Tag Archives: cats

Operation Git-Meow Wants to Save the Feral Cats of Guantánamo

by RoderickTinline Posted on April 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Guantánamo Bay Naval Base is home to a military prison, and now, a growing stray cat population.

In March, a nonprofit billing itself as Operation Git-Meow issued a request to start an adopt-a-cat program to help connect feral cats with new homes. Last year, almost 200 feral cats at Guantánamo underwent euthanasia because the military base had no alternative method to address the cat population, according to the Miami Herald.

Under current policy, the base is bound to the practice of “trap, neuter, and release.” However, a percentage of Guantánamo’s stray cat population may be euthanized if deemed too ill, injured, or dangerous to the general public. The navy base commander Capt. Dave Culpepper rejected the formal proposal to create a rescue program for cats, citing regulations and a lack of authority over the matter. Instead, Culpepper’s team is “committed to maintaining an animal control program as guided by Navy and Department of Defense regulations and ensuring all species are legally and humanely managed,” the commander’s spokesperson, Julie Ann Ripley, told the Miami Herald.

Guantánamo, leased on 45 square miles of Cuban land, is home to a controversial U.S. military detention camp that has housed hundreds of prisoners as part of the War on Terror since 2002. The prison now holds 41 prisoners, and some 5,500 people live and work on the naval base.

Operation Git-Meow—a play on Guantánamo’s nickname, Gitmo—intends to appeal the decision to the Department of the Navy, putting forward a “no-cost solution” that would include volunteer veterinarians and other experts who can vaccinate and sterilize the cats. The group has even drafted an anti-animal cruelty rule to contend with the growing ill treatment of animals at the base. The proposal, if implemented, would be free for taxpayers.

“Based upon the unique situation at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an aggressive trap, neuter, vaccinate, and release program funded by our organization would be a far more effective approach than simply trapping and killing the cats,” Meredith Ayan from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International told the Miami Herald.

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Operation Git-Meow Wants to Save the Feral Cats of Guantánamo

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Remote Control Hummingbirds!

by TwylaDutton Posted on March 20, 2017

Mother Jones

It tuns out that one of features of my new camera is the ability to control it remotely with my cell phone. If you have even a gram of nerd blood in you, this should make you insanely jealous.1 It’s the coolest thing ever.

And yet, as cool as it is, it still left me twiddling my neurons trying to figure out what I could do with it. One possibility was situations where I need to minimize camera shake. Put the camera on a tripod and then snap the shutter remotely without actually touching anything. But that would be just another example of using a thousand dollars worth of technology to do what a ten-dollar cable release can do. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Then Marian suggested I could set up the camera by our hummingbird feeder and wait for hummingbirds to fly in. So I did. Here’s what the setup looks like:

Then I went into the living room and watched Roger Federer play Stan Wawrinka at Indian Wells. Every time a bird showed up on my camera, I held down the remote shutter button and shot off a few dozen pictures.

Which did me precious little good. Damn, those little buggers are fast. Even with the shutter speed allegedly set at 1/2000th of a second, the pictures were blurry. Also out of focus most of the time, which was a combination of my fault and the camera’s fault. Still, live and learn. Here are the two best shots I got:

The top one is a male Anna’s hummingbird. The bottom one is, I suppose, a female Anna’s hummingbird. The bird folks can enlighten us in comments.

Anyway, I’ll have to try this again. It’s certainly a way of getting some good nature shots without sitting on my hump for hours on end in a muddy patch of dirt. Then again, since the WiFi range for the camera is about ten feet or so, maybe it just means I get a little better selection of where to sit on my hump for hours on end. I’ll have to think of some way to try this with the cats.

1Unless you already have a camera that can do this.

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Remote Control Hummingbirds!

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 January 2017

by RaraBurne7440 Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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I’m alive. Barely. My congestion decided to migrate up into my ear canals yesterday, so every time I cough my right ear blocks up and the world starts spinning. Unfortunately, I cough a lot. It doesn’t last too long, but it happens often enough to keep my stomach in a permanent state of mild nausea. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the cats are all fine. Here’s Hilbert camping out on the fence.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 January 2017

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Friday Cat Blogging – 9 December 2016

by DavidChapa50370 Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

For years we’ve had a regular feline visitor to our house. However, a few days ago, for the first time I can remember, he visited during daylight hours. This caused considerable alarm, and in the ensuing dustup both of our cats somehow ended up on the roof. I’m not quite sure how or why, but after it was all over they roamed around for a while and then settled down on the patio cover. As you can see, Hilbert is keeping a watchful eye out for any further invasions of his territory.

Speaking of territory, the Downing Street mouse problem has still not been solved. So now, in addition to Larry, Palmerston, and Gladstone, the staff has added a mother and son pair of cats, Evie and Ossie. We now have an army of five cats on Downing Street patrol. Would you like to see them and hear about all the inside dirt? (Turf wars! Dog terrorizing! Tarantulas!) This is the kind of thing for which tabloids are really and truly your best source. Forget the Guardian. I recommend the Sun or the Mirror for this story.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 9 December 2016

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Would You Eat an M&M That Fell on the Floor?

by EverettCourtney Posted on October 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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News you can use from Aaron Carroll:

Perhaps no one in the United States has spent more time investigating the occurrence of bacteria on public surfaces than Charles Gerba.

According to Carroll, Gerba’s research tells us that it’s just fine to eat food that you’ve dropped on the floor. This sounds suspiciously like motivated reasoning to support the stereotypical male point of view, and I’m a little curious to learn what Mrs. Carroll thinks of this. I suppose we’ll never know. In any case, the argument here is that your average floor is no more germy than any other surface in your house, and less than many. Kitchen floors, for example, have about half the bacteria of kitchen counters.

That’s all fair enough, but what about ordinary old dirt and dust? My kitchen counters have almost none of that. My kitchen floor has lots, thanks to the fact that I walk on it, the cats walk on it, the dust accumulates until I vacuum it, and so forth. It may be that dirt and dust aren’t likely to make you sick, but it’s still a little disgusting to have it all over your food. Or am I being a little too fastidious here?

Of course, it also depends on the food item. If a peanut M&M fell on the floor, I’d have no qualms about rubbing it clean with my shirt and then eating it. But a leftover piece of chicken? Probably not.

I wonder what Donald Trump would think of all this? He’s a famous germaphobe, but he also apparently thinks that fast food is safer than other foods because it’s highly processed and standardized. So what would he think about an M&M that fell on the floor?

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Would You Eat an M&M That Fell on the Floor?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 August 2016

by RosemarDemaio Posted on August 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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As everyone knows, the best cat toy is also the cheapest: a three-foot piece of string. But everyone also knows that you can make anything better by putting it on a stick. Hot dogs. Grilled peppers. Ice cream bars. Three-foot pieces of string.

With that in mind, yesterday we drove by the animal shelter and picked up a few new toys for the cats. One of them, of course, was the ever-popular feather-on-a-string-on-a-stick. So behold, Hilbert and Hopper at play. Note the color commentary from Marian at the beginning and Hilbert’s graceful belly flop on top of Hopper at the end.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 12 August 2016

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Sunday Goose Blogging – 22 May 2016

by DianDossett269 Posted on May 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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As promised, here’s our local crop of Canada goose babies. First up, this is one of the goslings that we originally saw a few weeks ago. As you can see, he’s going through those traumatic teenage weeks. But I’m sure he’ll get over it and grow up to be a majestic, honking adult:

And here comes the brand new crop of babies:

Aren’t they adorable? But I’ll tell you something: I’ll never complain about photographing the cats again. These little guys are hard. You can’t get too close or else the mama geese get upset. So that means using the longest zoom setting on the camera. And these goslings zigzag along relentlessly. Keeping them in focus and in the middle of the viewfinder is tricky business. But I succeeded a few times:

Here’s a couple of them taking a (very) short break from the grueling task of eating whatever it is they’re eating.

Finally, breakfast is over and it’s nap time under the watchful eye of mama.

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Sunday Goose Blogging – 22 May 2016

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Friday Cat Blogging – 22 April 2016

by Antoinette3030 Posted on April 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Our cats enjoy dark, cozy spots, so a few days ago I thought I’d buy them an enclosed pod to see how they liked it. Have I gone a little pod crazy? Perhaps. But it’s a cheap and harmless hobby.

Anyway, the only one I could find locally was a sort of cat yurt, so I shelled out $14.99 and took it home. It was…problematic. But the problem, it turned out, wasn’t the yurt concept per se, it was the pillow inside, which was so thick and soft that the cats rolled around on it like drunken sailors. As you can see in photo #1, Hopper solved that problem by burrowing under the pillow and using it as a door.

That worked well, but it caught the eye of her brother, who promptly stepped on the yurt and then decided to camp out on it. He eventually got bored with that, and when it was all over I removed the pillow entirely and moved the yurt. At first, everyone happily had their own pod. The Hilbert decided he wanted to try out the yurt, and as you can see, he eventually got his way.

But he’s a little too big for it, so it’s mostly a Hopper yurt. I’ve now customized it further by putting their old red blanket inside. We’ll see how that works out.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 22 April 2016

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Friday Cat Blogging – 27 November 2015

by AnthonyArmbrust Posted on November 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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I am an idiot. Yesterday, in a fit of bad timing, my camera chose to tell me its memory card was getting full. I had already transferred all the photos to my PC, so I went ahead and deleted everything on the card. Today, I went looking for a terrific Thanksgiving-themed picture of Hilbert that I took a couple of weeks ago, and….I really don’t have to finish this story, do I? It turned out I had transferred everything except for about 50 pictures taken two weeks ago. For some reason, I missed those. File recovery restored a bunch of deleted photos, but not the Hilbert pics.

It was a really great picture, too. But I guess you’ll never see it. Luckily, my sister-in-law came up for dinner yesterday and brought her dogs. So today you get a very special edition of Friday catblogging starring Rupert the dog. Isn’t he cute? There are no Thanksgiving pictures of the cats available because they were both upstairs hiding under the bed. They’re such brave little furballs.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 27 November 2015

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 November 2015

by JonathaBateson Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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When I came home from the hospital last year, we (i.e., Marian) scurried around for a few days moving furniture. In the end, one of our sofas ended up getting shoehorned into my study, where it was out of our sight and all too vulnerable to feline claws. So a few months ago we bought a cheap slip cover, basically designed to give the cats something to claw at other than expensive upholstery. It’s mostly worked, but there were unforeseen consequences.

You see, the slip cover has an elastic band around the bottom to keep it in place. When the cats discovered this, they decided it made a great cat hammock. Over on the right, you can see what it looks like from the outside. Basically, it’s just a bulge. I think you can guess what happened next after I took this picture. (Insert Battle of the Bulge jokes here.)

Luckily, I also took some pictures before Hopper showed up, something I’ve been doing for weeks. But as you can imagine, it’s really hard to get a decent photo from underneath the sofa. However, thanks to my persistence, along with my camera’s articulating LCD screen, I eventually got one. Below, you can finally see Hilbert in the the cat hammock close up. It’s pretty obvious what the attraction is. In fact, you’d practically think it had been designed as a cat domicile: dim, cozy, and shaped like a cat. Who knows? Maybe it was, and we just got tricked into buying it.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 6 November 2015

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