Maggie Beer was reportedly intrigued by the idea of eating a “pussycat sandwich.”
Meet Maggie Beer, a “culinary icon” from Australia who was convinced to teach cooks at some sort of community kitchen on the promise that another chef would kill a feral cat to make her a “pussycat sandwich.”
Beer was invited to help instruct cooks who volunteer for a program feeding Australian seniors. In return, one of the cooks would show her how to prepare domestic cat meat.
That goes a long way to explaining the state of mind in a country that recently killed millions of cats by poisoning them and has pledged to exterminate all free-roaming cats because self-styled conservationists believe felines — not habitat destruction, mass industrialization, the widespread use of carcinogenic pesticides, windmills, glass buildings and all the other changes wrought by human presence — are the primary drivers of local bird and small mammal extinction.
Beer and Brown, cat eaters.
“We were talking a lot about cooking kangaroo tails and then I also told her about how one of our directors… had recently cooked us a feral cat from Kiwirrkurra,” said Sarah Brown, the CEO of Purple House, which prepares meals for Australian seniors.
“She got very excited about this and I said, ‘Well if you come to Alice Springs and do some cooking classes with us, then Bobby West will teach you how to cook a pussycat and you can have a pussycat sandwich for lunch.'”
Feeding seniors intelligent companion animals is about giving them “joy as well as sustenance,” Brown claims.
Thankfully not everyone in Australia thinks this is amusing, nor do they buy the claims that slaughtering cats will magically solve all the problems facing indigenous wildlife.
The California man was hunting another animal when a herd of African elephants charged him and his professional guide.
The reaction to the trampling death of a “big game hunter” this month can be broken down to two main camps.
One side is in a celebratory mood, saying Ernie Dosio deserved to be trampled by African elephants on April 17 in Gabon, central Africa. His death was poetic justice, they say, delivered by animals of a species Dosio hunted, whose preserved and mounted heads he proudly displayed on his extensive trophy walls back home in California.
On the opposite end are people engaged in the hagiography of the 75-year-old business owner, describing him as a “pillar of the community” and a “great guy” who gave generously to charity.
We like our narratives black and white, our heroes and villains clearly delineated. To most people, Dosio was one or the other.
In reality, the two sides of Dosio are not mutually exclusive. It’s entirely possible he was a good member of the community who had compassion for people. It’s also true that contrary to claims that he was a “conservation hunter,” Dosio took pride in killing animals from critically endangered and protected species, like many who think their wealth entitles them to rob the Earth of wonderful and unique forms of life so they can collect trophies.
Dosio posing with an elephant he killed on an earlier trip.
Indeed, the concept of a “conservation hunter” is an oxymoron. The pro-hunting side says the fees hunters pay for licenses, guides and other services are crucial to fund conservation efforts.
The truth is that the majority of the money finds its way into the pockets of officials in kleptocracies. If the contributions of so-called conservation hunters are supposed to make a difference, then reality proves them to be an abject failure: population numbers for endangered species like elephants, lions, cheetahs and rhinos continue to trend down, and those species will be extinct in a decade or two if we don’t put a stop to poaching, hunting, habitat loss and other threats.
I also have a problem with calling these people hunters.
These men and women are not Jim Corbett roughing it on foot in the British Raj, using their skill and knowledge of the land to take out vicious man-eaters at great risk to themselves.
They are weekend warriors, wealthy tourists who pay tens of thousands of dollars to kleptocratic governments for their blessing to “harvest” the animals they kill. It’s big business: in South Africa alone, the trophy hunting industry brought in $120 million, according to a 2015 estimate. That number is likely considerably higher today.
When he was killed, Dosio was hunting for a yellow-backed duiker, a rare antelope listed as near-threatened on the IUCN red list. He paid Gabon’s government a $40,000 fee to “harvest” the animal.
Trophy hunters don’t stalk by moonlight, rifle in hand, looking for tracks and camping rough.
They are chauffeured around by hired drivers in comfortable, climate-controlled luxury off-road vehicles. They have servants who pitch their tents, cook their meals, light their fires and guard their camps.
They do not track their targets. They pay men to lure the unsuspecting creatures directly into their paths using food as a lure. The lions, leopards and other animals they kill don’t even realize they’re being hunted before the rifle shots end their lives.
Then the hunters retreat to the air-conditioned comfort of their vehicles while their hired servants do the dirty work of beheading the animals so they can be packed up, prepped for display and shipped back to the US, where they will join the heads of other animals killed by these wealthy men and women. Men and women who proudly show off their kills when they invite people to their homes, recounting their heroics to the bored guests, who make appropriately polite noises to pretend they’re impressed.
In addition to the 30 or so animals on display here, photos show the walls on the rest of Dosio’s home are covered with the preserved heads and bodies of animals he’s killed.
Nothing about this grotesque sequence of events resembles hunting. It is killing. It requires no skill, it carries no risk, its outcome is never in doubt, and it serves no purpose other than to pad the egos of people who have lots of disposable income and little self-confidence.
They have their defenders and their haters.
“I knew I was going to enjoy this,” one person wrote in response to a news story about Dosio’s demise.
“Do you think the elephants will mount his head on their walls?” another joked.
Some people speculated that the elephants, a species with notoriously long memories, may have remembered him from a prior encounter.
The more likely explanation is the elephants saw Dosio and one of his guides, both carrying weapons, as a threat to the calf they were protecting. Rather than put the baby and themselves at risk, they attacked first. If that’s the case, humans are at fault for that too, because the elephants know people carrying guns do not have good intentions. It may not have been Dosio who killed a member of that particular herd, but odds are overwhelming that someone has, and the elephants haven’t forgotten.
While celebrating Dosio’s death may provide a cheap dopamine hit and a sense of righteous justice, to be truly on the side of life means to value all forms of it, animal and human.
Dosio, 75, was reportedly a millionaire and owned a business that partnered with vineyards in California.
Celebrating Dosio’s demise means we’re no better than the “hunters” who grin like psychopaths for photos with the animals they’ve just killed. It makes those of us concerned about animal welfare and conservation look like extremists, and it only takes a few bad actors to wreck the efforts of an entire group. If a thousand protesters gather in a city square and two of them become violent, the resulting headlines will be about those two, not the 998 others who peacefully made their opinions known.
The way to fight back against trophy killing is by educating the public about the damage those killers do, by countering their claims that the fees they pay protect other animals, and by pointing out that without drastic intervention, elephants, lions and cheetahs will be nothing more than memories for a few generations, and near-myth to subsequent generations.
Killing, not hunting: this photo of an unnamed trophy hunter and his wife is instructive because it shows trophy “hunts” are never in doubt, never pose a risk to the “hunters,” and require no physical ability.
This also calls for self examination. On an Instagram account I made for Buddy, one I log into two or three times I year, I follow a handful of National Geographic photographers.
One of their images remains indelibly burned into my brain: a beautiful tiger cub, looking happy and full of curiosity about the world, gazing right at the camera. Even though I know I’m anthropomorphizing a bit, I can’t help feeling good about the expression on the young tiger’s face, an expression that looks like an enthusiastic grin. He is radiating joy at life.
And then I read the caption. This cub, this beautiful animal of a species that teeters on the edge of extinction, is growing up on a hunting reserve. His fate is already set. He will be killed, his life cut short by another weekend warrior paying to “harvest” him and mount his head on a wall so he can tell stories about his own bravery to bored friends and acquaintances.
That’s not just inhumane, it reveals something deeply disturbing about the kind of people who take pleasure from killing. Something primal, something that has no place in our civilization if we’re going to mature as a species, overcome our violent instincts, and have a future on this planet without destroying ourselves and taking every other form of life with it.
That’s why we need to be on the side of life. The alternative is reducing this garden world, this paradise, into a cold, lifeless rock.
Vigilantism against stray cats and their caretakers is on the rise in Australia and New Zealand amid increasingly pitched rhetoric from conservationists who say felines are responsible for driving other species to extinction.
Antone Martinho-Truswell wants to get rid of every free-range cat in his native Australia and says “it’s time we outlawed pet cats” as well.
The University of Sydney academic, who styles himself as a zoologist and makes impossible claims about the number of animals supposedly killed by felines every year, doesn’t mince words when presenting his argument, which boils down to a logical fallacy. He says he’s an expert, he says cats must be driven to extinction, ergo it must happen.
“Your cat is a killer and it cannot be permitted to live here,” Martinho-Truswell said.
With rhetoric like that, and special interests groups claiming cats are the primary force behind the pending extinctions of native flora and fauna, it’s not a surprise when people think they should take the problem into their own hands. In Australia and New Zealand we’ve already seen vigilantes who fail at hiding their joy at killing felines, and now volunteers helping cats have to worry about their physical safety.
A colony manager and two other volunteers were feeding strays in western Sydney on April 17 when a man in a gold Nissan stopped and asked them if they were helping the cats.
When they said they were, the man became violent and attacked the colony manager, a 31-year-old woman, and a volunteer who tried to protect her, a 33-year-old man who was knocked unconscious by the suspect, police said. The man drove off before officers arrived.
The victims were treated at a local hospital. Police have a description of the suspect and a license plate number, according to local media in Sydney, but it isn’t clear if they know his identity.
Credit: Cheng Shi Song/Pexels
A spokeswoman for the volunteer group, Community Helping Campbelltown Cats, told Sydney’s 9News that the resources the government makes available are “simply inadequate,” leaving volunteers to do the bulk of the work and fundraising for trap, neuter, return (TNR) and colony management.
“It is left to volunteer rescue groups and members of the community to do what they can to stop the breeding and get cats off the streets when they can,” she said. “These individuals risk their welfare day in day out; it is simply not right.”
As for the conservationists who advocate extreme measures, they need to dial it down a bit with the apocalyptic talk. There are productive ways to handle this problem, and they don’t involve demonizing animals for behaving the way nature intended, whipping people into a frenzy, and calling for the violent extinction of an entire species. Cat owners will need to be onboard for any effort to come up with a meaningful solution, and you won’t secure their cooperation if you’re constantly telling them their companion animals are “murderers” who need to be killed.
Can an ocean-dwelling invertebrate make music? Mattias Krantz thought so. Proving his point took months of work, creative thinking and perseverance.
Mattias Krantz got Tako from a Japanese seafood market.
“That guy,” he told the person manning the stall, pointing to a common octopus sitting in shallow water with others of its kind, not even given room to swim before it was to become someone’s meal.
It is the ultimate as far as random interventions of fate go, and I kept thinking about Tako’s almost-end on a plate while watching musician Mattias Krantz teach the clever animal how to play piano.
Octopus are smart. Comparing animal intelligence to human intelligence is always a flawed and imprecise effort, not least because of differences in psychology and evolution, but the eight-armed invertebrates have cognitive abilities on par with humans at three years old. That is to say, some of their cognitive gifts exceed those of small children, some fall short, and some are about equal. It’s always going to be apples to oranges between species.
Octopus learn quickly simply by observing. They remember individual people even if they haven’t seen them for months. They play, explore and even decorate their dens. In the wild, species like the mimic octopus perform nature’s most astonishing acts of imitation, not only changing the hue, texture and patterns of their skin, but also their shape and the way they move. They can imitate dozens of creatures, blend into the sand, and disguise themselves as plants and rocks. When a predator approaches, the mimic octopus takes on the shape, color and behavior of another predator — a highly venomous fish, for example — and scares off the aggressor. That requires serious smarts.
Technically, saying Tako is playing piano may be a stretch. Octopus can’t hear, so Krantz rigged Tako’s tank with a device that turns sound to rhythmic pulses in the water.
Yet there is no denying that Taku took to the piano with enthusiasm, happily played it, even looked forward to it every day when Krantz’ multiple iterations of waterproof keyboards finally reached a point where the animal could reliably manipulate the keys. (Krantz had to create switches Tako could pull, for example, as it’s difficult for the invertebrates to push keys.)
Krantz’ determination is admirable. The Swedish musician, known for his quirky projects, overcame major hurdles that would have stopped most people, and navigating some of those challenges required radical reconsideration of how humans and animals interact with the world.
Yet Krantz and Tako got there in the end, and the piano is only one part of it. Tako is short for takoyaki, a Japanese fried octopus dish. Watching Tako’s interest and enthusiasm as he tackled the piano day after day, you can’t help but think about his less fortunate tankmates, and our collective ambivalence to the overwhelming evidence that we share this planet with billions of other minds, each with their own thoughts and feelings.
Header image of common octopus credit Albert Kok/Wikimedia Commons
Strongly resembling ocelot cubs, margays have a unique biological adaptation to tree-climbing and a devious ability that gives them a massive advantage over their prey.
Taxonomic name:Leopardus wiedii Genus: Felis (small cats) Weight: Between 5 to 9 pounds with typical felid sexual dimorphism Lifespan: More than 20 years in captivity Gestation: About 80 days Litter size: Single kitten, rarely more than one Distribution: Central America, including Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, Colombia, Panama and parts of Mexico IUCN Red List Status: Near threatened
If you’re fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of a margay, you might think you’re looking at an ocelot cub.
The two species look remarkably similar, sharing beautiful rosette patterns in their fur, intense eyes and prominent facial stripes.
But ocelots are medium-size cats that can top out at 35 or 40 pounds, while margays are even smaller than domestic felines, weighing between five to nine pounds.
An ocelot cub with, left, with its mother. Margays are easily mistaken for ocelot kittens. Credit: Mark Dumont via Wikimedia Commons
Living in jungles teeming with life, margays have a distinct advantage that allows them to escape land-based predators while making them a threat to monkeys and other critters living in the branches — they are outstanding climbers with unique biological adaptations that allow them to do things other cats cannot.
Credit: Supreet Sahoo via Wikimedia Commons
The most dramatic example is their ankle joints, which allow them to rotate 180 degrees as the little spotted cats anchor themselves to trunks and branches. As a result, margays don’t just climb with speed and ease, they are capable of swiftly evacuating trees by climbing down head-first like squirrels.
Other cat species lack that adaptation, which is one reason why we often hear about domestic cats who find themselves uncomfortably high up in trees or on utility poles, refusing to come down for days despite hunger and coaxing by humans trying to help.
A margay demonstrating its ability to climb head-first down a tree thanks to its unique ankle joints. Credit: James Kaiser
Margays are outstanding jumpers in addition to their unrivaled climbing ability, able to leap six to eight times their own height. It’s easy to see how these diminutive cats can intercept birds and monkeys far above the jungle floor in addition to hunting terrestrial mammals.
Indeed, using their large tails as a counterbalance, margays traverse branches with a swiftness and sure-footedness that rivals the gibbon.
The jungle’s tricksters
They’re also remarkably clever. Scientists have documented margays mimicking the vocalizations of monkeys, their favorite prey. In one documented example, a margay imitated the call of a baby tamarin, then ambushed the adult tamarins who approached to investigate the sound.
That’s a surprising adaptation for a cat species, and we should be thankful they’re tiny. The thought of tigers or leopards with that ability is terrifying.
Margays are solitary and due to their size, they’re both predator and prey. Because of that, these tiny cats spend the majority of their time well above ground level and are usually found deep in old growth jungles where they can blend into dense vegetation, hiding among leaves and branches, where their coat patterns help them blend in.
Like all wildcats, margays face increasing pressure from habitat loss, poaching and other threats, and they’re classified as near-threatened on the IUCN Red List.
Credit: Anderson Cristiano Hendgen via WikimediaCredit: Wikimedia Commons
Header image credit Clément Bardot via Wikimedia Commons
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