Tragic news from Shelton*, Washington: in an animal sanctuary that specializes in big cats, the Wild Felid Advocacy Center, the tigers and caracals and lynxes have been dropping like flies.
“They’re drowning, basically, in their own lungs,” said Melinda Mathews.
Melinda Mathews lives here full-time with her husband, Mark, who founded the nonprofit in 2006.
“They were immensely suffering,” Melinda said, her face drawn in sadness. “It was the hardest thing, so hard.”
The first to get sick was a cougar, Hannah Wyoming, back in mid-November. The veterinarian thought she had cancer. And when Crackle, an African Caracal got sick, the vet thought the cause was cancer, too.
But the big cats died and others soon followed.
“Basically, we’ve lost a cat every day for about two and a half weeks,” Mark said.
It’s the bird flu, H5N1, that was spreading through all the animals. They think it was transmitted through the cat food, which often contained bird meat. Now there has also been a recall of Northwest Naturals Turkey Recipe cat food after tests showed that it was tainted with H5N1, and after one domestic pet died of bird flu.
This is how those sneaky viruses get you. H5N1 is spread widely in bird populations, but is unlikely to spread to humans, and does so only rarely. Now a variant has a toehold in a common, widespread mammal that thrives in our homes and farms and cities, numbering about 75 million animals. If a pandemic spreads through that population, which would be terrible news in itself, a variant that can thrive in people could arise, and then…lockdowns and mask mandates and a frantic search for a vaccine. Unfortunately, this could come at a time when a big chunk of the population likes to defy basic practices in hygiene and when an incoming administration has expressed a desire to gut the scientific enterprise in the USA, and we’re about to have a demented anti-vaxxer in charge of biomedical research.
I guess the evil cat is going to have to go. I’m not going to harbor a plague vector in my home.
Wait, what’s that? The cat has informed me that she’s an indoor cat and we never let her go outside anyway, despite all the tail-twitching staring she does at the window. Also, all of her cat food is fish-based, because she doesn’t like the taste of bird — she wants to murder them, not eat them.
Also, we haven’t trimmed her razor sharp claws in a while, and she knows where we sleep.
*I know where Shelton is! My grandson lives in Lacey, and I have other relatives in McCleary.
The Mathews need a new vet. Well, maybe not now.
Because of course they needed to profit from the infected flock of chickens and turkeys rather than having the diseased carcasses incinerated as they should have been. Not eating diseased animals is basic food safety.
Poor cats!
Don’t forget the conspiracy theories, the quack “cures,” the racial scapegoating, the armed kooks seizing state legislatures in the name of “freedom.”…
Cute.
what’s that Metallica song? Enter Sandman:
Say your prayers, little one, don’t forget, my son
To include everyone
I tuck you in, warm within, keep you free from sin
‘Til the Sandman, he comes
Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight
WATCH OUT FOR THE CAT IN THE NIGHT!!!1!11!!!
Can you give them pure oxygen?
Put them in an oxygen tent, the functioning parts of the lungs will process the oxygen five times better than the 80% nitrogen/20% oxygen in ordinary air.
Plus for small organisms a substantial amount of oxygen will enter by diffusion through the skin.
.
I heard weeks ago that bird flu had mutated enough to target felids. So all this was predictable.
Giving a cat pure oxygen would require either sedating them so they don’t struggle against the mask or keeping them in some sort of sealed room, neither of which is precisely feasible long term.
@birgerjohansson #6:
IIRC, 50% oxygen for any length of time would kill them, so 100% is definitely out.
Vaccinate them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5N1_vaccine
Shelton, gateway to Bremerton or Potlatch depending on which exit one takes
This doesn’t bode well given that the Venn diagram of crazy cat ladies and RFKjr anti-vaxxers is almost a circle.
@ ^ dbinmn : it is?
Thinking here of now Vice -President (thanks Vicar, beholder, Purtity Disunity mob) JD Vance’s anti-cat ladies comments which among other things give me the impression most of them were much more leftwing and thus reasonable and relatively sane people..