animals


On April 17 I woke up with the memory of a talking cat. I have cats sleeping with me most nights, but the cat that was talking to me was an all black fully grown male cat and he was not on the bed, but next to it with his paws on the wooden edge of the bed looking into my face and talking to me.

When I woke up I didn’t remember what he said and there was no such cat in the room at the moment.

Shortly I picked up my phone from the floor and turned it on. I don’t keep the ringer on during the night. You could say I value my sleep.

Then I looked at the newsfeed on my phone. Very depressing. I scrolled down. There was an article featuring a picture of a black cat, a well known talking black cat, a YouTube sensation named Sylvester.

The fellow responsible for the cat saying funny things had committed suicide. Mental illness the article said, bi-polar. More sadness I thought. Can’t get away from it. Like many comedians and literal clowns his impulse to make people laugh covered up a darker aspect of his personality. Sometimes the need to make people laugh corresponds with the need for approval from others.

Immediately after, a friend named Susan in Italy posted a photo of her 2 black cats. Now that’s a mild synchronicity too. And later in the day a fellow named John, who I only know from Facebook, but a thoroughly nice chap, messaged me a video of a talking and singing dog. I don’t recall him ever sending me a funny personal message before. The style of the dog singing was eerily similar to Steve, the cat man’s videos. Was it his?

It wasn’t. It was Nikie Smith’s dog Amos doing a quarantine rendition of “Stayin’ Alive” on Facebook, which come to think of it, is very topical here.

The genesis of this synchronistic series of events may originate with my unofficial at-home study of dream remote viewing as propounded by Dale Graff, former manager of the DIA’s Project Stargate. Graff is a prodigious dreamer who is able to dream about what sort of news story will appear on a particular page of a particular newspaper a given number of days hence. His specialty is airplane disasters but he “sees” many other things, and has been a guest on “Shattered Reality Podcast”.

I do not remember my dreams as much as I’d like to, so I have been writing most of the ones I do remember in a dream journal. I hadn’t “tasked” myself the night before the talking black cat dream as I would have were I practicing dream remote viewing, but I think my previous tasking had somehow carried over. My success rate is quite good when I can remember my dreams, but I often don’t remember.

 

Steve Cash

The late very funny and creative Steve Cash, a popular YouTube personality best known for his “Talking Kitty Cat” video series. Rest in peace.

My deepest sympathies to Mr. Cash’s family and friends. He brought smiles to many faces.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

Fahrusha is the host of “Shattered Reality Podcast” and a professional intuitive.

Two photos I took late last year could be pareidolia or ???

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of recognizing patterns, shapes, and familiar objects in a vague and sometimes random stimulus, says RationalWiki.org. Faces are thought to be the most common things seen as an effect of pareidolia.

 

Photo taken by Fahrusha on November 15,2018

Multiple faces can be seen beside the cat witch nightlight.

Photo taken by Fahrusha on December 8, 2018

This is a shadow caused by towels hung on a hook in a bathroom. Seeing these faces while alone in a quiet place can be somewhat unsettling to the average person. Each individual must decide for herself where pareidolia ends and anomalous experiences begin.

An amusing case of precognition occurred while I was attempting to get some exercise this past Sunday. I was walking with a companion around a half mile plus Rundgang around a large pond or small lake. To break the monotony, I sometimes make up silly simple songs to sing softly to keep myself amused. These ditties are generally very absurd stream of consciousness numbers like:

Emergen-cy

Brain surgery

Is not for me.

Is not for me!

At a particular point on the path and out of no where, I began to sing:

Doggie treats are good to eat

For me and you

And doggies too.

Eat some doggie treats today.

Woof woof. Yum yum!

Granted, this is nonsensical and silly but exercise for the sake of exercise can be mind numbingly boring. I stopped singing and continued to walk around the path sometimes pumping my arms for extra exercise benefits. When I got around the lake to the same place where I had been singing my impromptu doggie treats song about 20 minutes earlier, there stood a tiny elderly lady in a winter coat, Hello Kitty pajama bottoms and an unusual thick embroidered helmet hat. Very elfin. She was with a younger man who could have been her son. In her hand she had a pouch of dog treats and was handing them out to two smartly attired Scottie dogs who were walking with a woman on the path. None of those people or dogs were present during my earlier circumnavigation. The elfish pixie and her companion continued to walk very slowly around the body of water and stopped twice more to give other dogs some treats.

The key to this precognitive event, I think, is the use of my stream of consciousness for the silly songs, freeing up my mind. What made it memorable was the fey and whimsical appearance of the little lady who was well under five feet tall.

See also Precognitive Dreams, and Pareidolia Or?

Fahrusha is a professional intuitive and the co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast”. 

The path I attempted to reclaim.

I have always liked garden worms, I even maintained several tropical red worm farms both personally and in a NYC primary school. Of course non-tropical earthworms are not quite the same, they are bigger and more pink than the red tropical worms.

In any case, I was attempting to reclaim a concrete path from the encroaching grass and weeds, when I came across what appeared to be a garden worm. It looked like a perfectly ordinary earthworm but a bit stiffer in the body because of the cold weather and had a darker redder stripe running down each side. I have seen that in the past; the worm’s body not being as flexible in the cold. I lifted the worm and placed it about 10 inches in from the place I was clearing. Generally when I place a worm away from where I am gardening it merely burrows into the soil and goes about its business.

The place where the angry aberrant worm reappeared.

A few minutes later the worm reappeared in front of me. It was angry. It had eyes and a mouth open. It lifted its head in front of me and seemed to be yelling at me, but of course, there was no sound.  I never saw eyes and a mouth on an earthworm, but its body still looked like a normal 6 inch earthworm. What was it? Tiny snake? What kind? It had no legs so not a reptile of any sort (chameleon, skink, etc.). It was fairly cold out, not over 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Was it a cryptid? Was it a shamanic vision? It was as real to me as the dirt on my hands. I was so freaked out I fled the scene. The vision is burned in my mind.

My depiction of the worm could not accurately show the mouth, which looked angrier and displayed a toothless gum ridge. Otherwise it is fairly accurate.

Unusual heretofore unknown fact: The common earthworm can live to be six years old.

Fahrusha is the co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast” and a professional intuitive.

 

There is a lot of discussion in the media about gender dysphoria. This blog post does not intend to make light of the subject, but this post is largely not about gender dysphoria. Tangentially it does play a small part. I was listening to an interview with a prominent paranormal thinker who noticed that oftentimes psychic readers, professional intuitives, and paranormal practitioners come from the population of marginalized individuals and communities. He particularly mentioned those in the LGBTQ community and the gender dysphoric. This may be true, but a large number of readers and psychics I am acquainted with are straight females, myself included. But this is not the actual topic of this post. And a hearty welcome to those intuitives from that community!

On a page on FaceBook, I made some disparaging remark about the destructiveness of the human race on the planet Earth. I was not faulting any particular person or group. A man with whom I am vaguely familiar, shot back at me something to the effect that he was tired of all the self-flagellating whiners like me. This surprised me deeply, not because he was critical of my stance, I rather expect that. It surprised me because it revealed something to me about myself, of which I was not so acutely aware. Something that I doubt he could have imagined. I did not think I was self-flagellating in the least because somewhere in my mind I do not identify with being human. I do identify with being in an animal body. I eat and like to have shelter and have sexual thoughts like humans and other mammals. I speak a human language but have as much kinship with cats and trees as humans. I also have what appears to be a human body and I often wear clothes. I wish all humans well and sincerely hope for a positive solution to human problems, but I don’t think that it looks at all promising. I have thought to blame my Neanderthal genes for seeing humans as destructive, but confidantes have laughed at that. It does make some sense to me that ancestral memories of Cro-Magnons invading and destroying the lifestyle of some of my predecessors could be a cause. This could jibe with seeing humans as “others”. By the way, one of those confidantes refers to himself as a Yeti (you know who you are). 🙂

Others have kindly suggested that perhaps this species dysphoria is because I am highly evolved spiritually. Personally I doubt it. Although I do think I subscribe to Robert Monroe’s primary statement, “You are more than your physical body.” And I do appreciate the approach of some North American indigenous people in envisioning other species as brothers and sisters and seeing the environment as sacred.

So many people who align themselves with spirituality or religion view things from a human-only point of view, seeking to reach an anthropomorphic Godhead of some sort, believing that a Supreme One somehow sets mankind on some evolutionary pinnacle as more important than other terrestrial beings. They also think that if angels or extraterrestrials or discarnate beings exist, that those beings wish to communicate specifically and only with humans. This hubris astounds me. Perhaps they’d rather communicate with rocks.

I think a whole lot more could be learned about paranormal phenomena if seen from a position that is non-species specific. We all operate some of the time on a subjective basis; the “it’s all about me” stance that some never have moved beyond, ever. So it is natural that as a group humans might view all intelligent paranormal phenomena as being about humans and directed towards humans. Now conversely, I do think that it is highly possible that some paranormal phenomena originates with individuals (human or animal or plant or non-respirating), but please note that a substantial portion of those humans in the modern era, who have displayed psychokinetic abilities, attribute them to extraterrestrials. Make of that what you wish.

Is this post somewhat tongue in cheek? I’m not sure and neither are you.

Fahrusha is an intuitive reader and co-host of “Shattered Reality Podcast.”

J.S. shortly after arrival.

J.S. shortly after arrival.

J.S. was born a feral cat in a colony of feral cats fed by a kind cat lover. He is all black, except for a few white hairs where one might imagine a belly button, and very soft. One day when he was a kitten I am told he was hit by a car but survived. The kind cat lady took him into her home, thought “he” was a “she”, nurtured him back to health and gave him up for adoption at a PetSmart store. There he was discovered to be a boy and neutered.

One day when J.S. was about four months old I entered his life. I had come back to PetSmart a number of times to see a strikingly handsome tiger boy cat who was about 8 months old. Two sisters were manning (or womanning) the adoption area. These two volunteers are great cat lovers, I was to find out. They introduced me to the tiger boy cat who was rather too pugnacious to adapt easily to my home and the big ginger tom that already owned the space. But they wanted me to meet J.S. who was very shy and huddled in his enclosure.

I petted him and he trembled a bit, and I said to myself “why not?” and paid the adoption fee and took him to meet the big ginger tom (herein after referred to as BGT). J.S. lived in the bathroom for a couple of days so the cats could take in each other’s scent. After releasing J.S. he hid a lot for the first few weeks, but it was clear he was enamored with BGT. BGT did not attack J.S. and allowed him to eat, but hissed and batted him if he came too close.

Big Ginger Tomcat

Big Ginger Tomcat

Flash forward a bit over two years: situation mostly unchanged. J.S. is aloof towards most people and hides when company comes. BGT still hisses and bats. J.S. still exhibits devotion to BGT and follows him around. BGT spends the night close to me on my bed. I’m sure he thinks it is his bed. J.S. often waits until BGT is sound asleep and sneaks in next to him on the bed. If he is lucky BGT doesn’t notice him and J.S. is very happy and purring, but more often he sleeps on the windowsill near the bed. J.S. is now nearly as big as BGT and frankly a bit chubby.

J.S. sneaking up on BGT

J.S. sneaking up on BGT

I woke up one morning a couple of days ago and surveyed my surroundings, seeing J.S. on the windowsill looking in my direction and BGT sleeping against my hip. Then I thought my thoughts. J.S. is probably hoping I’ll get up and feed him, little fatty. I wonder if he likes me at all? He is probably only in my room because this is where BGT sleeps. I wonder if he will ever be loving towards me.

I hadn’t moved yet at all except for opening my eyes. At that moment J.S. walked over to the head of my bed and jumped on board settling himself under my armpit and kissing my nose. He stayed there for ten minutes until I had to get up and begin my day.  He had never done that before. Who says cats aren’t telepathic?

The bear dog Magericyon anceps by Mauricio Anton.

The bear dog Magericyon anceps by Mauricio Anton.

Some years ago in the late ’80s, I predicted that biologists and geneticists would be able to breed mammoths and possibly mastodons by using frozen DNA which would be found in the Arctic regions. I wrote a blog piece which touched on this a while back: https://fahrusha.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/mammoth-prediction/

Recently I found another article confirming my old prediction: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/jul/31/woolly-mammoth-dna-cloning 

I was initially planning to add the above link to the Guardian article to my old post “A Mammoth Prediction”. But early Saturday morning August 3, 2013, I had a super-real dream, which was also a lucid dream. A being with a deep male voice spoke to me about extinct mammals of Europe. He spoke to me in English and in German and said he was the (over-soul of the) Bear-Dog and would like to be revived in the same manner as the wooly mammoth might be revived. Now mind you, this was a lucid dream, and my conscious mind was somewhat functional. The only two extinct mammals of Europe that I could think of while dreaming were the saber-tooth tiger and the aurochs, but I could not in this lucid dream state think of the word “aurochs”, though I tried. The being was looking somewhat bearlike and ferocious, but oddly, I had absolutely no fear of it and actually felt something of a bond with it.

When I got up on Saturday morning I decided to search the internet to find a description of the aurochs and did, but that was not the being in my vision. Strangely I did find an extinct mammal of Europe called the bear-dog! I had had no previous idea that such an animal ever existed. The illustration above is an artist’s depiction of what such an animal might look like. My bear-dog was somewhat huskier or fatter and had darker fur, but otherwise was very similar. I’m not entirely sure of what to make of this experience, but it was very exhilarating to find confirmation of my vision on the internet. The fact that he also spoke German to me was interesting and may point to either the animal after which Berlin was named, or indicate that the bear-dog’s range included German-speaking Europe.

So “Word up” paleontological geneticists! How about reviving my friend, the bear-dog?

Fahrusha is an intuitive reader in New York City and an avid lucid dreamer. She can be contacted by email at: fahrusha@fahrusha.com

A female human receiving inspiration. From an oracle deck called The Rainbow Bridge Tarot by visionary artist Lauren Raine. See end of article for link to this deck.

Sometimes while in a light meditative state certain things occur to me out of the blue. I have learned to pay attention to these unusual but seemingly random thoughts. Sometimes these thoughts are about my health and my body and I feel these thoughts may not originate in my brain but in my body parts and they are sent to the brain where they are brought gently into my awareness.

This idea is given life by studies which indicate that other organs, principally the heart, have their own intelligence and by other findings about the amazing awareness of certain animals without highly developed brains in the mammalian sense, such as the squid and octopus.

The first memorable incident of this odd personal medical intuition came a number of years ago when I was diagnosed with mildly elevated cholesterol levels at a rather young age. In my case this is not primarily a lifestyle and diet problem but a hereditary issue. I was musing over this situation and it occurred to me somewhat out of the blue that I should eat eggplant everyday for lunch. I was even given a recipe: make a slice halfway through the eggplant after washing it and cutting off the stem. Do not remove the skin of the eggplant. Put a couple of cloves of peeled garlic into the slice. Wrap the eggplant in aluminum foil and bake in the oven until soft. Remove from the oven and mash the eggplant and garlic adding cayenne pepper. Salt is allowed. Put on Scandinavian style whole grain flat bread and eat. Do not use any oil at all.

I followed this pretty faithfully every day for about a month. I went back to have my blood tested and discovered that my cholesterol levels had dropped by over 30 points! I gave my recipe to a number of people including my father and his brother, my uncle. My uncle said he had added this food to his diet and also experienced a drop in his levels. Though both men are now deceased, neither died of heart or circulatory disease and both lived into their late eighties and both had hereditary high cholesterol. My father did not take statins and neither did my uncle to my knowledge.

I personally still prepare this recipe and find it healthful, although I must admit I do not eat it often enough. I was shown a scene from inside my body by Spirit (I guess) in which I saw the eggplant in my intestine pulling fat molecules from my intestine wall. Recently I read about a new medical discovery that uncovered dried apples as a food that reduces cholesterol levels in women. I imagine that the mechanism is similar.

Warning: I am not a medical professional. This account is anecdotal.

Another instance of this odd intuition came to me some years ago while I was cleaning my ears in the manner one is cautioned against- with a Q-tip! I had noticed for awhile (this is sort of gross) that my earwax was copious and oily. All of a sudden this thought popped into my mind (almost verbatim): “This is probably not a good sign, the next thing you know ‘they’ll’ (researchers) probably say that this kind of earwax predicts a susceptibility to breast cancer.” A month or two later I read just such an article in a magazine. Thankfully I no longer have this sort of earwax.

Most recently I noticed skin tags (acrochorda) in one of my armpits. These are little bits of extra skin which are raised from the surface. In my case they were more annoying than disfiguring. I went to a dermatologist who cut them off and biopsied them. No problem, but then they grew back. More annoying after spending a considerable sum to remove them. Again an idea popped into my mind. Put tea tree (Melaleuca Alternifolia) oil and thuva oil on them regularly. I do not like the smell of thuva as much as tea tree oil so I began applying tea tree oil to the tags every morning after washing. At this point I am happy to say they are nearly gone. At some point during my self imposed treatment I decided to check on the internet for natural remedies for skin tags and also to see if what I was doing would be deemed safe. Both tea tree oil and thuva oil are prominently mentioned as remedies but the kicker is that there is a product for sale, by Dermisil, a proprietary formula of sorts for skin tags whose primary ingredients are…you guessed it…tea tree oil and thuva oil.

Now these experiences are not radical. My being is not taken over by the entity of the famous Doctor Fritz (an extraordinarily compelling story). My guess is that this is my own body speaking to me. Other plausible theories would include that these messages come from my higher self, the collective unconscious or universal mind (God), or a disembodied entity (back to Doctor Fritz).

While I have not come up with the cure for all disease I am sure that humanity could lessen suffering thru banning nuclear reactors (The unresolved Fukishima incident will cause millions of cancer deaths in the next twenty years.) and having much more respect for Our Mother Earth.

Postscript: To learn more about the Rainbow Bridge Tarot click the link.

In answering the comments on the previous post, I was reminded of an amazing cat story in which I participated briefly. This happened in New York City’s East Village circa 1990. A woman, an artist, who is now deceased lived across the hall from me with her husband and a cat named Bass. It was a sixth floor walk-up with an elevator that sometimes worked. I did occasional readings for the woman in exchange for a glass of wine. We were sort of friends. I had a special relationship with the cat and would read him from time to time by petting him and mentally asking him questions, to which he would answer directly to my mind very clearly. I would convey this information to the woman, who would then generally do what the cat required.

One evening the woman told me how the cat had come to live with her. It was a cold winter night as she made her way home. When she got a few steps from the doorway of the tenement, she became aware of the cat meowing pitifully behind her. She bent down and petted his shivering body, promising to bring him a can of cat food when she got up to her apartment to fetch it. I think the woman had once had another cat that had passed on some years previously and she remembered the lingering can in her cupboard.

She unlocked the two bullet-proof glass doors that separated the January chill from the steam heat. The elevator worked that evening and sped her to the sixth floor. After unlocking the door to her tiny home, she put down her handbag on the kitchen table and fetched the promised can from the cupboard and headed back to the door of her apartment two steps away with the intention of bringing down the cat a nice supper.

Imagine her surprise when upon opening the door who ran into her apartment but the very cat! She hadn’t let him in and he wasn’t in the elevator with her, so it was rather mysterious how he had gotten in and found her door on the sixth floor so quickly. But it was clear that the cat was at home so she allowed him to stay, especially since her husband, a musician, was out of town on a gig.

Several nights later when her husband was still away, the woman had a startling dream, almost a nightmare, that filled her with awe. The cat came to her in a realistic dream as a giant cat-headed figure larger than a human, and in a deep and resonant voice that shook her body, proclaimed, “I am Bass!” or at least that is what she heard. So naturally she called the cat Bass. And Bass became an accepted member of the household.

Now the woman, an artist, as I had mentioned previously, was an intelligent college educated person, but apparently never studied any ancient Egyptian mythology, because when I asked her if she was certain that the cat in her dream said Bass and not BAST she looked at me blankly and said something like, “I think so, what difference does it make?” I found it remarkable that she had never heard of BAST.

BAST is/was the protector Goddess of lower Egypt, where cats were worshipped and none so much as BAST. She is a glorious cat-headed woman in some renderings while in others a proud lioness or an elegant cat. The town of Boubastis in the Nile Delta was her sacred place.

Now the problem with this whole story is that BAST is a Goddess and Bass was a male cat, yet I feel sure that the woman had a visitation from the Goddess BAST. I told her so and though she mulled it over in her mind, I remain unconvinced that she was duly impressed with the divine encounter she had been privileged to receive.

Several months later, it came out in a reading that the woman and her husband would be moving to California. She requested I ask Bass if he would be pleased with the move. I held the cat on my lap and questioned him. He was alarmed. He did not want to go under any circumstances. A couple of months later they moved to LA taking Bass with them, in my opinion, against his will. About two weeks after the move, I found out later, the cat got out of the house and was promptly run over.

BAST (courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

One morning last week I woke up from a dream. The dream was weird and definitely in color. A certain large male orange cat of my acquaintance was prominently featured. In the dream I had filled a big sparkling white bathroom basin with cold water from the tap. The cat, who likes to put his paw in water and bat it, began doing so and then jumped in. Soon he put his head under the water too. Then, completely submerged, he tried to go to the bottom of the basin in order to breathe through the drain which was gurgling. I tried to pull him out but I could not do so. He remained at the bottom of the basin near the drain and seemed to be clinging to it trying to breathe. I was very upset about the cat in my dream.

Then I woke up and began to mull over the meaning of my dream. I opened my eyes and my long thin dark tan arm reached for the apricot stucco wall in the soft evening light. Whoa! I began to freak out! I do not have a long thin tan arm or an apricot stucco wall. Splat! I was pulled back into my chubbier whiter body and it was still the middle of the night (or at least still dark out) and I could see the outlines of my bookcase where the apricot stucco wall had been. I had experienced a false awakening while dreaming.

This has happened to me before but what stood out about this instance was that during my false awakening I was thinking about my previous dream about the cat. This may be a first for me to be actively thinking about and trying to figure out a previous dream while still dreaming.

Wikipedia defines A false awakening as “a vivid and convincing dream about awakening from sleep, while the dreamer in reality continues to sleep.”  I often have false awakenings in which I am awake in my real surroundings and get up and do something reasonably mundane and then realize that my physical body is still in the bed. These may also be spontaneous out of body experiences. But I can’t remember being in another body that felt like a real body in another room that looked real in which I was also thinking about my previous dream in a rational logical way.

It so happens that two days later out of the blue the orange cat went into a bad state of being, sitting by himself and hiding. The following day he was observed to be dripping a bloody substance from his rear quarters and was taken to the veterinarian where he was diagnosed with a urinary blockage in his urethra. His bladder was the size of a grapefruit and his kidneys were affected. He stayed at the animal clinic for several days. His condition was touch and go. When he was released back into the custody of his loving owners they were admonished to see that he drank more water and to add water to his food.

It seems to me that the dream was a premonition of the cat’s illness. He was in tip top shape at the time of the dream and did not begin to show any signs that anything was wrong until two days passed. My question is what was the dream telling me? If it was a premonition why was I unable to help? I have never dreamt of this cat before, so why now? Interestingly I feel I might not have remembered the dream if it weren’t for the false awakening.

Talkative Cat

Several nights ago, I was sleeping with cats on either side of my head, listening to Hemi-sync Supersleep (subliminal binaural beats under the sounds of ocean surf) repeated continuously after a healing yoga nidra track had played first. I had on headband earphones for comfort. I was dreaming about a class at a university that someone I know was taking on electricity. I was explaining to a man in the dream that she was not taking the basic class, which is in a large lecture hall with a couple hundred students, but a more involved and advanced class with only 3 people in it. He said enigmatically, “Electricity is the life spark (or life current) of the Universe.” Then suddenly I was in the electricity class as a subject of an experiment with electrodes on my head (possibly because I had earphones and a sleep mask on in the waking reality). I began to hear someone talking behind me in a strange language. I realized from within the dream that this speaking is not within the dream and I had better wake up fast. I was very alarmed. Who was speaking behind my head? Slowly I realized it was Sylvie the cat. I was very relieved. Stupidly, because I wanted to go back to sleep, I quieted her down. I should have listened and encouraged her, maybe recorded her.
This is the third time this has happened in some form. She seems to be a sleep talker. Odd thing is, she seems to be speaking a language she does not speak in her waking life. It is not little growls and purrs and meows. No, it is syllables with sounds she ordinarily can’t produce.
Sylvie is 15 1/2 years old now and very youthful. The first time it happened was a number of years ago, probably at least seven. Another cat, now deceased, was also there. I was in a state of sleep paralysis, aware of my surroundings but unable to move and vibrating pretty violently. Sylvie was on my chest, sitting with bent elbows talking into my face. I understood what she said at the time but could not remember later. Second time it happened was perhaps a year ago and I was wide awake in bed. I was flabbergasted. She was asleep then, speaking the same odd language she did recently.
I know that animals dream. Both she and other cats and dogs I have known have showed signs of it, legs twitching like they were running, perhaps mewing softly. This is different. She is definitely trying to articulate sounds which she is otherwise incapable. I have lived with many cats and three dogs over the course of my life and no other animal, save one dog, who kind of barked “mama” when coaxed, has ever spoken.
I’d like to record the syllables Sylvie speaks but it happens so seldom it would be hard to catch. I wonder if she is being possessed by a discarnate being. I’d like to hear from anyone with a similar experience.

Addendum: I recall receiving information in the past, retrieved through meditation that cats, specifically felis domesticus, led other existences during their copious sleep-time in our physical realm, so this is a possible explanation.

Remnants of Ancient Troy

It has been a while since I have written a post. I’ve been very busy with my life in general, but also very intensely concerned with the Earth and the ecological devastation that has taken place increasingly over the past year. I don’t like to write a post that is infused with hopeless negativity even if what I am writing about is true.

Last year we had the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a totally preventable man-made disaster, that was so destructive to other species and human livelihoods. It really made me furious and I could not write about it constructively, so I did not write about it at all. Instead I wrote some posts about energy solutions. I hope to continue to do this, but of course this is primarily a blog about the anomalous and the paranormal.

The Earth has also experienced a number of violent earthquakes around the world in many places such as Haiti, Chile and of course, Japan. I fear that the western coast of North America will not be spared. My heart goes out to all people and other creatures affected by these calamities. I am aware that earthquakes are a continuous phenomena across geologic time. It does seem to me that the severity and number of these quakes are increasing in recent years. A higher population density worldwide intensifies the destruction to humans. A theory concerning greater earthquake frequency to which I currently ascribe is that as glaciers and polar ice caps continue to melt due to (mostly man-made) global warming, the placement of water changes around the globe. There is, for instance, less water ice resting on the Himalayas and therefore a whole lot less weight holding them down, while there is perhaps more water, therefore more weight, in the South Pacific, especially around the equator. When this weight is redistributed in this manner, especially in a very geologically active area, such as the Ring of Fire, it may boost the number and severity of quakes on fault lines. The extent of the weight of water in this equation should not be underestimated. Think about how attentive one must be to water pressure when scuba diving only a relatively few feet down.

Now in addition to the devastation caused by the earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis, another man-made catastrophe has occurred. The nuclear reactors at Fukishima have been severely damaged by the quake and tsunami and are now in various states of partial meltdown. Unfortunately the reactors were unsafe from their inception. Nuclear energy is inherently unsafe due to human fallibility which is always present along with human greed which causes planners to cut corners, and because the spent fuel remains highly radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and there is no where to put spent fuel that is safe.

Sadly, the situation is far from under control, though brave workers at the plant have repeatedly attempted to shut down the reactors at the cost of their own (workers) health. It is not the object of this blog to go into detail about the various radioactive substances still being manufactured and spewed forth from Fukishima and which are a hazard to all biological life on this planet. A smart consumer of information will be well advised to look into this on his or her own. An excellent starting place is Arnie Gunderson’s site Fairewinds Associates. I personally would like to see all nuclear facilities fazed out starting with reactors in large population areas, on or near geological faults or subject to violent weather extremes.

Of course we should all do what we can to help the victims of these multiple tragedies. One action we can take to prevent this tragedy being repeated, is to lobby our elected officials to shutdown nuclear power plants and withdraw tax subsidies to build new ones. Go ahead…write those letters…get off yer duffs and go out and demonstrate! Do something proactive instead of stewing in existential depression which is pointless.

Wooly Mammoth

When I was younger and more foolish I made a list of predictions for the coming year. It was in the late ’80s and my late great friend, Captain Haggerty was organizing a new year’s publicity event around his dog training business and asked me if I wanted to take part. He was making predictions about what would be happening in the dog fancier’s world and displaying some of his dogs. I was to bellydance for the cameras and make some predictions about what would happen in the world at large.

Most of my predictions did not transpire in that year, but in some permutation many of them became pivotal in future years.  Last week I noticed in the news that Japanese scientists were actively working on recreating a mammoth from genetic material retrieved from the Siberian permafrost. I had predicted just that in the late ’80s. It is claimed that the mammoth will be born of an elephant surrogate mom by the end of the decade. The elephant is the closest surviving relative of the mammoth.

Since the time I made that prediction, I have thought long and hard about the business of making predictions. I have noticed that predictions I’ve made often occur but seldom in the time frame I expected. Often people are looking for predictions about the personal lives of the rich and famous. I have no interest in that whatsoever.

I am concerned that in making a specific public prediction one can change the course of events. Simply put, if I write that Mr. X will be killed and a sizable group of individuals read that and think about it, does that make it more likely that Mr. X will perish? I suspect it will. It will affect the collective mind of humanity.

There is another reason I am not making a lot of predictions: my world view has become increasingly dark and I do not wish to infect others with my state of mind. I am not depressed, really, I’m actually fairly happy. It’s just that my “Weltanshauung” (world view) is very negative.

What I have to say next is going to sound very politically partisan but in actuality it is not. I was very hopeful about the world until the day after the 2000 US Presidential election. I was never very politically active previous to this time. I was and am an active environmentalist. Yes, I admit it I am a treehugger. After “W” was elected it seemed as though the whole world went to hell in so many ways, both related to the election and not related to it at all, and it has not recovered.

I will make only one prediction now, and it will be very general. The more you do to improve or save the environment, the happier your future will be; and conversely if you degrade the environment you can be sure the future will be awful for your old age and those that follow you.

Sometimes I wonder how people (are they really humans?) can be anti-environmental. I do understand a certain shortsightedness on the part of those who might lose their incomes as sanctions are put into place which would cause them to lose their jobs. There is a fairly simple answer for this. They should be retrained for green jobs. There is lots of money to be made in renewable energy, for example, and this is just the beginning.

It is a fantasy of mine that those who are politically active against the environment are reptilian alien shapeshifters who want the Earth to be turned into a hot awful wasteland so that they can immigrate their population from their wasted reptilian planet light years away and enslave the few remaining humans. In reality those belonging to the anti-environment group are probably simply greedy and rapacious sociopaths who don’t care a whit for anybody or anything beyond dying with the most toys.

Mars Meteorite NASA image

After careful analysis of the subject I have come to the conclusion that the government is not planning to disclose anything much about what it might know about UFOs (or more accurately, other intelligent life in the cosmos) this year or any year in the near future. I will opine on why I don’t think they will further on in this post.

What I do think will come to light in the near future is corroborating evidence for extraterrestrial microorganisms such as have theoretically been found on meteorites and space rocks. The existence of these microorganisms may explain methane readings on Mars and some outer planets and their moons. This might be a reason that Mars purportedly gets greener at certain times of the year. I have to do a little more personal research on this subject, but I think this is all we are going to get in terms of “disclosure” from officialdom. This in itself is very big news. It would end the argument that our Earth is the only body in space capable of harboring life. It could be argued that if the space microorganisms are irrefutably proven to exist that that would be the biggest science revelation of the modern age.

It may be this forthcoming revelation that the Vatican is getting out in front of with their statements about extraterrestrials being God’s creatures and their seemingly sudden interest in the subject.

It is also a very psychologically gentle entre into possible future disclosures. Almost nobody, upon hearing that single- celled organisms are floating in space on meteors, is going to commit suicide or join a mob outside of Cape Kennedy to storm the gates. People will digest this information largely without incident or trauma. And it follows nicely upon the discovery of exo-planets orbiting distant stars.

Another question about possible UFO (intelligently maneuvered spacecraft)  disclosure is who would do the disclosing? To discern this answer we’d have to ask who is most likely to be in possession of the “secret files” if they do exist. The simple answer is those who have a verifiable “need to know”. This short list may not even include our President! My carefully assessed guess would be that any real information, if it exists at all, is buried layers deep in a Defense Intelligence Agency black-ops program. If my guess is correct, the next question is: Who with a ‘need to know’ clearance on this information would benefit from the disclosure of that information to the public? To this I must answer: no one; and therefore logically: no disclosure from government sources.

On March 17, 2010 I have read:

http://news.stv.tv/scotland/north/163021-is-there-life-on-mars/

This corroborates my thesis that we are being led slowly to the disclosure of rudimentary life on other celestial bodies in space.

Thanks to George Filer’s Filer’s Files.

UPDATE!!! Wednesday, April 28, 2010

NASA Announces Wednesday Media Teleconference About Search For Extraterrestrial Life

NASA Logo

By NASA MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-064
4-27-10

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news media teleconference at 1:30 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, April 28, to discuss the status of agency-sponsored astrobiology research, including the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life and the study of how life began on Earth. Topics also will include the quest for evidence of life on Mars, the habitability of other celestial bodies, and future technology research.

This week, NASA and scientists from around the world are gathering at a biennial meeting near Houston to celebrate 50 years of astrobiology research. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. Scientists gathered to share new data and insights, initiate and advance collaborations, plan new projects, and educate the next generation of astrobiologists.

The teleconference participants are:
Mary Voytek, astrobiology senior scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington
Steve Squyres, researcher, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Bill Schopf, researcher, University of California, Los Angeles
Jack Farmer, researcher, Arizona State University, Tempe, Ariz.
John Peters, researcher, Montana State University, Bozeman
To obtain call-in information, journalists should e-mail their name, media affiliation and telephone number to:

dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA’s website at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

For more information about NASA astrobiology activities, visit:

http://astrobiology.nasa.gov

Update!:

On September 29, 2010 it was announced that a new exoplanet named Gliese 581g was discovered orbiting a red giant star, Gliese 581, in the constellation Libra. There have been 6 planets discovered so far orbiting Gliese 581. What makes this one so special is that it has conditions that are ideal for liquid water as it lies in the so-called habitable zone where temperatures would allow for life as we know it. It is also a rocky planet which would have sufficient mass and gravity to hold liquid water to its surface. As it is neither too hot nor too cold, too big nor too small, too far from its sun nor too close, it has been dubbed “the Goldilocks planet”.

Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the planet’s discoverers, said “Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say, my own personal feeling is that the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it.” Those are fairly definitive words. Thank you Professor Vogt and colleagues!

12/1/10 Update

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/nasa-creates-buzz-extraterrestrial-announcement/

12/2/10 Update

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/arsenic-bacteria-alien-life-101202.html

12/09/10 Update

http://www.northjersey.com/news/national/111580304_Evidence_of_alien_life_gets_stronger.html

12/20/10 Update

It’s getting to be the end of the year and so this will be my final update:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827923.600

New Scientist Magazine predicts that the discovery of an Earthlike double is imminent. So I think my prediction back in February has proven true.

Couldn’t resist an additional update. 🙂

Update 09/29/12: Water ran on Mars- 1C696953DV583143J

 

from  Dallas Animal Advocates Blog

Bob Barker from the Dallas Animal Advocates Blog

I have been a member of Sea Shepherd, the conservation organization that protects whales from senseless murder, for a couple of years now, and when I heard that their whale protection vessel was horribly damaged by a Japanese whaling boat I was horrified and sent in a donation. It was smaller than I would have liked it to be. I’d like to be able to end whaling forever. Quite clearly that is Bob Barker’s vision as well.

Previously, I had occasionally seen “The Price is Right”, a TV game show that Bob Barker hosted for an astounding 35 years, from 1972 until 2005. He was a genial host and a very professional gentleman. I must confess I never knew that he has been a such a staunch animal advocate. He has gifted Sea Shepherd with $5 million dollars and has had a whale protection vehicle named after him.

Some demented individuals say that the heroes at Sea Shepherd are “terrorists” and I guess that that is the word of the decade for those who wish to tarnish reputations by throwing it around so much as to make it meaningless. The real criminals are those who  brutally murder the Earth’s grandest creatures, the gentle whales. For the record, the Dalai Lama supports Sea Shepherd. Need I say more?

Only “Bravo, Bob Barker!”

I have been reading a number of accounts recently about a new crop of cattle mutilations taking place in the Southwest. There have also been reports of mutilations in Great Britain of cattle and perhaps water buffalo. The first thing that must be ascertained is whether there is a pedestrian explanation for any an individual case. Such prosaic explanations would include predatory animals killing livestock or ritual animal murder by a cult. To me ritual murder of animals is repulsive but it is not paranormal. In examining the possibilities concerning those reports that are truly anomalous I have come to the following conclusions: It appears that the killers come by air, because in the truly anomalous cases there are no tracks to be seen. There are also no teeth marks and often the victims have had organs and tissues removed with beyond normal surgical precision. There are often reports of both UFOs and helicopters being seen in the area. Helicopters may indicate that humans are involved and it has been speculated that government agencies are involved. Some people think that the government or some parallel agency is testing for Mad Cow Disease. There is some plausibility to this concept, but why as in the recent case below test four calves from one farm? And why the weird coring procedures? It seems more likely to me that someone in a helicopter, likely from the government, has observed or heard that a mutilation has taken place and is investigating it themselves, but as with many questionable government investigations, will not admit to doing so.

This is reminiscent of reports of UFOs from Stephenville, Texas, wherein certain reliable citizens who made radar verifiable reports were hounded by helicopters and told by phone calls purportedly from Air Force personnel to keep quiet.

There is an even stranger explanation of the helicopters as screen memories. It is speculated that the occupants of UFOs are able to replace memories of accidental observers with more prosaic images, or perhaps the human brains of some observers are not able to process seeing a UFO.

Two of the most interesting accounts are here:
CATTLE MUTILATIONS BAFFLE COLORADO RANCHERS
By DeeDee Correll
Los Angeles Times
December 14, 2009

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-dead-calves14-2009dec14,0
,3007910,full.

story

DENVER – Manuel A. Sanchez has ruled out every logical explanation for the
fate that has befallen the calves on his ranch in southern Colorado.

Over the past month, he’s found four calves dead in a way that he cannot
reconcile with anything in his 50 years of raising cattle: eyes and ears
missing, tongues and genitals excised in what appeared to be a series of
fine cuts.

Mountain lions, bears or coyotes would leave messier marks, he said. And
Sanchez found no tire tracks or footprints that would suggest a human
invader — nor even bloodstains he’d expect to find around the carcasses if
someone had butchered them.

“There’s nothing to go by,” said Sanchez, who estimated his financial loss
at $10,000. “I can’t figure it out.”

Costilla County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Chavez agreed: “There’s nothing to
follow up on.”

Besides Sanchez’s calves in San Luis, several cases have been reported near
Trinidad.

It’s not the first time.

In the 1970s, ranchers in eastern and southern Colorado filed more than 200
mutilation reports, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation reports.
The agency investigated, even conducting an undercover operation, but to no
avail.

“It was such a bewilderment,” recalled Tillie Bishop, a state senator at the
time.

Some people suspected satanic cults. Others grew convinced of an
otherworldly explanation — space aliens.

But rancher Bill Bledsoe of Hugo, in eastern Colorado, said the deaths
weren’t suspicious at all.

“People find a dead animal and think it died strange, but usually it turned
out something had been eating on it,” he said. “I think they were just
jumping to conclusions.”

Some veterinarians also attributed the mutilations to predators.

Northern New Mexico suffered scores of cases too. A 1980 report by a state
task force blamed predators. Ranchers widely panned it.

Then the mutilations appeared to stop.

But in the mid-1990s, 27 cattle in northern New Mexico were mutilated in 16
months, the Associated Press reported. Again, ranchers found cattle with
genitals removed, tongues cut off at the roots, and eyes and ears missing.
The incisions appeared to have been cauterized, they said.

Again, the reports stopped.

This year, reports began trickling in from southern Colorado.

In March, Mike Duran discovered a cow dead on his ranch near Trinidad, the
udder and vagina missing. “It was like a laser cut,” not a rip, said Duran.
He’d seen such carnage before: In the ’90s, he found a dead cow missing the
same parts.

Sheriff’s investigators were mystified. “I don’t know how to explain it.
They’re just missing. There’s no evidence of blood, of anything being cut,”
said Las Animas County Undersheriff Derek Navarette.

In northeastern Colorado, some Weld County ranchers joke about “coyotes with
scalpels,” the Greeley Tribune reported. Some don’t bother reporting
mutilations anymore because of skeptics, the paper said.

The Las Animas County sheriff’s office investigated another case in March in
which a cow was missing the udder. There was no sign of human or animal
presence. “Unexplainable once again,” Navarette said.

He said his office didn’t order necropsies because of the prohibitive cost.

About 100 miles away, Sanchez found two dead calves in late October. A week
later, a third carcass was found, and the fourth in mid-November.

Frustrated by the lack of leads, Sanchez consulted Chuck Zukowski, a
Colorado Springs paranormal investigator who runs UFOnut.com.

Zukowski also investigated the cases in Trinidad, taking tissue samples from
two of those animals to Colorado State University.

Veterinary experts determined that the cuts were made before death and
didn’t involve cauterization.

Zukowski says he’s as baffled as everyone else.

Sanchez said that with the mystery unsolved, he didn’t want to risk losing
any of his 32 remaining calves the same way. So he sold them at auction this
month.

“I didn’t know when this was going to end,” said Sanchez, who has 40 cows
left. “There’s no way to catch these people. I don’t even know if it’s
people.”

Colorado cow mutilations baffle ranchers, cops, UFO believer

Posted: 12/09/2009 01:00:00 AM MST

Updated: 12/09/2009 04:57:46 PM MST
//

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Rancher Manuel Sanchez has lost four calves in as many weeks, all mysteriously mutilated. Authorities are baffled. (Joe Amon, The Denver Post)

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// ]]>SAN LUIS — Manuel Sanchez tucks his leathery hands into well-worn pockets and nods toward a cedar tree where, last month, he found his fourth mysteriously slaughtered calf in as many weeks.

“I have no idea what could do this. I wish I did,” he says.

Four calves, all killed overnight. Their innards gone. Tongues sliced out. Udders carefully removed. Facial skin sliced and gone. Eyes cored away. Not a single track surrounding the carcasses, which were found in pastures locked behind two gates and a mile from any road. Not a drop of blood on the ground or even on the remaining skin.

In his life in the piñon-patched pastures where his father and grandfather raised cattle, the 72-year-old Sanchez has seen

mountain lions and coyotes kill cattle, elk and deer. He’s seen birds scavenge carcasses. He’s heard of thieves slaughtering livestock in the field for their meat. He can’t explain what he saw last month.”A lion will drag its kill. Coyotes rip and tear flesh. These were perfect cuts — like with a laser or like a scalpel. And what would take the waste — all the guts — and leave the nice, tender meat?” Sanchez says, as he nudges his old Ford through rutted trails, rosary beads swinging from his rearview mirror. “No tracks. No blood. No nothing. I got nothing to go by. They don’t leave no trace.”

Every rancher who has reported similar cattle deaths — and there have been at least eight such deaths in southern Colorado this year — uses the same description.

“They just stripped this one,” says Tom Miller, who in March was one of three ranchers near Trinidad who discovered mutilated cattle.

Cow raises the alarm

One morning, he went out to his concrete troughs to feed his herd of about 80 red and black Angus cows and calves. The herd was racing about. A cow that a week before had birthed a calf was bellowing, “raising all kind of devil,” Miller says.

The remains of a calf killed on Manuel Sanchez’s ranch show the killer’s odd predilection for entrails. (Photo courtesy of Chuck Zukowski)

There by the trough — past the locked gate a quarter-mile from U.S. 350 east of Hoehne — was the calf. Its front legs and torso were gone. Its back legs were hanging by hide to a shattered pelvis and a meatless backbone. Miller thought a pack of coyotes had torn into the calf the night before.

Then he saw the ears: sliced off the head in circular, surgical-like cuts. He noticed that there were no tracks. And no blood anywhere.

“If anyone can show me how this happened, I will believe them. I know it’s not coyotes, especially in one night. Only a human or something like that can cut the ears like that,” says Miller, a 72-year-old rancher who was raised on the prairie bordering the Purgatoire River.

“If it was done by people, they sure went out of their way to bother and confuse me. And really, why? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Mysteriously mangled

Colorado Brand Inspector Dennis Williams came out and looked at Miller’s calf. He lives next door; the calf would be the last of three strangely mutilated cattle that he would investigate in March of this year.

“I’ve heard about it. It was weird, to say the least. Totally unexplainable. To me, it looked like that calf had been dropped from a high distance, the way its hips were dislocated and all its broken bones,” Williams says.

That same month, ranchers had called Williams to grisly scenes northeast of Aguilar and west of Weston to investigate mysteriously mangled cattle that had been seen healthy the day before.

To add to the weirdness, Sanchez, Miller and Mike Duran, who found a sliced Red Angus cow near Weston in March, have all experienced similar mutilations before. Sanchez lost cows in 2006 and 1993, Miller in 1997 and 1980, and Duran in 2000 and 1995.

“It’s weird and unexplainable,” says Duran, who lost a healthy 27-year-old Red Angus cow on March 8, her udder and rear end removed with what he describes as “laser cuts, like when somebody cuts metal with a torch.”

Cops, like Williams and the ranchers, are stumped.

“We can’t come up with anything,” says Las Animas County sheriff’s Deputy Derek Navarette, who investigated the Miller and Duran calves.

“We’ve seen these before and they are all kind of the same. No one has ever explained it. Northern New Mexico has had some of these same cases, and in those cases they never got any further than we did.”

Predators ruled out

Chuck Zukowski of Colorado Springs investigated three of the eight mutilated cows in southern Colorado this year. The amateur UFO investigator and reserve deputy in El Paso County documents each scene, testing for radiation and scanning carcasses with ultraviolet light.

Despite his extraterrestrial inclinations, Zukowski’s studies — found on his ufonut.com website — fall short of concluding anything paranormal. He seems certain all the animals he studied were killed and drained before they were sliced, which explains the lack of blood found near the animals.

The way the tongues were sliced off in straight lines back behind the teeth indicates it is not a predator kill, he says.

“I’m looking for obvious things,” Zukowski says. “I don’t like to say aliens did it. There are just too many unknowns. I like to lean on human intervention until I actually see a UFO come down and take a cow.”

Sanchez is a salt-of-the-earth-type fellow who put three kids through college running cattle. Yet, he says he and his wife marveled at incandescent blue lights hovering over a ridge near his pastures in July and August. He declined to speculate about the lights.

“I just say the truth and that’s what I saw,” he says.

Duran, on the other hand, is willing to take the next step. He’s looked at it from every angle, he says. If it wasn’t human and wasn’t a predator, he says, there’s only one other option.

“I do believe it was UFOs. This universe is so big, a lot of people think we are the only ones here,” he says, declining to guess why aliens harbor such bloody disdain for bovines.

“I bet there is something out there.”

Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com

Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_13956752#ixzz0ZyF0JgPq

This last one is really worth the time to go to the site and check out the video, comments, map and additional photos.
I’d also advise interested readers to look at Linda Moulton Howe’s website
because she is the person who won an Emmy award for her investigative film on the subject in the past and there are many informative articles there on the subject if you scroll down the page.
Another person who has made interesting speculation into possible reasons for an interdimensional or extra-terrestrial visitor too is Carol Rainey in the book Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings of which there is a short review on this weblog. If you think I’m being partial in this article to female investigators perhaps you are right. 🙂

Horrible animal slaughter in the name of religion!  This is a brutal and inhumane custom that brings shame on all those that participate. To kill harmless animals in the name of God is an abomination. This mass slaughter runs counter to Hindu principles of reverence for life. I try to be very open minded about the beliefs of others but this just makes me sick. I can’t see any bright side to this whatsoever.

I commend the actress and animal activist Brigitte Bardot for standing up for animals.

‘WORLD’S BIGGEST ANIMAL SACRIFICE’ BEGINS
By Deepesh Shrestha
AFP
November 24, 2009

Up to a million Hindu devotees have gathered in a village in Nepal to
witness the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of animals in a mass
sacrifice that has drawn widespread criticism.

Worshippers travelled long distances, many coming from India, to attend the
two-day Gadhimai festival, which honours the Hindu goddess of power and
takes place once every five years in southern Nepal.

A huge cry of “Long Live Gadhimai!” went up after the village temple’s head
priest launched the event with the ritual sacrifice of two wild rats, two
pigeons, a rooster, a lamb and a pig.

The crowd then rushed to a nearby field where 250 sword-wielding butchers
were waiting to begin the mass slaughter of about 20,000 buffalo, brought by
devotees to be sacrificed near the holy temple.

“This is a very special day for Hindu devotees,” head priest Mangal
Chaudhary Tharu told AFP as the Gadhimai festival began.

“All the people who came here to worship Gadhimai have been waiting a long
time for this day. I am very proud to be part of this event,” added Tharu,
the fourth generation of his family to serve as a priest at the temple.

An AFP reporter at the scene said up to a million devotees were crammed into
the area for the festival. Many were from India, where some states have
banned animal slaughter for religious purposes.

Mahesh Yadav, a Nepalese farmer who arrived at the site with a black goat
tethered to the back of his bicycle, said he wanted to thank the goddess for
giving him a son.

“I had seven daughters in a row so I promised the goddess I would sacrifice
a goat if she gave me a son,” he told AFP.

“Eight years ago the goddess listened and my son was born.”

Nepal’s government has refused to put a stop to what it says is a
centuries-old religious tradition, despite a vocal opposition campaign from
local animal rights activists who say the slaughter is needless cruelty.

Their cause is supported by the well-known Indian animal rights activist
Maneka Gandhi and by the French film star turned campaigner Brigitte Bardot,
who this month wrote to Nepal’s president urging him to put a stop to the
festival.

Armed police have been deployed around the temple grounds and there were
fears of clashes between animal rights activists and festival-goers.

But the campaigners appeared to have stayed away after making a last-ditch
appeal to the government to stop the event over the weekend.

The buffalo slaughter took place in a huge field surrounded by three-metre
wall, and will be followed on Tuesday by the ritual sacrifice of around
300,000 goats, sheep and birds.

Many festival-goers scaled the wall to get a better view of the killings,
carried out by volunteers using specially-built bamboo cages to prevent the
animals from escaping.

Jaya Lal Thakur, a 34-year-old local barber, said he paid 210 rupees ($4.90)
for a licence to work at the festival and had already slaughtered dozens of
buffalo.

“This is the second time I’ve slaughtered buffalo at the Gadhimai festival.
I don’t get paid to do it but I believe it will bring me salvation,” he told
AFP.

“This is a rare opportunity and I’m very happy to be a part of it.”

At one point police used batons to disperse the crowds and prevent a
stampede, an AFP reporter witnessed, but there were no casualties and the
event appeared mainly peaceful.

Nepal’s government has provided 4.5 million rupees ($105,510) in funding for
the festival, a lucrative event for organisers, who sell the hides to
contractors after the slaughter.

The meat is distributed among local people, some of whom set up stalls
selling sweets and drinks.

Authorities have banned the sale and consumption of alcohol in the area, but
reports said five people including one Indian national died at the weekend
after drinking home-brewed alcohol.

————

My recommendation is to go to the Nepalese Embassy website and complain vociferously: http://www.nepalembassyusa.org/contact.php

Anil Bhanot speaks out in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/nov/25/gadhimai-animal-sacrifice-nepal

Another article from the Guardian:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/24/hindu-sacrifice-gadhimai-festival-nepal

img_0653“Our Mother, whose body is the Earth, Sacred is thy being. Thy gardens grow. Thy will be done in our cities, as it is in nature. Thanks be this day for food, and air, and water. Forgive us our sins against Earth, as we are learning to forgive one another. And surrender us not unto extinction, but deliver us from our folly. For thine is the beauty, and the power, and all life, from birth to death, from beginning to end. Amen. So be it. Forever. Blessed be.”

~Henry Horton

Am I food?
Am I food?

This comes to me from Superior Bill. Though I am horrified I am not surprised. Considering the burgeoning human overpopulation, things like this are likely to become more rather than less common unfortunately. The slaughter and eating of cats is a very inauspicious activity to engage in.

http://ph.news.yahoo.com/ap/20081218/tap-as-china-cat-protest-1st-ld-writethr-bb10fb8.html

China protest decries custom of eating cats

By GILLIAN WONG,Associated Press Writer AP – Friday, December 19

BEIJING – A southern Chinese province must stop the “shameful” and “cruel slaughter” of cats for food, a group of more than 40 animal lovers in Beijing said Thursday as they unfurled banners in a tearful protest.

Thousands of cats across the country have been caught in the past week by traders and transported to Guangdong province to be killed for food, said the protesters gathered at the Guangdong government’s office in Beijing.

“We are very angry because the cats are being skinned and then cooked alive. We must make them correct this uncivilized behavior,” said Wang Hongyao, who represented the group in submitting a letter to the Guangdong office.

The protesters urged the provincial government to crack down on cat traders and restaurants that serve cat meat, although no law says it is illegal to eat cats. It has long been common for cats and dogs to be eaten in some parts of China and in some other Asian countries.

The demonstrators held up banners saying “Cooking cats alive! Shame on Guangdong!” and “Resolutely oppose cruel slaughter” as they met with a representative of the Guangdong office.

Calls to the Guangdong provincial office in Beijing rang unanswered, while the government news office in the province refused to comment.

The protest was apparently in response to Chinese media reports in recent days that carried pictures of furry felines peering out through bamboo crates and metal cages, apparently en route to Guangzhou, Guangdong’s capital. Other pictures show cats being skinned in restaurant kitchens.

About 5,000 cats were sent from Nanjing to Guangzhou, while cats from Shanghai, Hangzhou and other places were also being rounded up, the Chengdu Business Daily reported last week. The paper said people in Guangdong eat 10,000 cats a day.

No reason was given for the increased media coverage, or if there has been an increase in cat meat consumption.

Many of the protesters in Beijing were retirees who said they have been caring for strays cats. The protesters said they believed that some street cats in Beijing, “especially the fat ones,” have disappeared and were likely nabbed by cat meat dealers.

“These cats, they are like our children,” said Cui Qingzhen, a 56-year-old woman who said she has been feeding street cats for six years. “We can’t let these people do this to them.”

The demonstrators also noted that a virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, is suspected to have been spread to humans by civet cats, mongoose-like animals considered a delicacy in southern China.

SARS was first reported in Guangdong in November 2002 and killed 774 people worldwide before subsiding in July 2003. In 2004, Guangdong banned the raising, selling, killing and eating of civet cats.

“Haven’t they learned from SARS that some animals just shouldn’t be eaten by humans?” Cui said. “Ask the Guangdong people: What else must they eat?”

Associated Press researcher Xi Yue contributed to the report.

Luz, the orphaned kitten, by Doyle Phillips.

Good news: Luz has a new home at a school for handicapped children in Mexico. They adore her. And her sore eye has been healed.

A few articles of interest about cats.

Bad news from Peru- they have a Cat Eating Festival. I may choose to cancel my plans of visiting Macchu Picchu due to this disgusting ritual. My thanks to Superior Bill for this sad news, but news we need to know and act on.

Fury over cat eating festival

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1782932.ece

ANIMAL rights groups are up in arms over an annual festival in Peru that serves up hundreds of fried CATS to locals.

The ‘Gastronomical Festival of the Cat’ – dubbed the ‘Massacre of the Moggies’ – sees townsfolk in Canete, near Lima, feast on the fluffy pets for two days.

They believe that eating cat burgers – and fried cat legs and tails – can cure bronchial disease.

It is also believed that feline meat serves as an aphrodisiac.

The cats are bred especially for this festival – which takes place at the end of September on the Day of Santa Ifigenia.

But it has generated fury among animal rights groups.

A PETA spokesman said: ““If Peruvians really eat poor old Moggy because they think his meat cures bronchitis, that’s about as bizarre as it gets, although remember that Asians eat monkey bits thinking that will cure their impotence and even Europeans butcher poor old Bessie the cow or Henny Penny the hen, because they see them as nothing more than a bit of nourishment.

“Having toured slaughterhouses for dogs in Taiwan, horses in Texas, and chickens and cows in Europe, PETA’s staff says the last thing we need to do is add yet another poor animal to the list of those being frightened and slaughtered for a taste.

From Roxan Lucan, a item of interest about how cats’ purring is good for their health and yours as well:

Why Do Cats Purr?

Leslie A. Lyons, an assistant professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, explains:

Over the course of evolution, purring has probably offered some selective advantage to cats. Most felid species produce a “purr-like” vocalization. In domestic cats, purring is most noticeable when an animal is nursing her kittens or when humans provide social contact via petting, stroking or feeding. Although we assume that a cat’s purr is an expression of pleasure or is a means of communication with its young, perhaps the reasons for purring can be deciphered from the more stressful moments in a cat’s life.

Cats often purr while under duress, such as during a visit to the veterinarian or when recovering from injury. Thus, not all purring cats appear to be content or pleased with their current circumstances. This riddle has lead researchers to investigate how cats purr, which is also still under debate.

Scientists have demonstrated that cats produce the purr through intermittent signaling of the laryngeal and diaphragmatic muscles. Cats purr during both inhalation and exhalation with a consistent pattern and frequency between 25 and 150 Hertz. Various investigators have shown that sound frequencies in this range can improve bone density and promote healing. This association between the frequencies of cats’ purrs and improved healing of bones and muscles may provide help for some humans.

Bone density loss and muscle atrophy is a serious concern for astronauts during extended periods at zero gravity. Their musculo-skeletal systems do not experience the normal stresses of physical activity, including routine standing or sitting, which requires strength for posture control.

Because cats have adapted to conserve energy via long periods of rest and sleep, it is possible that purring is a low energy mechanism that stimulates muscles and bones without a lot of energy. The durability of the cat has facilitated the notion that cats have “nine lives” and a common veterinary legend holds that cats are able to reassemble their bones when placed in the same room with all their parts. Purring may provide a basis for this feline mythology.

The domestication and breeding of fancy cats occurred relatively recently compared to other pets and domesticated species, thus cats do not display as many muscle and bone abnormalities as their more strongly selected carnivore relative, the domestic dog. Perhaps cats’ purring helps alleviate the dysplasia or osteoporotic conditions that are more common in their canid cousins. Although it is tempting to state that cats purr because they are happy, it is more plausible that cat purring is a means of communication and a potential source of self-healing.

Answer originally published on January 27, 2003.

From Nadira Hall, we see how a cat, Mr. Green Genes, is helping science to find methods to cure diseases such as cystic fibrosis.  The cat has a manipulated gene that causes it to glow green under ultraviolet light. But is it ethical or animal cruelty?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/10/23/scicat123.xml

Scientists make cat that glows in the dark

By day he is just a normal tabby but when the lights go out this ginger cat glows in the dark.

Scientists have genetically modified a cat as part of an experiement that could lead to treatments for conditions like cystic fibrosis.

Named Mr Green Genes, he look likes a six-month-old cat but, under ultraviolet light, his eyes, gums and tongue glow a vivid lime green, the result of a genetic experiment at the Audubon Centre for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans.

Mr. Green Genes is the first fluorescent cat in the United States and probably the world, said Betsy Dresser, the centre’s director.

The researchers made him so they could learn whether a gene could be introduced harmlessly into the feline’s genetic sequence to create what is formally known as a transgenic cat.

If so, it would be the first step in a process that could lead to the development of ways to combat diseases via gene therapy.

The gene, which was added to Mr. Green Genes’ DNA when he was created, has no effect on his health, Ms Dresser said.

Cats are ideal for this project because their genetic makeup is similar to that of humans, said Dr. Martha Gomez, a veterinarian and staff scientist at the center.

To show that the gene went where it was supposed to go, the researchers settled on one that would glow.

The gene “is just a marker,” said Leslie Lyons, an assistant professor of population health and reproduction at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, who is familiar with the Audubon center’s work.

“The glowing part is the fun part,” she said.

Glowing creatures made international news earlier this month when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists who had discovered the gene through their work with jellyfish.

They used the gene, whose formal name is enhanced green fluorescence protein, to see how things work inside animals and even inside cells.

The fluorescence gene will go alongside the cystic-fibrosis gene and make it easy to spot. The long-term goal of this process, for which there is no timetable, is the production of what Dr Gomez calls a “knockout gene.”

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