mine had already had breakfast. I put the dish for the cat who looked like Silver in a cage; she went in for isolation. She seemed very hungry. I tried to remember exactly how Silver's spots had looked. I needed to look at old pictures of Silver to let myself believe that this wretched shivering stray was our cat princess come home.

She let me pick her up, accepting but not returning any displays of affection. (Serena doesn't like to see other cats acting as if they thought they were my pets. Silver always was a Secret Snugglebunny.) She knew where the kibble was kept. She knew where to scratch the door to get me at least to shout at her to stop. She didn't really answer to her name, but when I said, "Aren't you Silver? Are you another cat who looks a bit like Silver? Is your name Spot? Gray Lady? Miss Kitty?" she walked away looking offended.

She did not have a fever, or visible wounds. Maybe she was only shivering because she'd become accustomed to being indoors? It was a damp, chilly day. 

I didn't want to upset Serena or Drudge by making too much fuss over her; she'd been here for two days before I had a good look at her underside. 

The thing I'd hoped wouldn't happen to Silver, because she's shown the Seralini Effect...had happened.

Somebody had trapped, spayed, and released a cat whose health depends on her being able to flush toxins out of her body through the bodies of stillborn or short-lived kittens. You know, that sort of blithe assumption that they know best that some people love to make..."Three days after her hysterectomy, Jane went on safari hunting lions." 

She was limping because the shaved patch on her underside had barely had time to form a scar. She was weak, but irritable, with reactions to anesthetics and antibiotics, and to chemical vapors against which she's lost her primary natural defense. 

She did not belong to the person who had her spayed. That person had very likely found her on the road as she made her way home, having decided she didn't want to be the only cat in the family. 

That person needed to be told in very strong terms: If you don't own a cat, if you don't know it well, if you can't keep it in your house after the operation, don't bother your head about having it spayed. In some cities feral cats may still be a nuisance. In my part of the world we need more, not fewer, free-roaming farm cats and there are waiting lists for kittens whose parents had the mental capacity to be real pets. And we still allow wholesale poisoning of humans and animals by spraying chemicals into the air everyone has to breathe...poisoning that I've watched kill many animals outright, but that Silver has been able to resist because her body has sequestered toxins in non-viable kittens. Silver has had exactly one kitten who lived to adulthood. 

Silver did not come home to die. She is a loving and lovable cat. She came home to be with her friends and family. They know and like her, though they're still making it clear that she smells disgusting and they don't want her to be close to them yet. But now every time the Bad Neighbor sprays poison, claiming he's trying to clear farm land, having no intention of farming but wanting to make other people feel bad whenever they are doing outdoor work or gathering to celebrate occasions in the neighborhood, I'll wonder whether I'll find Silver's body...where I found her adoptive uncle Traveller's body? Where I found her sister Swimmer's? Where I found her sister Pastel's?

Sometimes I feel that I could positively enjoy the job of pumping glyphosate into convicted spray poisoners and watching them die. 

Federal law now provides legal measures for people who have been harmed, or whose animals have been harmed, by the fools and deliberate evildoers who are still spraying poison on their gardens. We can sue those individuals for damages. The more lawsuits, I think, the better; anyone buying "herbicides" to maintain a tacky fake-Astroturf "lawn" deserves to lose his shirt in court, but money paid to a human is not likely to give much comfort to an animal who has been ill. Or died.

Silver is on the screen porch watching me type this. Her eyes are half shut. She does not look comfortable. She eats hungrily enough--she looks as if she might have picked up worms this summer--but then afterward she looks as if she may not be keeping food down. But her facial expression (cats don't have as many variations of facial expressions as humans do, but their eyes and ears do express things) looks grateful. I think she's glad to have found that her home is still here.

Bad Poetry: Ten-Line Obituary

At the Substack I had pre-posted a cheerful silly poem about this week's weather. The first real cold front of winter produced only scattered patches of frost "in the higher elevations." Usually that phrase in the weather forecast means "not at the Cat Sanctuary," but we are a few feet above sea level (water boils at 217 or 218 degrees on a Fahrenheit thermometer, not 212) and the leaves that turn color in cold weather turned this week. In the towns the leaves were still green. I'm guessing they saw color this morning, though, because my thermometer was down just below the freezing mark this morning.

The other news was not so cheerful. It popped out of my head in this form when I looked at the Poets & Storytellers United prompt for poems "to the power of ten."

Ten little eyes that never will open,

Twenty wee paws that never will run;

Five tiny Seralini kittens,

None lasted through the night, not one.

In the warm room their mother laid them

In the warm spot, right on the mat.

Warmth was no use to them, nor milk either;

They were born only to cleanse the cat.

I heard them squeak in the night to say,

"We never came into this world to stay."

Researchers, one of whom was called Seralini, determined that exposure to glyphosate and apparently some other toxic chemicals causes some females, of all species, to sequester these chemicals in non-viable embryonic offspring. The mothers show no reactions except that, if they give birth to living young, these babies aren't able to live very long. Women who have this trait have gone on record saying that they would rather have been sick themselves than lost their babies. Other animals don't seem happy about it either--but they do survive, and thrive. If they're not exposed to "pesticide" (why did I start to type "petsicide"?) vapors before or during their next pregnancy, they may have healthy babies later.

Malnutrition: Kitten Update

A photo of a skinny baby, whose given name is Mohammed Zakaria, inflamed some bloggers. "But he has health problems, some say? Anybody would have health problems if people keep killing the people who are delivering their food." The Internet kerfuffle has established, mainly, that Americans can't tell one kind of Semites from another. Semites are delivering food to Gaza and other Semites are attacking them, so the question becomes whether Israel, Iran, the United Nations employing local people, or whoever else, are delivering the food and whether Israel, Hamas, or some other group are attacking them. Maybe it's not a matter of politics. Maybe there are just a lot of men in this part of the world who will fight over food.

https://x.com/NYTimesPR/status/1950311365756817690

Meanwhile Serena's kitten was growing fast for the first few weeks. Sedentary, no indication that he'd ever be a hunter, but such a sweet, cuddly, well-behaved kitten. Then he hit a plateau, as he reached an age where he needed more food and his mother supplied less food. Nature intends six-week-old kittens to feel hungry after nursing, look around, and start eating solid food. Serena's kitten ate four or five kibbles one day--and no more. He stopped gaining bone length and started losing flesh. He went from adorably coltish to alarmingly emaciated. Kibble was set out for him, even held up to his mouth; he wanted nothing to do with it. I offered him cooked meat. He eats that, but he's not gained any length, weight, muscle mass, or energy yet. (Kittens are supposed to be just noticeably bigger almost every day.) Control of digestive functions seems to be coming slowly and with difficulty, rather than developing almost instantaneously as it does with most kittens. Self-cleaning is also coming slowly; this week Serena's kitten has a body odor most felines never allow themselves to have.

There are a few unfortunate baby lifeforms--in all species--who can starve to death even while receiving enough food to keep normal members of their species well fed. They're born without the ability to absorb nutrients from food. Sometimes a single food source, like cow's milk or wheat, may be the problem and the baby can develop normally if supplied with an alternate source of the same nutrients. Sometimes only mother's milk nourishes the baby. A few unfortunate creatures, like some tailless kittens, don't digest even mother's milk well enough to support life.

"Mohammed" is a human name, but if Serena's kitten fails to qualify for the name Miracle his name may be recorded as Zakitty.

Petfinder documents that some people do seem to want to make the effort to keep alive Manx cats who may be considered sicker than Serena's kitten is, Mix human-quality food, massage the posterior half, clean the fur. The cats can be "worth it." They have extra soft, thick fur and may reward their humans with lots of purring and snuggling. I think Serena's kitten may have inherited some ability to understand words. He certainly is affectionate. For someone who can commit to a lot of the kind of caretaking most cats never need and would violently reject, he might still be a satisfactory house pet.

Status Update: Pris Mulls Continuing Education

Katydids are singing. Summer has passed its height. The hottest heat wave of summer, like the coldest freeze of  winter, often comes after the solstice and this week is expected to be the hottest week of summer...

Kingsport, the small city to which I could still walk if the side of it facing me hadn't become a slum, is bracing for brutal heat. Life-threatening heat. Don't walk or work outdoors if you can possibly avoid it, people are being told. Stay inside air-conditioned buildings. Drink lots of water. Check on older people daily.

At the Cat Sanctuary, the worst heat wave of summer might cause me to shut down the computers and take a siesta, or, if the temperature stays above 90 degrees longer than I can sleep, clear out the spring branch. This is a fun job, with which help from any or all of The Nephews may add to the fun but will not be necessary. 

In Kingsport local warming could easily push the temperature above 100 degrees. By focussing on whether people do or don't believe in global warming and ignoring the causes of local warming, in theory Kingsport could, as some places in Africa did in the 1930s and 1940s, see officially documented temperatures in the 120s and 130s Fahrenheit--officially measured in the shade, not near pavement--push up to privately observed temperatures of 140 Fahrenheit in crowded paved areas. Oldtimers who remembered a 140-degree day used to be told that the official temperature had peaked at 131 degrees in 1931 and say, "But we were not at the weather station. We were not in the shade." 

(Buy large cups of ice chips, replacing as necessary. Forget about formal dinner-party etiquette. Eat that ice. Let individual chips melt in your mouth, on your head, and down your shirt. In the US eating or playing with ice is thought to indicate cravings for physical sensations, i.e. more and kinkier sex, when it's done at normal temperatures in the 70s and 80s. At temperatures above 100 it indicates a will to live and is perfectly polite and proper. Applying ice chips to friends and pets indicates a preference that they also survive, and is also polite and proper, and is done by diplomats in Washington when they stray out of air-conditioned buildings. The proper places to apply ice are the top of the head, the back of the neck, the wrists, and any skin that has actually been burned. What is impolite, at temperatures above 100, is putting other people to the trouble of treating you for heat exhaustion in a hospital, when you could have stayed cool by using ice as nature intended.)

It's instructive, though annoying, to Google heat records in Africa. Some localities did set new ones last summer and may set new ones this summer, though that would be records for the highest temperature on a specific day. No recent temperature has broken the 131-degrees-Fahrenheit-in-the-shade record from 1931...yet some people want very much to focus on last summer's relatively mild 124 degrees in the shade in Algeria, because it fits into the "global warming" narrative. "Human-induced climate change!" they squawk hopefully, like parrots who want crackers. It is human-induced but it is NOT global. Global warming is a theoretical possibility that would be difficult to verify and would have to be consistently verified over more years than Al Gore has lived, or can live. What northern Africa had survived before and is surviving now is human-induced local climate changes. We can and should try to avoid contributing to global warming, but what threatens us personally this week is local.

There are remedies. Kingsporters should be in a mood to think about them, this week. They include dispersing people away from densely populated areas, reducing pavement and motor travel, maintaining more green trees and green space between houses. Buildings with floor space higher than 20 feet above the ground should be used as storage barns, not home or work spaces for human beings. 

"Walkable communities" form naturally when zoning regulations are not written to favor motorists over ordinary people. With no interference from "planners" or governments, people naturally like to build houses at the corners of farms where they can see neighbors' houses, at least if they go out and look, and put markets, schools, churches, and shopping zones in space that feels central to a few dozen households. That's how a walkable community comes to exist. What "planners" need to do is get out of the way and let walkable communities rebuild themselves in small towns and suburbs.

"Smart cities" are an abomination. The human body was not built to live in cities. Cities have always been breeding grounds for diseases and wars. Intelligently planned cities are, like Washington, planned to be nobody's permanent home, to lack representation in a democratic government because the people spending time in the city are supposed to be the representatives of their own small towns and farm communities. That does not rule out monitoring traffic or policing public gatherings, but it does mean that cities are where people stay temporarily to do jobs, coming in as representatives of other places and returning to those places when the jobs are done. Washington was meant to be a ghost town at this time of year. The homeless bums should have hitchhiked out of there last week. 

Your Members of Congress should be touring the leafier, shadier, cooler parts of their districts now. If they're not, remind them that this is their duty. You don't need them to be damaging their brains in the city's heat. You need them to be connecting with their rural voter base, and this is the time of year when they're meant to do that.

There always have been and always will be summer heat waves. The foolhardy and the very unfortunate have always died during summer heat waves by spending too much time out in the sun. Humankind has always survived by resting from heavy labor, dispersing ourselves in shady places, dipping ourselves in water to maintain normal body temperatures, fanning ourselves, and pitying the fools who go out in the midday sun.

Anyway, traditionally in these United States the big bad heat wave of late July, sometimes into early August, is when schools are closed but stores start advertising back-to-school sales. Shrewd merchants know that people like this reminder that the heat wave lasts only a week or two, that it will soon be over and people will go back to their regular jobs or studies. 

So I was near a television set at some time last week, and it was blaring about a new division of the University of Maryland, called the University of Maryland's Global Campus, open to anyone who has a computer in the United States or any allied country. 

Hmm. In Virginia we think of the University of Maryland as a bit of an intellectual lightweight. Virginia students traditionally start school earlier (in the term during which the child's sixth birthday falls, rather than seventh) and are expected to absorb more information in each year. But wottha--I'm an adult, anyway. I'd have the advantage of forty years of self-education over any normal undergraduate anywhere. I've always thought a BS, or even MS, would be a nice addition to my trade school certificates. And I remembered having learned, through research for a writing job about ten years ago, that many online programs are available free of charge to people over sixty. Hey...I may actually be over sixty now, or some time in the next few academic years, in real life. Old enough to Zoom in from a community college computer center and be the "Go Granny Go" student who keeps the kids on their cute little toes, anyway. 

Grandma Bonnie Peters didn't go to college until she qualified for free tuition as a senior citizen, so community college courses were just right for her. Everyone enjoyed the idea of her going to college enough that it provided some natural, sustainable economic stimulation for the community. Her children went to a few classes with her. The school sent out a minibus to bring her and some other students onto campus for classes and take them back home. People treated her to lunch, and she treated them back.  She bought books and art supplies. She took painting for her arts requirement, and actually had her work shown in a gallery where she sold some paintings and got some commissions. Well, she had her talents and I have mine, but in any case she had a lot of fun. So did the classmates and teachers who remembered her thirty years later.

Meh. I remember trying to run this web site from the community college's computer center. Excellent computers. Delightful people. And what a time I had getting there and back again. The worst weather is of course the worst time to rely on a car pool. Some days I had a reliable ride back but not a reliable ride to campus, so I'd walk a few miles out the highway before someone going the right way stopped. 

Often people in Gate City would say "I can take you to Duffield," which I learned was not a good idea. People I knew from Gate City or Big Stone Gap did not stop at any of the truck stops in Duffield every day. The thing about finding a ride in Duffield is that anyone who doesn't know you personally naturally assumes you've just been released from jail and are interested in doing something that might get you back in there. Nobody believes an adult trying to join a car pool outside the county jail is really interested in doing legitimate academic work at a college eighteen miles up the road. So you might as well start walking, and whether you walk toward Gate City or toward Big Stone Gap, you're likely to lose the day's supply of time and energy on the road, and quite possibly be harassed or insulted, before you get to either town. The misery of having to turn down offers from the jailbirds and the wrong sort of truckers outweighed the rare prospect of being able to join a car pool with friends. From Gate City it looked as if it would be easy to join a car pool going to the college from Duffield, but in practice I remember that actually happening--twice, both times involving one retired couple. Usually if my feet touched the ground in Duffield the day was lost.

And, having done those two years at the overpriced church college, I didn't have a lot of community college courses left to take, unless we count the trade school programs taught there. I have thought seriously about taking the electrician's assistant course. If my Significant Other hadn't become ill when he did, if we'd gone on renovating and reselling abandoned houses, we might have been able to write it off as job training on his business taxes. Of course the classes meet on winter nights when the school never did offer bus service. Of course I no longer have a more experienced partner in home improvement, though as men my age are being laid off and "retiring' I'd like to meet one--if there were men my age who didn't already have families or obvious reasons why nobody will ever marry them.

Oh, the days, and the nights, of commuting to and from the college. The missed car pools! The road harassment! Tourists walking around the towns of Duffield and Clinchport are welcomed, but anyone walking along the highway near Duffield is presumed to be a jailbird at whom some people throw garbage; I was hit squarely on the back of the head with a half-full Big Gulp cup, once. I walked twenty miles when the temperature stood at twenty degrees Fahrenheit, once, in falling snow, in comfortable but uninsulated canvas shoes. I walked twenty-two miles in the rain, another night. 

A Lee County policeman once informed me that, whatever the law said, he reckoned walking on the part of the highway that runs through Lee County at night was evidence of insanity, and he would arrest me and keep me at the Lee County jail until someone from Gate City came to take me home in a car, if I walked through Lee County again. Seriously. I might not be chargeable with any offense but that officer was not going to let me walk in peace. And I hate to say it but he does have a point. The part of the highway that runs through Lee County was built to discourage foot traffic. There are places where your options are walking in a full speed traffic lane, or literally hand-over-hand along the guard rail along a bridge, and motorists coming down the hill toward the bridge tend to pick up speed, too; I never felt exactly safe on the outside of the guard rail, having seen speeding vehicles slam into those rails. I did walk home from the college again, though...because Lee County does not put policemen on the highway very late at night, and if I walked all the way from Big Stone Gap, by the time I reached Lee County the local police had gone home to bed. And the late-night truckers and worse types of people on the road knew this, and drove accordingly.

A Wise County fireman reckoned that my walking home from the college at night was dangerous enough to justify deployment of emergency vehicles, and even threatened to complain to Delegate Kilgore about it. The last thing I want to do is be used by the opposition party to complain about Delegate Kilgore's voice of frugality in the State budgeting process. 

And the really galling thing was that I had sponsors who were willing to pay anyone taking evening classes, or even regular afternoon classes, for adding me to a regular, reliable car pool. I even had one sponsor who had a divorced twenty-something daughter living at home, taking community college courses, who told daughter and me in no uncertain terms, "My daughter WILL bring you home after her evening class on Mondays." Daughter was a nice kid, as her generation go. She did take me home after one or two classes. Along the way she explained that she thought of long drives as her "me time" when she liked to smoke cigarettes, blast rock music out the windows, and brood about her life. Also her course did not require her to show up for more than the two evening classes, and after those two evenings she never did. I advertised. Didn't students want to earn gas and meal money? Well, it seemed, they didn't. The community college doesn't put that much financial pressure on them. Apparently they preferred to drive alone and be free to make side trips of their own when they felt like it.

Meanwhile, what had happened to the college bus service? A horrible fascist ("public-private partnership") operation had eaten it up. According to their web site, "Mountain Empire Older Citizens" now runs "Mountain Empire Transit," which provides transportation for anyone in any part of Scott, Lee, or Wise Counties, for fees that completely submarined the local taxi services in which so many housewives, young people, and retirees used to earn their pocket money. I believe in public transportation so I really tried to support that DISservice, in the past. I just can't. For one thing they want to offer "need-based" transportation, for which they can beg rich sponsors for more actual money,. rather than ordinary fee-based transportation like an ordinary city bus service. They don't want to say "We have a bus that stops at point A at eight o'clock and reaches campus at nine, and a bus that stops on the campus at four o'clock and reaches point A again at five." Oh no, that's not the way their system works. They want to ask lots of questions about who you are and what-all you "need" and how they can "take care of you" by meeting you at your door, even though in practice they have exactly one bus that runs from Scott County to Wise County, anyway, and it's a real milk run that takes more than two hours to bounce around back roads and collect a lot of mental patients who work at some sort of make-work program in Duffield, and they don't like or have room for normal adults on that bus. A person riding that bus to the college would be unable to attend most of the classes taught, would not get a very long work session in the computer lab either, and would spend more time being annoyed by mental patients on the bus than getting any kind of useful work done. 

And the employees gossip about paying passengers; you might be familiar with city buses and be prepared to pay your fare, sit down, and read, knit, or look out the window, but the bus drivers are prepared to ask lots of questions about you so they can, among other things, be sure you know which other passengers are going in for dialysis or for addiction counselling, and which are mental patients, and who's "gay," and on and on...They don't like people who don't chatter and gossip with them, either. I had one frustrated extrovert deliberately drive past my stop so that I had to get off the bus at a place where the road had no shoulder at all, where I had to scramble down over rocks. I complained to the office about that one and got, "And what would the driver's race have to do with this?" I said, "Well, I'm  comparing his job performance with Greyhound drivers and DC Metrobus drivers." The office idiot said, "We are not Greyhound or Metro, and we never will be." This is all too true. That would-be-nanny company's shabby excuse for a driver would never have got behind the wheel of a Metrobus. Probably most of the drivers they employ wouldn't.

So regular use of the community college is just not a sustainable plan for me, or for any non-driver from Gate City. Until we can cut out the festering sore of "public-private partnership" and have a sustainable mix of tax-funded (school bus) and for-profit (taxicab) transportation, Scott County has access to a community college only for those who choose to drive thirty miles each way in their own private cars.

Zooming into online classes, however, might still have possibilities.

Well...what kind of classes would I want, anyway? Writing would be a logical choice for a writer, but does the MFA degree really teach writers more than writing for publication does? I feel about it the way C.S. Lewis did. (I have a samizdat copy of his portion of the Oxford literature course.) People who ought to be writers want to read as many of the books on the Oxford reading list as they can get, and I do, and I have done, but they need a college course on those books only if they're young writers who want to build a network for a teaching career. I'm not young and the world has plenty of young people who want to teach English in public and private schools. 

A recent poll found that a slight majority of today's adults feel that online video games ought to be taught as a college course. Meh. I don't think I'm visual enough to do well in that sort of course and, in any case, I'm too old to use video games to learn how to fly a fighter plane. 

I am a Christian and I'd like to write Christian books. For that certification as a Bible teacher might help my career. Liberty University is practically local and I might be able to Zoom from a local Baptist church. But, again, do I really need a degree for writing? It's not an option I want to close off completely but there's another option that feels more radical and more fun.

I saw the idea first in an ad for a writing fellowship program in Canada: Take biology courses, teach a freshman biology class, and publish a book about something related to ecology, sustainability--something Green. I know there's a lot of Poison Green in the Canadian school system these days, probably even at McGill, although McGill offered some of the most attractive fellowships and I have a lot of respect for my husband's school. Nevertheless.

I would like to learn more about biomass, about ways to keep those sewers local people thought they wanted so much from polluting our lovely aquifers and all those rivers south of us from which so much of Tennessee gets their drinking water. 

I would like to have enough formal education in entomology that my being asked to write articles about the Hemileucas, or about nicer insects I'd rather look at, wouldn't feel so much like a bad joke about the quality of Wikipedia or the Internet generally. 

"The world needs more entomologists," one college I Googled said, "particularly in Africa." We've seen in the Butterfly of the Week posts here how many African and Asian butterflies remain to be documented. Insects with more pressing economic significance need to be studied, too. I am not the one who needs to be doing those studies. Africa and Asia need no more Anglo-American "saviors" coming in to tell the people how to live with their wildlife. African and Asian people need to be studying their own ecology, down to the insects and the algae. I could help them write their theses and publish their studies, but that would be more editing than research.

I'd be interested in biology generally. Though I'm not a great gardener--the secret of what success my garden enjoys is its emphasis on hardy native species--I actually like plants more than insects. I like cute little woodland creatures, too, as can be seen from my one-way instant bonding with Jimmy Skunk (I was afraid he'd been poisoned last winter, but he's still alive!) and Dawn Possum. 

I'm probably too old to be hired as a park ranger but I'd like to be a more informed and informative writer about this land that I love.

So...The University of Kansas offers free mini-courses in entomology for everybody, probably aimed at people with a sixth grade education. Beyond that? As regular readers remember, I have a lot of respect for Purdue, enough that I chatted with them first. Purdue has no free senior courses and recommends none; they have online courses for about $500 per credit-hour, $250 for veterans--I'm not one. 

The University of Florida has an impressive entomology program, with the butterfly museum from which this web site's got several photos. If only their biology department did not include Kevin Folta. I don't think I'd ever be able to work with him. I'm not sure I'd want to work with people who did. All scientists make mistakes. Usually there's no shame in it, but usually scientists' mistakes are not based in hate and contempt for the people who have been physically harmed  by those mistakes. Anyway Florida's web site didn't advertise free senior courses.

The University of Maryland has an undergraduate biology program with graduate studies in entomology and does advertise free senior courses...but I think they require residence in Maryland. In the absence of a trusted Nephew to run the Cat Sanctuary, I couldn't really reside in Maryland any more. 

I'm still checking other universities' online programs. I might not go back to virtual school this fall, anyway, but it's a thing I'd like to do.

Limerick for Drudge and Serena

Happy Independence Day, fellow Americans! This limerick was prompted by Poets & Storytellers United. Status update is below; adoptable cat and dog photos, for sharing, are below the rant linked here.

With the baby cat's growing and nibbling,

Climbing, scampering, there is no quibbling,

But his moods of inaction

Drive us to distraction.

How we wish that he still had a sibling!

As regular readers know, Serena is the Queen of the Cat Sanctuary. She solved a local crime mystery, last winter, at the risk of her life--solved it by getting people to see what I'd been telling them was there for some time. A crime mystery is not only "who done it" but also "what's done about it." Serena did more to solve that than anyone else did. After exposure to toxins (primarily glyphosate vapors in the air) she has a history of giving birth to kittens who didn't show the Manx gene but either didn't live, or didn't survive their first whiff of glyphosate. 

"So why not have her spayed and spare the drama?" Because the way the Seralini Effect works is that females who inherit this trait survive by eliminating toxins through defective offspring. There are women who say they'd rather shorten their own lives than give birth to babies who can't survive. I can't make that decision for Serena and see absolutely no reason to imagine she'd make it for herself. She loves the kittens she chooses to rear but she wastes no effort on the ones she considers non-viable. In fact I've argued with her and persuaded her to feed a few kittens, including Drudge's late mother Pastel, who Serena initially thought weren't worth feeding.

So last winter I was sure that, if she had kittens, they'd be doomed Seralini kittens. She had three. She tried to keep all three alive, but two just didn't come into this world to stay. If the smallest one lived three months, I said, his name would be recorded as "Miracle."

So far he has yet to claim anything he's been called--Baby Cat, Little One, etc.--as a name. I think he may be waiting to earn the name of Miracle. I'm pretty sure he's going to be a large, perhaps oversized, black "Tuxie" tomcat with a half-tail folded under into something like a rabbit's tail. The tail moves independently from side to side, easily enough, and can be raised or lowered, but can't be straightened.

The kitten does bounce and pounce and climb on things, now and then. Serena thinks he needs more activity. She's cuddled other kittens while they were nursing, in the usual way. With this one she sits down, lets him begin nursing, then jumps up and runs around the office, then sits down and lets him begin nursing again somewhere else, then runs around the office again, and so on. He gets full meals in four or five sittings each. 

Drudge, who is this kitten's nephew, is really too big to play with kittens. Though he was patient and gentle when he was the biggest kitten in the litter, and he's been very patient and gentle with his little uncle, the size difference seems too much to allow them to play as kittens do. Drudge is still growing , even skinny under his fur, but is already longer and taller than all the other cats currently living in the neighborhood--except the baby's father.

The baby's father, whom I call Tarbaby, was visiting the Cat Sanctuary regularly. He wasn't hungry; he was looking for a fight. He inflicted several skin wounds on Drudge before Serena took a stand, for the baby's sake. Serena weighs ten to twelve pounds. Tarbaby weighs, I would guess, fifteen to eighteen pounds, and he didn't obey Serena without a fight, as a tomcat should do. 

"Did Tarbaby do that?" I exclaimed, seeing a skin wound on Serena. "He's going to be neutered."

"Never mind," Serena nonverbally said. "He tried to fight. That's all. I won."

Status Update: The Care of Orange Bobtailed Tomcats

March Thaw weather arrived on schedule. I went into town. The news I heard, apart from what was about private individuals, was still about Hurricane Helene. Several people were still sawing up the trees that had been uprooted last October. Some people had gone to Asheville, following the hurricane's path through Tennessee, to be good disaster tourists. Roads and bridges and the larger part of the little town of Unicoi, Tennessee, have yet to be rebuilt. An appeal has been made for gently used books to restore Unicoi's library. And then, this weekend, the first (or second?) storm of spring was rough enough to bring back memories.

I heard nothing about the cheerful chap who delivers Serena's Pure Life water. He still uses a "smartphone," issued by his employers, and it seems to be out of use. "Smartphones" seem to have been designed to slip down between or into boxes in the back of a delivery truck. At first I wondered whether he knew that Serena is still alive. Now I'm wondering about him. The customers still want him on his job, because he does better work than young men, but he's not young. I had bought an extra case of bottled water during the winter, so we have enough to drink for another week or two. The store employs other deliverymen. The white-haired one will be missed. 

I came home, put out some kibble and the first few tablespoons of water off the top of a bottle, and sat on the porch with the cats. There were three of them: Serena, and little Drudge (he looks pretty large under his long coat, but he's still a half-grown kitten), and another one. The third cat had a bright red-orange tabby coat, a little stub of a tail, and an insolent manner. It could only be the stray tom I call Trumpkin because he is orange, loud, and annoying and he refuses to go home when told to go home. But it hardly looked like Trumpkin. It was gaunt; every bone and muscle showed even through its thick Manx coat, and it was coughing, bleary-eyed. It looked as if it might have panleukopenia--but it's not natural panleukopenia that's killed several neighborhood cats this winter. It's something little Drudge has been able to avoid while sharing food and water with the cats who've died of it. Wrymouth Calhoun was in the neighborhood, just before dawn on Saturday morning.

This post is for Trumpkin's owner, whoever that is and whatever the little guy's real name is. Your tomcat did not catch a natural virus from our Silver (who, if she's living, is missed at home). He has the same trouble she and Serena have had. He might easily die. He might still recover but he will probably need human help to survive.

The bobtailed tomcat has been poisoned by the same person who creeps around at night loosening parts of roofs and gates, damaging locks, breaking water lines, fouling water, trampling flowers, breaking fences, and generally trying to make people feel that living in their homes was not worth the trouble. Wrymouth Calhoun is that person. He's admitted it. He wants everyone else to give up and go away so he can get their land, cheap, and sell it at a profit. He is related to one family in the neighborhood by birth, and another one by marriage, so nobody wanted to see it, but he is a sociopath and needs to be in an institution. His recklessness with chemicals ought to have been investigated as a factor in at least two untimely deaths, one unaccountably serious injury, and some unexplained chronic illness in our neighborhood--and in the death of his parents, brother, sister, wife, and child, all within ten years, two within one week. If you can get a vet to examine a blood or saliva sample from your cat, you may be able to help Wrymouth get the sort of care his one surviving brother is obviously not able to provide him.

Good luck finding a vet who's prepared to do those tests. The main reason why Wrymouth has been able to do as much harm as he's done is that nobody would expect a grown-up, retired adult who was once considered intelligent to do any of it--least of all poisoning cats.

Meanwhile, you need to bring the cat inside. He will be losing great quantities of water. You will want to set out plenty of water for him, but he may lose the ability to drink from a bowl. He may be super-sensitive to pain and may scream or fight when touched. Minimize touch if that happens; don't take his sudden hostility personally. He may be feverish, or his body temperature may drop and he may be cold. Keep him warm, anyway. 

There is no cure for panleukopenia and there's probably not one for intentional poisoning with a chemical that replicates the effects of panleukopenia. What a veterinary hospital will do is keep the cat hydrated and check the electrolyte balance in his blood. You can do this at home. You will need a 10cc syringe--the one the vet gave you with his last worm treatment, say. 

You also need a bottle of activated charcoal capsules. Wal-Mart sells these; they'll be somewhere in the vitamin section. Take a clean cup, hold a capsule over it, and pop the capsule apart. The charcoal powder will fall to the bottom of the cup. Fill the cup with water. Stir. Draw up a syringe full of this solution. 

Even if the cat has taken medicine from a syringe before, he may be feeling too sick to swallow. Pop a couple of clean sacks or blankets around him, or a heavy jacket you can clean afterward, to secure his legs under him. I usually hold a cat by the back of the neck and place the syringe behind the fangs, angled toward the back of the mouth, through the row of short carnassial teeth behind the fangs. When sure the syringe is in place, inject about 2cc at a time. Give the cat time to swallow each mouthful before injecting the next one. 

Cats are capable of "mixed feelings," though it's hard to imagine what that actually feels like to them. A cat who has had a dose of charcoal and felt it doing the cat good may know it needs another dose but still not enjoy the treatment. Persevere. 

Repeat as necessary. As long as he's coughing, vomiting, refusing food, or passing bodywastes that seem abnormal, give charcoal once a day, plain water once or twice. (If able to drink water, he will probably be very thirsty.) If his movements seem weak, stiff, or spastic, let him drink plain chicken broth or fish broth from the can, to restore electrolytes. Cats who survive panleukopenia survive because they build complete immunity. There is no need to overuse charcoal. 

It does not take long for charcoal to adsorb poisons and wash them out of the body. (The trouble is that charcoal will carry out nutrients, too.) After just a few doses the cat will still be ill, but much improved. He may want lots of food to restore lost flesh--try to do this slowly. He will probably want to go out and mark his territory, but will soon be tired and need a warm place to rest for several hours. Rest is good. If he's like my Serena, he will want to overdo the activity and have setbacks.

Recovery will take several of his days and I don't know how complete it will be, but, like most things about "owning" a pet cat, it won't take much of your time or money. A day or two of giving charcoal solution and water through a syringe, and he'll probably be able to drink water and eat food again. 

Waiting may allow symptoms to worsen. As with real panleukopenia, it's possible for a cat to go so far down with this disease that nothing can bring it back. 

Setbacks may occur if he becomes tired or stressed, or is exposed to more toxic chemicals. He may become more sensitive to chemicals than he was before. He needs exercise, needs to rebuild lost muscle, but watch that he doesn't overdo it. Walking around your yard is probably good for him. Playing with sticks and strings is good if he's still interested. Walking as far as my house might be harmful. 

He needs company--as in another cat. Try to adopt one who has already had the virus that is not what he has, whether the vet called it "enteritis" (a mild case), "parvo," "distemper," or panleukopenia, which depends on how ill the cat was; they're all the same virus. She should be immune for life, which is good because your cat has probably had the virus and might be shedding it. Many cats like to be the only pet in the household. Yours does not. He will wander about, crying from loneliness, and probably annoy someone and possibly be hurt, if he doesn't have a cat friend at home. He is still interested in sex, but he's more interested in company, hanging around my cats when there are no immediate possibilities of sex. 

Your cat may or may not be truly bisexual, but I've seen him at least try to have sex with a gentle male cat who didn't fight with him. In animals this is often a challenge or dominance display, more like schoolboys saying "You won't fight; you're 'gay'" than like serious solicitation. Trumpkin is primarily interested in females. The ideal companion for him would be a spayed female. Silver, if she's still alive, is not spayed and shouldn't be; her body, like Serena's, resists glyphosate poisoning and other things by storing toxins in the reproductive system and producing non-viable kittens. A cat you rescue from a shelter will be spayed. Same dramas, no kittens. 

I like the little guy's determination, anyway, and hope you can reach a complete cure and enjoy the cat's full natural lifespan with him. If it were panleukopenia, cats who survive one bout with that usually have good immune systems and long lives. Since it's poison, who knows. I don't think it's good for Trumpkin to be hanging out here and commuting back and forth in all kinds of weather, but I wish him well. In case you have not noticed yet, he's not a normal cat. He could be an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime pet for you. I hope he is.

Animal Status Update

Serena is a celebrity cat who's been threatened, attacked, and badly injured. She might prefer to stay down cellar with her grandkitten if I go to visit friends during the February Freeze, but I can't let her do that any more. I've never found out, but I'm guessing she's not in the minority of cats who enjoy travelling and visiting.

And Serena's not complaining about being kept indoors, although she's starting to recover her bounce and sass (while still being sniffly, and threatened). She has, for example, progressed from wanting to maintain contact with me at all times to finding it easier to snooze on the other side of the bench. She'll curl up on my lap to show good will, then stand up with a reproachful look and move to her own side when I change positions. I can gauge her level of boredom by the frequency with which she changes sides or positions while dozing. She is getting bored. She seems to have some idea of what she's up against, which helps. I think she understands why she has to endure more boredom than she's ever tolerated before. Overconfidence and rebellion may come later. For now I'm still, as so many times in the past eight years, awestruck by Serena's practical intelligence. She has a different kind of brain than a human has; she never will really speak, or talk, or write, but she certainly uses what she has.

Drudge is still here, healthy, adorable, adoptable. He drank out of the same water dishes Pastel used before she died, because that's how social cats are; when they have a dish apiece, they'll still take turns sampling whatever is in each dish. If Pastel's trouble had started with panleukopenia, Drudge would have shown some sign of infection by now. There is none. Here he stands to testify that Pastel was deliberately poisoned with something whose effects on cats may destroy immunity to, or may simulate the effects of, panleukopenia. (Not including the watery yellow diarrhea the word "distemper" brings to mind, even if virologists say panleukopenia is the strongest form of the same virus.) 

This does not mean that Drudge may not have been exposed to natural panleukopenia. There's no way to be sure without blood tests. He got the benefit of the full lactation cycles of three immune carriers, since Serena and Silver used lactation for birth control after each lost a litter to "New Roundup" vapor drift last year. In theory that could mean that he has some immunity to the virus, is currently an immune carrier, and might come down with the disease later on--if natural panleukopenia had anything at all to do with this winter's events. 

But I'm still inclined to suspect chemical poisoning that simulated the effects of the deadly virus. Charcoal is wonderful stuff for any undesirable chemicals or bacteria in the digestive tract; I don't see how it could have any effect on virus in the bloodstream. It seems to me that if Serena had been starting to froth at the mouth from the effects of a natural virus, even if charcoal could have done her any more good than it did Pastel, it would have taken more than an hour for any good effects to have shown. I'm still not confident about saying that Serena's been cured of what was probably a small amount of poison. I believe the prayers that have been said on her behalf may have helped, and I've certainly been praying; she is still sniffly, and sleepier than she was before. If she survives she may be an Old Cat, as distinct from the mature but still bouncy cat she was last year.  

Drudge's only flaw that I can see is that he's starting to smell like a tomcat. He likes having his fluffy coat groomed and petted, even being turned upside down and tickled, which few cats will tolerate for anything like as long as Drudge and his brothers do. He's big for his age, and will still grow a little bigger, but I'd be surprised if his healthy weight ever got over fifteen pounds. While his brothers were here, Drudge tagged along, but didn't really participate, when his attention-craving brothers tried to stampede into the house or climb up my coattails to grab food out of my hands. As the only remaining kitten he's lonely, but mellow and polite. His general affect is like, "Will there ever be mild evenings when a human sits on the porch and shares water with us cats and trails switches over the ground for us to chase, ever again?" All kittens have to learn how not to bite or scratch; Drudge learned fast, because he wants to be loved, and would probably be a good first cat for a family with a child. He does seem to have learned, as Diego refused to learn, that scent-marking the porch is not a way to make himself loved. I don't know whether he recognizes individual words; he doesn't answer to his name, whether it's pronounced like The Great Matt's full family name or shortened to "Dru," because he answers to human voices or footsteps. For anyone who doesn't mind a bit of tomcat odor he'd be very easy to love.

And, after the February freeze, will Silver come back here again? I hope she will. If  Trumpkin's humans really want to keep her, I can say that she's worth the cost of a veterinary hospital if she does go down with panleukopenia. She and Serena have been a fantastic team of social cats, all these years. It's rare to find a cat who's as good a Queen as Serena; it's also rare to find a cat who's as good a Loyal Follower as Silver. Despite Serena's "Don't give yourself airs!" act when Silver's come home, full of food treats and full of herself, I really think Serena misses her. So does Drudge. So do I. So, if they're still alive, will the possums Silver made it her job to supervise. And there are other cats, equally pretty if not equally loved, in Kingsport who desperately need the good home Trumpkin's humans clearly have to offer.

Meanwhile, the really stupid animal in this story, the one without the capacity for common decency,  sent his hired man around...not to pretend that he'd not trespassed on a better neighbor's property to poison my cats (and me, and the eighty-year-old gentleman who may have failed to meet an obligation for the first time during that week), but to assert that he was, too, a veteran and he still lives, part of the time, in his original home. The Trotter Lane address is merely the one published in the telephone directory. No doubt this information will be useful to anyone who has found anything at the bottom of the deep freezer, or dead beside the road, or similar, that they think would look good on a pet killer's vanity vehicle. I take his silence on the important question as an admission of guilt.

I don't want Wrymouth Calhoun dead, actually. I want him to suffer. I want him to spend years trying to die, and being prevented from dying and punished for trying, behind bars. And I want him to know before he dies that he'll be commemorated in history by a law that recognizes "pesticide" spraying as poisoning any neighbors, human or otherwise, that are harmed by it, and basically ensures that any lazy landowner who would rather poison road verges than prune shrubbery will be paying two-thirds of everything he has to his complaining neighbors for the rest of his life. 

Some have opined that Wrymouth resents me more than other neighbors because, before I was "the child prodigy," he was sometimes described as "the smart one"...I think adults should try harder to avoid mislabelling children's intelligence, which depends so much on their health and the way adults deal with them. I suspect the old beekeeper who died so mysteriously, who made a career out of having been "retarded" by a childhood injury, may have had a higher IQ than either of us. Still, let Wrymouth Calhoun be remembered as the biggest fool in the history of our town. So much evil he's done just to destroy the peace of a real Christian community, and so much money spent...to gain nothing, to die sick and disowned and disgraced in an institution. Thus be it ever to bullying, cowardly evildoers.

Perhaps, when he's locked up, the rest of us can put the rich uncle's estate behind us, too, and become a real Christian community--an extended family, with generations of friendship among the neighbors who were not physically related to each other--again. Perhaps my Nephews' children can grow up, as I did, in a neighborhood where all children can safely roam over all the land. I hope so.

Status Update: Serena Hangs Tough

It's hard to tell whether my grandmother cat Serena is shaking off the effects of poison or just dying hard, but she's still hanging in there. She knows what's going on. 

Her daughter Pastel died. There were ups and downs, but mostly downs, for a few days before Pastel wanted to go out and lie in the sun in the Late January Thaw That Turned Into the Early February Thaw. Then Pastel wanted to walk down to the branch creek for water. She had crossed the road, moving slowly and taking it easily, and then--you could tell by the way her eyes had dilated, looking up into the sun--everything went black. I found her minutes after she died and wasn't sure whether she might wake up from a healing coma, so I brought her home, but she was gone. 

Serena and Silver observed Pastel. Silver and Drudge and the visiting nuisance I call Trumpkin kept a vigil over her body that night. Then the cats reached a mutual decision that since I have one warm room and Trumpkin's humans have another warm room, Trumpkin could petnap Silver again. While occupying the warm room and being ill Serena liked having my undivided attention, or at least sharing it with things like sleep and writing, rather than Silver. So Silver went home with Trumpkin. 

I had learned something about Silver I'd never known before. As an outdoor cat she never overate, but when kept indoors she will overeat--from boredom. She'd been overeating at Trumpkin's house. It had not done her good; she came home fat and wheezy, but when kept indoors she prowled around showing boredom, wanting to overeat or else damage my property. She's not good at being an indoor cat. Trumpkin's Humans will need to spend a lot of time entertaining her, with good active games and not a lot of food, and if they're trying to work from home they'll probably find keeping her to be a nuisance. But, considering the probability that Crayola and who knows how many other neighborhood cats may have been poisoned, until the danger passes they may keep Silver indoors if they like, and I'd recommend keeping poor lonely Trumpkin indoors too.

We need, of course, to get the Bad Neighbor out of the neighborhood. I'd like to hope it can be done without violence. If enough people present a united front and deliver the message that anyone who cares about him needs to keep HIM confined (and sterilized, and doped up if he doesn't seem to like being kept inside and closely supervised), it's probably possible to prevent the sociopath escalating to more direct attacks on human beings--though he has already used legal methods of poisoning that have killed human beings including his own immediate family. 

This web site does not publish identity or contact information for living private persons, but since I think a sociopath is not so much living as undead, here we go. The Neighborhood Blight in my neighborhood is Larry Ricky Calhoun. That is his real name--not short for any more formal names that were "traditional" in the 1950s. I've never heard him called Larry, only Ricky or Wrymouth. He used to display photos of himself on Facebook but, after gaining weight and losing hair, has pulled them down. He still has the crooked mouth, a lifelong birth defect. Strangers have been known to describe it as a cute lopsided grin; my brother's phrase when we were kids used to be "crafty and calculating," and some would go so far as to call it evil. Well he does evil. Anyway he's about 5'10", wears #8 men's shoes, used to have dark hair but if he has any hair left now it's white. He used to live out below Bray, among relatives who shared the old family property, but after they all died and he inherited their land he apparently found the place sad and lonely, and moved closer to Gate City, on a back road called Trotter Lane, on what older people may remember as Oscar "Junior" Peters' land. He lives in a trailer house that has a land phone, 276-452-4042. Even on dirty back roads he likes to drive big shiny-new pickup trucks, and try to tell people to ditch their roads down to bedrock because it's not his problem if the rocks destroy their trucks--only if mud or dust get on his. As you'd expect from a cat-killing sociopath, he may seem pleasant enough in public, but basically he is scum.

This web site does not advocate violence, or property destruction, especially if animals might be harmed, and on Trotter Lane a fire would harm a lot of cute little wild animals. This web site would, however, display photos of Wrymouth's trucks covered in any sort of rotten, sticky, slimy garbage anyone might happen to find in a deep freezer after a long power outage, or similar, in the interest of encouraging him to repentance. This web site has no real hope that Wrymouth Calhoun is capable of sincere repentance but we do hope he can be persuaded in that direction, in the same way we hope Serena-cat can survive. 

Other nonviolent ways to encourage an evildoer to repent include things like nobody speaking to him, even if he speaks first, or waiting on him in any place of business, or buying anything he sells. (He has been known to sell food in open-air markets. Here I stand to testify, I once bought a bag of fresh corn on the cob from him, shared it with friends and relatives, and we were all sick.) Things like people going to a different church if he starts going to one. Things like people warning anyone seen still talking to him, out loud, in public, "Why would you want to talk to a cat poisoner?!" Things like, if anyone who cares about Wrymouth as still alive, their urging him to sign over all his real estate to the people he has harmed as evidence of repentance, then take a very long bus ride away from here and try to find a nice, safe place with bars on all the windows where he can spend the rest of his worthless life praying for forgiveness. 

God's forgiveness, I mean. I do not believe that anyone who remembers the very mysterious diseases that killed our beekeeper and his bees, which were not caused by any virus, bacteria, or fungus known to medical or veterinary science, because they were caused by deliberate chemical poisoning, will ever want to look at Wrymouth again. 

But this was supposed to be a post about Serena, who is still, as she's always been, a source of delight. She's not well. She's still likely not to survive this incident, but she's still sassy and sweet and more intelligent than some people want to believe a cat can be.

Serena never, ever, wanted to snuggle up on anyone's lap before this winter. As a kitten she took many naps beside or against me, but on waking she always wanted a good fast game. She might chomp on me in a friendly puppy-like way, or just bound away, waving her tail and looking back--"Chase me!" As an adult cat she could be a nuisance when I was doing anything outdoors, running out into the road in hopes that I'd chase her back toward home. (She didn't want to go away from home and would come back, disappointed, if not chased.)

But during the Big Freeze this winter, she started making a display to her daughters--"I'm still the Queen Cat around here! I get to occupy the human's lap, day or night, and you don't." It started while they were all active and healthy. 

Little we guessed that short occupations of my lap, before she went out to hunt or eat or check her territory, would turn into days spent coughing and sneezing on my lap.

She seemed to be shaking off the effects of whatever she'd eaten, and gaining some weight while taking all her meals indoors, up to last week. Then she started smelling streppy. Amoxicillin might have helped, or might have killed her, if I'd had any, but I did not. Charcoal, which I have, had cleaned up Pastel's breath after she collapsed on my lap smelling like a sack of bacteria. Serena, who has had charcoal for food poisoning before and recommended it to her kittens, didn't want any. Her temperature rose. She even made a puddle, not on my lap but on a blanket folded up a few feet away. Then she stayed on the site, concealing the damage. She went into defensive mode when I moved her away. She didn't want me to find out.

"Oh, Serena," I wailed, finding the wet spot. Old female cats and humans probably do get away with a few minor episodes of incontinence because, most of the time, most of our urine doesn't have a strong odor, but this was not the case last night. "I'm so sorry that happened, you poor dear cat..."

Serena really snarled, making an uglier sound and display than I've seen her use with unwelcome visiting cats. She hated pity. 

"But if you're going to become a bedwetter you can't sleep here any more," I said, and brought in a cage, lined it with newspapers, and shoved Serena inside.

I slept in the office, as I often do in winter, after hand-washing the blanket in one of those wonderful enzyme formulas and drying it in front of the hot-air fan. Serena woke me a few times, rearranging the newspapers, making a big display. "See, I still wake up and get up and bury my own bodywastes! I am still a competent cat!" I prayed earnestly that she might either recover or die overnight.

In the morning I set out some food for Drudge. Serena was on her feet, bright-eyed, with a bit of a cough but a dry, slightly warm nose. She ate some breakfast, too. I left them to it for fifteen minutes. A little snow had started to stick to the ground before being replaced by a cold steady rain, the sort of rain that tends to freeze into black ice at sundown.

After fifteen minutes I went out and called. There was no sign of Serena. I went around the house, calling and searching, in the rain. "You can sit on the cot," I said, returning to the porch, "on newspapers, not on my blankets."

Serena popped up from behind a storage bin. "Deal!" she nonverbally said.

Needless to say, she sat on newspapers for about fifteen seconds before she was back on my lap, curled up in a circle, making her almost inaudible purr. She purrs audibly only when nursing kittens, but she does purr. Usually I have to touch her to know when she's purring. (Yes, I can still hear most cats purr.) 

Enzyme formulas aren't cheap but it's worth the price if Serena's last days are as pleasant as they can be...especially if her last days are still ten years away.

Status Update: Pastel's Last Days

It's hard to believe that the junior cat Pastel was still only edging up on her third birthday. It feels as if she'd been here for a long time. Though not long enough.

The Queen Cat, Serena-Seralini, has a wide frame because she had a Manx great-grandfather. When she was growing up I thought she'd have to be spayed, to prevent any more Manx kittens being born. They're often born with birth defects that eitther cause a painful death in the first month of life, or doom them to a miserable life. Serena outsmarted me. She gave birth to four beautiful, perfect kittens, and one that wandered out into the snow and died, on a snowy night before other cats had started thinking about starting kittens. 

The COVID panic was still going on. There was no reliable Internet service. I had lots of time to watch Serena rear those healthy, mannerly kittens. When they were sick and needed medicine for a day or two, they stayed in their basket for exactly four hours, then lined up and waited for their medicine. When they were bouncing around outdoors in the daytime but needed to come in at night, they waited outside the door. People couldn't believe kittens could behave so well until they'd seen it, but they did see it. There are still people who want one of Serena's kittens.

That's because the ones who were exposed to glyphosate vapors, before birth or while young, have not survived. Serena didn't show a significant glyphosate reaction. Her kittens did. That's the Seralini Effect: some female bodies, sometimes against the stated wishes of female humans, survive exposure to poison by storing the toxins in the placentas during pregnancy. That may be enough to kill a fetus at once. Or the fetus may be stillborn or deformed. Or it may live until it's exposed to the same poison again after birth, and no longer. One year Serena gave birth to one dead kitten and eight living ones all at once. (She bulged, and seemed impatient to get them out, but they were all normal-size.) The eight kittens had been fed, and shown to me, and adored, and then a blast of glyphosate vapors blew over the Cat Sanctuary, and all eight kittens died. 

Serena loves kittens but she's selective. Why did that first kitten wander into the snow? While tending kittens Serena has cleaned some with licks that pushed them in to their nesst, and some with licks that pushed them aside. Smell and taste allow mother animals to perceive several things about their young that aren't apparent to the eye. Often they can recognize conditions that will make a baby animal hard or impossible to rear.  Serena has a tendency to give birth to normal-sized kittens and large kittens, and reject the large ones.

In 2022 someone had the idea that it would be terribly cute to name the kittens after writing tools. Biro, Pastel, and Crayola were the large kittens born that year. There were some small ones called Bic, Sharpie, and Ticonderoga (Tyke). Pastel was the one I saw Serena pushing away from the others. She had already pushed Crayola.

"I want to keep the calico kittens," I said to Serena.

"Well I don't," Serena nonverbally said. "They're overgrown. They get it from their father. They'll grow up stupid and weak like him."

"If you want to rear kittens in the office, you have to rear the calicos," I said.

So Serena, and her older daughter Silver who had kittens later that week, reared their kittens in the office. Several kittens died in the first glyphosate spray poisoning that year. Pastel and Crayola survived; Crayola was very pretty. Pastel had a prettier, more distinctive coat, but what people noticed about her face was almost always how bleary her eyes looked, because of her glyphosate reactions. 

"If you want to rear kittens in the office, you'll have to rear the two calicos," I said.

So the two cats reared their kittens together. Both cats showed the Seralini effect. Biro, Pastel, and Crayola moved outdoors. The others died and were removed from the office. Biro was adopted. I kept the calico kittens.

Crayola grew up quickly, and was a small adult cat when the neutered orange Manx tomcat I call Trumpkin led her back to his home. Pastel had sex with him, too, but stayed at home. I don't know who Trumpkin's humans are or what they call him. I started calling him Trumpkin because he was orange and annoying and refused to go home. 

Pastel is about as long and tall as Serena but not quite as broad-framed. The spots of white and colored fur form what I consider a pretty face, but her beauty has been marred by her watery eyes. Her reaction to glyphosate, and no doubt to other things, involves watery eyes. 

After her second birthday, last summer, Pastel had four "mixed hair" kittens, one of whom is still with me. Pastel has never seemed especially intelligent, as Serena and Silver do, but she showed that this was partly due to shyness and a wish not to offend Serena or me. She didn't do several things other cats instinctively did until Serena or I had demonstrated them, or pushed her to do them; then she did them easily, clearly having the same instincts but feeling inhibited to act on them. She was a good mother cat and, like Serena and Silver, taught her kittens to wait outside the door to be taken indoors at night. She was social; Serena and Silver, having no viable kittens of their own, shared the rearing of her kittens, and the three who lived through their first summer are big healthy fellows. 

It was just after Thanksgiving when our Bad Neighbor was heard talking to a laborer he sometimes employs. The laborer is not quite a deaf-mute, but has poor hearing and a speech impediment. It is possible to have a limited sort of conversation with him. In this conversation they were discussing a coyote trap the Bad Neighbor had set. The Bad Neighbor, a sociopath who shows no obvious disabilities, had taken it into his head that "wildlife"--foxes, if not coyotes or bears--could be trapped and killed; but whenever an animal was in the trap, it was a cat. Not one of mine, but apparently, two or three times in a row, it had been Serena's preferred kitten-daddy. The laborer had chased him away, again, and volunteered, "If I catch him again I'll take him and dump him out around 600," referring to a paved two-lane road several miles away. 

"I'll drive up and throw out some meat," said the Bad Neighbor. "Then there'll be no more cats."

They laughed, but the laborer stopped to warn me. I warned him that killing other people's pets was a crime. The laborer said, "If you catch him."

One night during the week before last I caught the Bad Neighbor sneaking around the neighborhood at night. He stopped short of my property line. I watched, but did not see him trespassing on residential property. A disturbance seemed to come from small wild animals, possibly released from another trap in another neighbor's woodlot. The Bad Neighbor's evil errand might have been spraying New Roundup along the road.

Last week all of my cats were sniffly. Trumpkin had been running around the neighborhood, day and night, wailing loudly that he was lonely; apparently Crayola had died. Silver had gone off with him and spent days and nights away from home. I had thought Silver's being "petnapped" by another cat, who had obviously prevailed on his owners to bring her into their home and overfeed her, was at least amusing, though after most of a week at Trumpkin's house Silver came home so overstuffed she wheezed when she walked.

Actually, last week, all of the cats seemed to have "cold" symptoms. And on one cold night she spent indoors, Serena demonstrated that a meal of human food she had tolerated before was hard for her to keep down.

Then Pastel stepped away from the house--oddly, before a meal--and came back, hours later, looking very ill, gushing watery bubbles from eyes, nose, and mouth. I brought her in, dried her off, and gave her a charcoal solution for food poisoning. 

It was not as quick a cure as it had been for natural food poisoning in the past. Still, Pastel had some natural food poisoning, from which she seemed to recover; the first night she stank, the second night she smelled like a damp cat; and she seemed to be feeling better, and to want to go out and enjoy the February thaw. I had some misgivings. She hadn't even started to eliminate whatever she'd eaten. In view of her past, though, I thought it was possible that she might be holding in toxins because she felt inhibited about vomiting or defecating indoors, even in a box full of newspapers.

It occurred to me that the meat might have been deliberately poisoned, but I wasn't sure how to proceed with that. Would a local vet have a way to identify and treat chemical poisoning? Would the police? I sent out e-mails. They weren't answered. Nobody was prepared to deal with that possibility. And meanwhile I was hoping not to have to be among people while I was an immune carrier of Pastel's germs. On Saturday I thought the load of bacteria I was likely to be carrying would be conspicuous and dangerous. By Tuesday, however, a day out in the sun seemed to have burned off the bacteria; Pastel's breath smelled clean to me and nobody seemed especially revulsed by my breath, either, when I ventured into town in the evening.

But if Pastel had been recovering, at least from the strep infection, she'd overburdened her strength. I found her beside the road. Rigor mortis had not set in; it was hard to tell whether she was dead or in a coma. She had been thirsty. She had gone down toward the branch creek, and suddenly everything had just gone black. In the bright sun her eyes looked completely black, pupils fully dilated. She had yellow-green eyes, but nobody will ever see their color again. She had had cramps, but not been able to move any toxins up or down. She had suffered before she died. 

She had not died of a strep infection. The odor and fever were gone. She had not had symptoms of distemper or feline leukemia. She had been fighting something off before she had gone out, away from food, as if she thought she were going to eat a better meal. 

While Pastel had been ill Serena had first seemed to be trying to help, snuggling up beside her. Then she seemed to give up hope and resent the attention Pastel was getting. I could only hope that emotional resentment was all Serena was feeling. She never was a cuddly cat. Growling when touched might have meant she was feeling physical discomfort, or meant she was feeling emotional dissatisfaction. I backed off and said "It's only because Pastel's been sick," though, strictly speaking in my native dialect, Pastel never was sick; she was ill, and died, because she was unable to be sick.

Now at least I had some idea what we were dealing with, something to tell a vet if one of them wanted to try to help Serena and Silver...because, yes, they'd ingested some of the same stuff. Their eyes and noses were watery. Serena seemed unusually thirsty. Silver was unusually distrustful of me. She's never been cuddly, either, but that's because Serena scolds her for indulging me in soppy behavior unbecoming to adult cats; when Serena's not looking Silver is "the Secret Snugglebunny." But she refused to come into the office and share a meal with Serena. Normally any suggestion of a meal being served in the office would have brought Silver running inside.

Today, Wednesday, I watched for e-mail from a veterinarian or at least another animal rescuer whose e-mail I had in the computer. If any of them answered my e-mails, the reply didn't get through. The Internet was up and down all day with at least four "down" periods lasting over an hour each, so it's possible that a reply was lost. It's also possible that nobody else in our small, mostly peaceful town had any experience with deliberately poisoned animals. When local people want to get rid of animals they don't blather about reverence for all life; most seem to believe that humans have a right to kill animals whenever we feel like it, unless the animals are someone else's property--but they do use either guns or knives, and kill animals quickly. Pastel was a portrait of misery for four days and nights.

In the evening I brought Serena inside, although the air was warm, for observation. Her nose was starting to run enough to bubble. I gave her charcoal. If it's still getting into her digestive system, if her insides aren't paralyzed by the poison, charcoal can adsorb and remove most kinds of poison. If it's not, the question on my mind tonight is when and whether I could kill Serena to spare her from what  Pastel went through. I don't think I could bear to watch Serena go through that. I don't think I could kill Serena. I know I couldn't pay a vet to kill her.

Most cats will leave the house if their human is unable to feed them. I remember Serena sitting beside me, purring as if to say "Take your time, friend," when I suddenly found it so hard to walk across the floor and put out some kibble during the salmonella episode. When I'd forced myself to do that by telling myself they'd not been fed for two days and nights.

Many, not all, female cats will feed kittens whose own mothers can't feed them, if they find it convenient. Only Serena sat down with the mother cat and the kittens and got the other mother cat's milk going. 

Most cats find little dens in which to keep kittens away from light and strangers while the kittens develop to the point of being able to go out and explore the world. Serena built a den. In winter. With layers of doorways that didn't overlap, to create a snug little vestibule around a warm cozy shelter for the babies. 

She is, of course, a bit of fur whose color pattern happens to please my eyes, a pet...but she's also a dear friend, in the same way a human housemate might become a dear friend. Sometimes I laugh at Serena, and sometimes I admire her. Shelters are full of beautiful bits of fur occupied by dumb animals who have learned to enjoy being around humans, but there'll never be another Serena.

And Silver? Silver is avoiding Serena and me. She could be less sick than Serena; she could be sicker. I've never been close to Silver, as I've always been with Serena, but I don't think I could watch Silver die the way Pastel did, either. 

I think, on the other hand, watching the Bad Neighbor die that way would be great fun; especially the point where he'd feel thirsty and try to drink any available liquid, and not be able to take any fresh water in because so much polluted liquid was gushing out.

None of my cats ever was in the Bad Neighbor's stupid traps. I know because all of them reported for every meal I offered them, all winter. They are technically barn cats but they spend most of their days on the porch, in the yard, or following me around the place. Unlike normal cats, who like to be alone most of the time, social cats like to be together and even sleep in heaps, like baby kittens, for security. 

I'm well aware of a number of people, some even well-intentioned, who think it's good for cats to be kept indoors. I'm also aware that it's not good for cats to be kept indoors. It's not good for the doors; if kept indoors on days when they preferred to be outdoors I have reason to believe that either Serena or Silver would systematically claw away enough of a door, or a wall, to reclaim their right to come and go at will, and they'd take encouragement from working as a team. It's not good for the neighborhoods where, if cats don't stay at the top of the food chain, rats will. It's not good for humans to tolerate conditions that make it dangerous for cats to be outdoors where they belong, protecting humans from rat infestations and rat-borne diseases. If one cat has to spend one warm day indoors because a neighborhood is infested with a cat killer, the humans in the neighborhood should be spending that day working to remove the cat killer. 

This can often be accomplished without violence, by a simple agreement that nobody wants to encourage a cat killer to live another minute, and so nobody trades with him, nobody speaks to him, nobody stays in a church if he comes into one, and so on...until the cat killer gets down on his knees and begs the owners of the cats to take his property, from which he walks away, never to return, with the clothes on his back if the injured parties are charitable, and starts another life in another place, far away.

But this Bad Neighbor is not only a cat killer. The presence of a cat killer is a valid reason not to buy a house in a neighborhood, and people advertise nice livable neighborhoods by mentioning the cats visible on the street, because cat killers usually start with small animals and work their way up to murdering human beings. Our Bad Neighbor, however, may have started with small animals while living in his original neighborhood, but before moving into our neighborhood he had already worked his way up to at least accidentally killing his parents, one brother, one sister, his original wife, and their one documented child. And it would be hard to prove, but I believe he deliberately killed our old beekeeper and came very close to crippling Grandma Bonnie Peters. And he's certainly and openly displayed willingness to injure or kill me. He is not known for physical courage; he's spoken when spoken to a few times, but the way I've seen him most often, and will remember him best, is trying to run out of my sight. He worked, before retirement, at a chemical company and has consistently used chemicals to harm human beings, along with the petty property damage intended to help him cheat people out of land.

I don't know. I think he deserves to suffer much more than this, but for a start he could be tied behind whatever oldfashioned horse-drawn vehicle anybody still has and paraded through the county, up every back road and to every house door, having his crimes read out to people who are then invited to take their feelings out on him with whatever kind of parting kick they feel that his crimes deserve. Then let him go and try to get into a mental hospital, or just be a homeless beggar, a thousand miles away.