CHARISMATIC ALPHA PREDATOR MAMMALS

Cecil Rhodes

Cecil Rhodes was an imperialist.  (1853-1902) Whether or not that made him a shit depends on your point of view.  Rhodesia was named for him and so was Cecil the lion, much lamented.  Whether he was a glorious symbol of kinghood (whether or not kinghood is all that glorious) or a trophy for either camera or arrow so a dentist to boast about killing him by cheating/baiting the protected and named animal and then botching it (48 hours with an arrow sticking out of Cecil, who hid, while someone else hunted for him with a proper gun) or a great money raiser for the professionals who make millions by playing on heartstrings, Cecil was a strange name for a lion.  (A better name for a seasick sea serpent -- remember that puppet?)  But the lion was a good-looking and innocent creature.

Jamalya

When I was an AC officer, there was a lion -- half-grown -- named Jamalya.  She got loose.  She belonged to the son of the King of the Gypsies -- this was in Portland, OR.  I lived only a couple of blocks away so had spotted her and talked to the son not long before.  He was treating her like a big dog on a leash, while inevitable kids stood just barely out of reach.  I don’t know whether he was strong enough to restrain her if she really wanted to lunge at a kid.  

She was loose early in the morning just as I was leaving for work as Education Coordinator for animal control and I thought maybe I could walk up to her.  After all, I’d slept with bobcats.  But scale matters and by the time I got over there, people had gathered -- all of them full of useless advice and heedless of their own safety -- she was confused and scared.  I held out my hand, she held out her taloned paw, and she won.  Rock, paper, and claws like scissors.  I backed off.  We were on the cover of the Oregonian the next morning.  We finally used the tranq gun.

Then came the problem of who would clean her cage, which was really the sick bay for the dogs.  The answer turned out to be me.  There were two chainlink enclosures, so I would open the clean empty one, encourage her to go in there (with the mop), close that door and clean the other.  We got a bag of Lion Chow from the zoo and found a source for meat.  During the switch of enclosures she could easily have torn my throat out.  My hair stood up stiff with adrenaline.  The shelter supervisor stood outside the windowed door, but she got bored and left.  She thought she was looking at a tame animal.  There were no male personnel at hand.  Finally the lion went back to the boy with orders to get it out of town fast.

Ernest Hemingway  (not a dentist)

If that miserable dentist, who has lost his comfortable life and had best change his name, wanted to prove what a great hero he was, he ought to have done it the traditional African way: hand to hand with a spear.  Or he could have done it the Hemingway way -- a big gun, a couple of bearers, and a bottle of whiskey.   These days, he had better have inquired whether there were a village with a predator that needed killing and then done a good job of it.  Village predators are not usually very good-looking.  They tend to be old or sick.

Getting back to Portland, we heard there was a black leopard in town.  A few years later there was a tiger.   But the deaths -- an average of one a year -- were due to dogs, usually it was the pet of the owner which killed the owner’s baby or the victim might sometimes be a small woman.  But it seems impossible to raise the consciousness of the sentimental public, neither the end that wants to take all charismatic megamammal predators in their arms nor the end that wants to shoot them, trundle them to the taxidermist, and never see the transition to a mounted head.  I helped do that.  I’ve skinned a lot of bears.  I know how it is -- neither as gruesome nor as magical as people imagine.  

It’s a great irony that the great-granddaughter of the taxidermist/sculptor I married is an investigator for HSUS.  I greatly value that young woman and even admire some of the other work of HSUS, but not their money-making.  In my day the outfit was run by a Presbyterian minister who had a touching speech about a pair of geese.  Bonding for life, you know.  That was before it became unfashionable for humans to do that.  And HSUS is not about animals in situ, not about real life, but about animal shelters.  Captive animals.  Zoos, farms, labs. They do not talk about street or domestic animals.

The other big recent animal story was the zoo that dissected a giraffe with kids looking on.  The mommies were horrified.  The kids were veeeery interested.  The head of the zoo claimed it was scientific -- they didn’t KILL the giraffe and they wanted to know what did.  This was true, but the head of the zoo was stupid to not predict the reaction.  Marius the giraffe became lion chow, a change from the usual cows.

In the days when I was still in the neighborhoods with a truck, I stopped to collect one of the many dead mother possoms with the babies still attached.  They are born helpless but as soon as they get hold of a nipple -- which is long like a noodle -- they lock on until they are old enough to function.  The “pouch” of a possom is not a pocket in front like a kangaroo, but two sort of jacket-like flaps, one over each row of nipples.  This animal was not playing possom -- she was really dead but her babies weren’t.  

The kids were just going home from school and they were very interested, so I was giving them a tutorial of possom anatomy when a cop showed up.  A neighborhood woman had interpreted the scene as the kids assaulting me and called for a cop.  The cop came on strong, then saw the scene was innocent, so tried to make friends with the dachshund that had come with the kids.  It bit him.  Things dispersed fast.  I couldn’t even find out where the dachshund lived so the cop wouldn’t have to have rabies shots.  If it had been the possom that bit him, he wouldn’t have had to worry.  My line was “possoms are too dumb to catch rabies.”  That seems to be pretty much true.

What always bothered me was that I had no efficient way to kill those baby possoms humanely.  They were too immature to raise, couldn’t seal onto a bottle nipple, were considered varmints -- not much charisma unless you like primitive animals with a lot of pointy teeth.  The easiest thing would have been to carry surgical scissors and cut their heads off.  Neat, quick, lab rat technique.  The mommies would have been rabid.

People don’t know stuff.  Even the ones who ought to know better miscalculate.  Hitchbot, the friendly charismatic robot, was fatally beheaded in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia.  The outcry was just like the one for Cecil.  

In the meantime, who’s looking out for the African animals?  Hunters, tourists who shoot with cameras, and the industries based on them.  Who’s looking out for the people of Africa? Who’s repairing the damage done by Cecil Rhodes and his tribe?

Incidentally, a Yellowstone Park employee was killed by a bear a few days ago.  The killing of the bear comes next.  She has a cub, but it hadn't been caught the last I heard.

COMMUNITY CATS: A TRIBE OF ITS OWN

Three generations of ferals:  "Patches," "Smudge," "Skeezix"

The best working theory about the kind of animals that we keep for pets but that also live interstitially, partly pets and partly feral and “partly-partly”, in and out, is that they are self-determining tribes interwoven with our tribe.  This was first expressed on the rez by Blackfeet talking about dogs, but it also works for cats and to some extent for birds.  Humans in settlements create ecologies and various animals enter various ways.

“Patches” and her three kittens came to my yard last fall.

  

"Ming" grew to twice this size, quite splendid.

I called the biggest Ming because of his almond eyes.  He's a white tom with gold patches and a curl on the end of his tail.

The "Crip" before her broken shoulder.

Then there was the prettiest calico, darker than her mother with kohl-rimmed eyes.  She had some kind of accident that broke her shoulder.  Nevertheless, she healed and now only has a funny gait.  I call her “Crip.”  

The "Smudge"

Then the littlest one, no more than a smudge in the grass who walked so close to the mother that if the mother paused, he bumped into her.  I thought he was “he,” but he turned out to be female.  The name “Smudge” stuck.  She's almost a throwback to an African wildcat.  Just needs stilts.

African Wildcat

I got this family through the winter -- don’t ask me why.  I knew better.  I had the idea that by spring they would be tame and I could find them homes.  NOT.  They remain feral.  I’ve never touched them and if I make a surprise move, they scatter like rabbits.  There was only one point of vulnerability -- for them and for me.  The mother, the Crip and the Smudge all came into heat and were bred.  I found the kittens hours after their birth and drowned them except a white and gold long-faced one, now half-grown, I call the Skeezix.  

The Skeezix

The closest any of them come to being tame is that they sneak in the cat flap and afflict my two fat old indoor cats.  (I call them the Marmots.)   But the most troublesome cat of all is still Caspar, who belongs to Dale across the street but believes this is his house and resents all others, no matter the species.  She sometimes tries to kneecap me when I chase her away.  

The Indoor "Marmots"

Smudge turned out to be entirely different from her sibs.  She’s long, skinny, short-haired, striped instead of patched, with headlights for eyes.  She willingly took on the Skeezix, nursing him and wrestling with him all day every day.  Patches was not interested.  After living up and down the street for years, she's an abusive mother.  I’m hoping this nursing (still continuing long after Patches would have tolerated it) will keep her from coming into heat.  I’m hoping the Skeezix is male. I hate drowning kittens.

This summer forgot dog days in Valier.  It’s been cool, almost coastal, weather, infused with smoke.  But the community cats are back in heat.  “Managing Community Cats: A Guide for Municipal Leaders” is a 36 page handout prepared by the Humane Society of the United States. http://www.animalsheltering.org/resources/all.../managing-community-cats.htm.  Like many HSUS things, it’s not quite what it’s represented to be.  A rehash, but a good intro.  The only new idea is that now “Trap-Neuter-Replace” is discredited.  Wayne Pacelle wants cats to be kept indoors.  He wants them to be children.  He wants them to eat broccoli.  Even if they did, they would still poop in unpleasant places and eat birds, which are the main objections from the People Tribe.  

Wayne Pacelle

Terrierman  (http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com) regularly rips the covers off Wayne Pacelle, the new Cleveland Amory.  In the Seventies when I was doing animal control work, Amory was the big cheese at “Fund for Animals,” and the professionals always joked that the main animal was Cleveland.  He did so love the good life, jetting around, charming old ladies out of money.  The Fund appears to have been swallowed by HSUS.

Cleveland Amory

Rev. John A. Hoyt

In those days HSUS was helmed by John Hoyt, a handsome Presbyterian minister who gave a canned speech that was deeply moving the first time you heard it.  The real work was done by Phyllis Wright, who was a down-and-dirty just-do-it woman who monitored shelters and researched how-to.  I mostly worked with Char Drennon, a lady suit who organized the tent-meetings for evangelizing to raise money, cleverly disguised as workshops.  There is nothing that will raise money better than animals -- the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the RICO act, has been brought to bear on HSUS more than once.  ALL the national humane societies are cutthroat competitors, each with more ruthlessly heartbreaking stories than the last, recycling tragedies.  The least corrupt is American Humane Association which protects both children and animals.  They monitor the movies, too.

Cut Bank, Montana

I will NEVER contribute to ANY humane society that isn’t local.  Animal control agencies ARE local, usually under the auspices of the sheriff or police because they are sworn officers who go into neighborhoods to confront problems in situ.  They need civic and moral support as much as money.  Lately a few have been killed on duty.

The standards for all animals, like everything else, must be different between urban and rural.  I was surprised to hear that local grain farmers want cats, which have a high attrition rate because of predators and hazards.  No longer do they keep dairy cows so that the cats line up charmingly to be squirted in the mouth with milk.  The perfect cat could catch pigeons and rodents while not being caught by a coyote.  The perfect cat complaint would be resolved without money.  No one has a budget for feral cats.  Out in the country they are simply shot, the same as a fox or skunk.  In town some geezers would happily do that.  Some poison cats, I'm told.

Grizz soon to be numbered and moved.

It’s always a mistake to name wild animals, but an irresistible mistake.  Even when they stopped giving nicknames to known grizzlies, people starting calling them by their tag numbers and soon the number was a name.  So now Ming, who carried his little head like a rocking horse, neck all bowed up and proud, is laid low from a cat fight in which a bigger tom crushed his back leg.  It’s been three-times normal size but he still manages to escape me and I hate to make him run.  The Crip hasn’t been around for days.  Smudge and the Skeezix are the only ones who show up diurnally for food.  Also, now and then, Patches, who has a new batch of kittens someplace.

For a week or so the cats were sharing with blackbirds who flew back and forth to feed their babies so industriously that they soon emptied an entire bowl of kibble.  Then the babies got big enough to come themselves and for a while there was a great squawking scramble in the yard.  I sort of hoped the ferals would eat a few of those birds.  I could spare a lot of the exotic collared pigeons who live in my blue spruce with the whole purpose of making noise.  On cranky days, esp. after reading another warning about not leaving pet food outside because of attracting bears and after hearing another post office tale about the latest bear visit to Valier, I almost hope the bear will show up and eat the cats.  Instead I’ve made a deal with a neighbor that if I trap a cat that doesn’t have a known owner (it’s likely to be HIS!)  I’ll take it over to him and he’ll run it to a ranch he knows.  

Here’s quite a different story about a feral cat.  This one was captured and given to a careful owner who was ever-so-kind, but the cat suffered so much from the lack of freedom, that he had to be put back where he came from.  Now and then there are people who are like that, even youngsters, who would rather die than live in captivity.  They mean it.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/for-merlin-the-feral-cat-a-spell-indoors-was-hell/article19472092/

Here’s another in the genre of cat philosophizing:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/a-man-and-his-cat/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=1&

This is the valuable takeaway concept:   “Biologists call cats “exploitive captives,” an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies.”  Lolita comes to mind.  Even she eventually settled down to have babies.

Posted today 8-4-14 at Terrierman:

HSUS's Positive Rating Replaced With Warning Letter 
Charity Navigator has always been a bullshit site using nonsense methodology, as I have noted in the past. That said, direct mail fraud groups have typically pointed to their positive ratings there as "proof" they are legitimate. One of those groups is (or was) the Humane Society of the U.S. which once had a 4-star rating with Charity Navigator, but then got downgraded to 3-stars. Now, following HSUS's payment of $15.75 million settle a racketeering lawsuit Charity Navigator has pulled all its stars and replaced it with a "Donor Advisory" warning. About time!  

Terrierman's two new pups