Caturday felid trifecta: Towser the distillery cat and his mousing record; Operation Cat Drop; cat can groom another to annoy it; and lagniappe

July 25, 2026 • 10:30 am

We have three cat-related items today, and a bit of lagniappe.

From Facebook’s F’d Up Facts (note that the image is AI):

And the information attached to it:

At the Glenturret whiskey distillery in Scotland, there was a cat named Towser. She was a long-haired tortoiseshell. Her job was to keep the place free of mice.  She did her job very well. In fact, she was the best mouser in the world. Over 24 years, she is believed to have killed 28,899 mice. That’s about 3 mice every day for her entire career. The Guinness Book of Records officially recognizes her record. She became a legend in the distillery. A statue was even put up to h…

Here are photos and text about Towser from The Great Cat, a wonderful site.  The text is in a screenshot:

A photo of Towser credited to source at bottom:

The site adds that “even though Towswer had had several successors, none of them have ever been able to match her mousing skills.”

From ScotchWhisky.com,

All hail Towser. In the pantheon of mouse-catching machines, the famous cat from the home of The Famous Grouse reigns supreme, and it’s all about the numbers: almost a quarter of a century on duty at Glenturret, and a frankly mind-boggling 28,899 rodents liquidated.

Towser was a kitten of the ’60s, but seems to have skipped the ‘peace and love’ stuff – and she was still gamely terrorising mice until her death, three weeks short of her 24th birthday, in 1987.

Her longevity is attributed to the addition of a wee dram to her milk every night, although we should say that this is not a form of treatment formally endorsed by the veterinary profession.

If you’ve a calculator handy, you might have worked out that, for Towser to account for 28,899 mice over a 24-year period, she’d have had to kill three or four every day. That’s quite a vermin problem.

The story behind the figures is simple: a team from The Guinness Book of Records observed Towser’s activities for a few days, totted up the corpses and extrapolated the total from there. Not exactly scientific.

But let’s not allow such mundane concerns detract from the legend of Towser; a legend that lives on, both in the form of a statue at Glenturret distillery and, earlier this year, in a distillery bottling named after the mouser supreme.

You can see the official Guinness record here. Towser puts Larry to shame!

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Here’s a video I found on Facebook. It’s basically true (see below), describing a parachute drop of cats into Borneo to control rodents where the native cats may have been exterminated by application of DDT.

The Wikipedia article on “Operation Cat Drop” is here, and here’s a bit of it:

Operation Cat Drop is the name given to the delivery of cats, equipment and supplies by the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force to remote regions of the then-British colony of Sarawak (today part of Malaysia), on the island of Borneo in 1960. The cats were flown out of Singapore and delivered in crates dropped by parachutes as part of a broader program of supplying cats to curb an infestation of rats. The operation was reported as a “success” at the time.  Newspaper reports published soon after the operation reference only 23 cats being used. Some unreliable later accounts of the event claim that as many as 14,000 cats were used, but this figure is apocryphal.  An additional source references a “recruitment” drive for 30 cats a few days prior to Operation Cat Drop.

Insecticides including dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) were widely used during the 1950s, including in Borneo, as a malaria control measure. The insecticides were intended to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes before they could pass the disease onto humans.

At the time of the cat drop in 1960, newspaper reports indicate that a district in Sarawak was suffering from an infestation of rats, which were destroying crops. It has been suggested that this rat infestation was the result of many of the existing local cats dying due to the use of DDT or other insecticides, and the rat population subsequently increasing as it faced reduced predation from cats. While it has been claimed that these cat deaths resulted from biomagnification of DDT – the cats eating other creatures such as lizards or cockroaches that had in turn been exposed to DDT – this has not been confirmed. Deaths of cats may have been caused by direct exposure to DDT sprayed in dwellings, as opposed to biomagnification.[4]

A nine-minute video about the operation, with pictures and video supplied by AI.

Text for the video is here.  And Wikipedia notes the unintended consequences of spraying DDT to control mosquitoes and the malaria they carried. Note that the video gives another but less likely story involving the proliferation of geckos or, alternatively, of caterpillars.

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Finally, a new NYT article dispelling another bit of cat-related “wisdom”: that cats groom each other as a form of friendship and bonding. Not always true! You can read the article here by clicking below, or find it archived here. 

An excerpt:

Let’s just say cats have a reputation — of being standoffish, manipulative, maybe even jerks. Here’s more corroborating evidence: Scientists are beginning to think that even seemingly innocent cat behavior — grooming another cat — might not always be nice.

The licking can be a method of subtle torment, according to new research published in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science.

Mutual grooming, called allogrooming, is widespread in the animal kingdom and found in primates, birds, horses and even insects. The grooming is typically focused on parts of the body that are difficult for an animal to reach on its own, like its back and neck, making the behavior an act of kindness that supports social bonding and wins friends.

Like primates that pick lice from each other’s backs, cats that lick each other have also been considered an indicator of social bonding. “So far, mutual grooming in cats has been categorized as affiliative, or ‘friendly,’ cat behavior,” said Noema Gajdos Kmecova, a cat behavioral scientist at Ghent University and an author of the new study.

Or so we thought.

Morgane Van Belle, another cat behavioral scientist at Ghent University and the study’s lead author, was observing her own cats, Fabio and Giovanni, interacting over a favorite napping spot in the sun and noticed something.

“I saw these weird grooming patterns in my own cats where I thought, This is not super friendly at all,” she said. “Sometimes one cat would lay on the blanket near the window and the other cat would come up and start licking it — but in an annoying way.” The interaction would induce the licked cat to get up and forfeit the sunny spot, she said.

Reader Divy told me she noticed eactly this with her two cats Jango and Boba.  A bit more:

To check whether this behavior was more widespread, Ms. Van Belle and her colleagues looked at 53 households across Europe with two or more cats. After telling the pet owners what to look for, the researchers had them submit videos of their cats’ interactions. The scientists then randomly selected a submission from each participant and used statistical analyses to tease apart the hidden nuance in cat-licking behavior.

“It became immediately clear from the analysis that mutual grooming does not mean the same thing in all contexts,” Ms. Van Belle said.

The results revealed two things. The first was consistent with typical grooming behavior: The cats licked each other on the head, neck or ears. In these videos, the cats were much more likely to mimic each other’s body postures, either cuddling together or sitting next to one another before and after the grooming. The licks were clearly friendly gestures.

The other side of the cat-licking coin revealed something more in line with bullying. A subset of the videos showed that licking often preceded conflict. These interactions were defined by differing body postures, where one cat might stand and lick the other sitting cat. The aggressive licks were followed by signs of stress in the licked cat, including staring, yowling, rotating the ears, licking the lips or swiping at the other cat. The results were inconsistent with the prior conception of cat allogrooming.

“Based on our findings, allogrooming is associated with at least two contexts — not only social bonding, but also social tension,” Ms. Kmecova said.

 

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Lagniappe:  First, the cat with the world’s longest tail:
Another video of Puggsley Addams:

 

More lagniappe: Kitten rescue (h/t Bill):

Marco Rubio, the DSA, and Communism

July 25, 2026 • 9:15 am

Here’s a 2½-minute video of Secretary of State Marco Rubio talking about socialism, communism, and his vision of America. It’s a bit Ayn Rand-ish, and I ignored the bit about God. (I don’t know the narrator, but it appears to be a “media personality” named Jillian Michaels, a woman of conservative views.

Rubio is speaking about “radical leftism” and its goal of “social justice” that, he thinks, is really acting out a mindset of “poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation. . . “.

Have a listen and tell me that part of this doesn’t resonate with you; and forget it’s Marco Rubio speaking and just listen to the message. Of course I’ll get labeled an “alt-righter” for posting this, but I don’t care. I sent the video to several of my center-left friends, and in general they liked it (except for the God part).

Duckling photo and videos

July 25, 2026 • 8:00 am

It’s Saturday, and besides the Caturday felid post (coming up) we have a photo and three videos of Miss Duck and her babies having a postprandial rest on the rockes. This is the first weekiversity of their hatching, as they must have hatched last Saturday and made their way to Botany Pond in the morning. All four babies are doing well, and my hopes for their long-term survival and fledging have risen.

It’s typical for ducks, after a hearty feed, to find a quiet place to sleep.  Miss Duck and her Brood of Four like to rest on a rock at the north end of the pond, with Miss Duck taking a position on the ledge above to watch and guard the brood. First, a photo:

And three short (one-minute) videos of the ducklings resting.  “Rest” is hardly the word, for although they sleep, they also move around, stretch, wake up to have a drink of water, and flap their tiny wings.  Here’s a view of the whole scene”

A closeup of the resting brood. Notice the black feetsies extending out, the scratching and preening, and the nictitating membranes closing when they sleep.

Here they’re more or less sound asleep, and you can measure their breathing rate (I counted 32 breaths in 30 second for the duck in the foreground).  Notice the leg stretch 17 seconds in and a double leg stretch at 42 seconds.

I find watching sleeping ducks very restful, and could do it for hours (I often watch for the one hour that their naps usually last, both to relax and to prevent people from interrupting their nap).

Oh, and a first yesterday: I kissed a squirrel! They are now so tame they climb all over me to get a nut, whether or not I have nuts with me.  One of them, “Skinnytail”, crawls all over my body, climbing up my leg and sometimes perching on my shoulder. Yesterday he sniffed my ear and I could hear him breathe, and when his back was by my mouth, I kissed it to see if I could. This is a first! (Yes, you’ll think me crazy, but I don’t care.)

Saturday: Hili dialogue

July 25, 2026 • 6:45 am

Welcome to shabbos for Jewish cats: it’s CaturSaturday, July 25, 2025, and also National Day of the Cowboy.  Here’s a photo I took on a fly-collecting trip to Death Valley:  a rare Jewish cowboy once on display at the Eastern California Museum in Independence, CA. The last time I went, the photo was gone and nobody knew about it or even remembered it. I’d kill to have it. He looks more like a yeshiva bochur than a cowboy.

And there’s a feature-length documentary on the subject, which I haven’t seen:

It’s also Culinarians Day, National Hot Fudge Sundae Day, and National Wine and Cheese Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 25 Wikipedia page.

I will have visitors for much of next week so posting will be light. Bear with me; I do my best.

Da Nooz:

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal describes “Three options for escalation” of the war with Iran. Segal thinks that the higher alert levels of the Israeli military, the new involvement of the Houthis, and Trump’s own words bespeak a coming escalation of the war.  Segal gives three possibilities for how the escalation will take place—three target strategies:

The first is Iran’s energy infrastructure—the operation that was on the table before Trump declared a ceasefire. Israel had begun pursuing it during Operation Roaring Lion until Trump reportedly pulled the brakes, under pressure from Gulf states with a well-founded fear for their own energy industries. The target set is narrow and thoroughly understood. Kharg Island handles the overwhelming majority of Iranian crude exports; a few missiles in the right place and Tehran has no way to sell its oil. Choose this option and the Iranians are left cash-strapped and reeling—and overwhelmingly likely to retaliate against regional energy infrastructure, and perhaps against the desalination plants the Gulf depends on for its water.

The second is direct action against the nuclear program itself. That could mean targeting senior figures, seizing the enriched uranium, or some other step aimed at the core of the program. Pickaxe Mountain would likely be the primary target. The site is buried deep enough that it is widely assessed to lie beyond the reach of bunker busters, which is why “seizing” rather than “destroying” keeps surfacing in the discussion. The Iranian response to an attack on their nuclear facilities would be severe as well, though significantly less severe than an oil crisis.

The third is the Strait of Hormuz: a major offensive against the Iranian capabilities surrounding it—anti-ship missile batteries, the IRGC Navy’s fast-attack craft and mine stocks, and coastal radar and drone sites. Throughout the war, it was barely on Israel’s radar. It is now perhaps the single most important question in the global economy. But even such an operation still won’t open the strait. All it takes is one IRGC operator left alive with a drone or two to send war-risk premiums through the roof and shipping companies in the opposite direction. Regardless, Trump may simply declare the strait open and call it a day, with the best-case scen

What’s interesting is that some of these operations don’t require Israel’s involvement at all. Trump said so explicitly: “We don’t need anybody.” He also teased the opposite possibility, saying Israel “would join in two minutes if I ask them to,” and that there would be consequences if it did. Could the conflict intensify dramatically elsewhere while Israel largely stays out of it? At first glance, that seems unlikely. Israel is, after all, only the Little Satan. But even the Little Satan is still Satan.

On the other hand, the past few weeks have produced some confusion among the Israeli population. There are missiles and drones flying across the region, and they aren’t the target? While Kuwaiti vacation plans have been entirely put on hold, Israelis are still flying back and forth on a daily basis. It defies the historical pattern entirely. Israel has become a place of quiet in the middle of a hurricane sweeping across the Middle East.

Still, whether it remains so depends entirely on Trump. He has a ticking clock in the form of the midterm elections. As this war continues to plunge in popularity, Trump appears desperate to wrap it up, though I would caution the president that the only thing less popular than continuing an unpopular war is losing an unpopular war.

I’m not sure that if Trump “loses” the war he’d get more unpopular, as much of the American populace just wants gas prices to go down. And if Iran and Yemen keep blocking transit of oil, that won’t happen. Based on Trump’s verbiate, the second option seems the most likely, followed by the third. Infrastructure destruction would be less popular because the American people don’t like it, and some of it is a war crime. I am not a pundit, but one thing seems likely to me: Trump will escalate the war before he ratchets back.

*I can’t help but think that this NYT article, called “‘We’re trapped in hell’: Iranians say that life is put on hold by months of war” (article archived here), is meant not just as news, but also as part of the NYT’s regular criticism of our war with Iran. (The subtitle is “Devastated by cycles of violence and economic crisis, many are giving up on work and their futures as the United States batters Iran again.”)

Planning for the future seems an absurd luxury when impoverished friends can afford to buy rice only by the cup and when the United States and Iran are trading strikes on military sites, ports and water desalination plants around the region.

For more than a year, Iranians have been trapped in a constant cycle of airstrikes, domestic security crackdowns and economic devastation. A short-lived cease-fire reached last month with the United States brought some respite from falling bombs, though not from the plummeting economy.

The unraveling of the agreement in recent weeks tipped the country back into war. Many Iranians have been left feeling that their lives are on hold or are no longer their own.

. . .This cycle of crisis has plagued Iranians since the 12-day U.S.-Israeli war that battered the country in June last year. In its wake, the government placed the country under a monthslong internet blackout, citing national security concerns. That sent the already foundering economy into a nosedive.

Then, a currency crisis in December set off antigovernment protests that grew into a nationwide movement. Those were crushed in January in a crackdown fiercer than any Iran had experienced in decades, leaving thousands dead and the country bitterly divided.

Weeks later, Mr. Trump and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced their war against Iran, describing it as a once-in-a-generation chance to topple the country’s authoritarian rulers. American and Israeli warplanes pummeled Iran, destroying infrastructure and killing the supreme leader and thousands of civilians. But the country’s theocratic rule remained intact, emboldened by its survival.

Asal, a 20-year-old shopkeeper in a town near Tehran, was among the thousands who took part in the protests in January. Breaking into tears as she described the arrest and torture she said she and her friends experienced, Asal said she had once hoped the U.S.-Israeli intervention would help bring down the regime.

“Trump told us he wanted to save us, but that wasn’t true,” she said. “Whatever happens in the future doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

. . .Loyalists to the Islamic republic camp out nightly on the streets of most cities, demanding that the government pursue war instead of peace and fraying the nerves of those Iranians desperate for the crisis to end.

“Things have become so bad that everyone has completely lost it,” said Mohsen, a business owner in the central city of Isfahan. “We’re trapped in hell, and there’s no saving us.”

“I have no control over my life anymore,” Behnam said. “Our fate is in the hands of those who don’t think about ordinary people.”

The NYT clearly wants this war over, and it wants it over with Trump looking like the loser (i.e., no nuclear deal, which means “worse than Obama”, and with Israel, which the NYT detests, also looking like a loser.  In fact, it also seems that the NYT is siding with supporters of the Iranian regime, though at least it mentions that the regime is oppressing many and has killed thousands (more than 30,000, it’s reported).  The NYT has been captured by progressives, amply represented among their young employees.

*Yesterday the Fields Medal—considered the “Nobel Prize” for mathematics, but given only every four years—was awarded to four people.

Two U.S.-based mathematicians from China have won the Fields Medal, considered math’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, becoming the first Chinese nationals to earn the honor.

The International Mathematical Union awarded its Fields Medal on Thursday at a ceremony in Philadelphia to four people, including Yu Deng and Hong Wang, who both attended Peking University before earning doctorates in the U.S.

Deng, a professor at the University of Chicago, was honored for his work on one of a famous set of 23 problems proposed by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900, which are considered benchmarks of progress in the study of mathematics, the university said.

Deng and his collaborators solved a problem within broader attempts to mathematically connect equations governing the motion of gases from the smallest to the largest scales, according to the university. An avid player of the ancient board game Go, the 37-year-old was also honored for research that laid the foundations for this breakthrough.

Wang, a professor at New York University and France’s Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, was recognized for resolving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions, a decades-old geometric problem that addresses the shape left behind by a needle moving in multiple directions, NYU said.

The 35-year-old Wang, who briefly pursued architecture during postgraduate studies in France before renewing her focus on math, is the third woman among the 68 people to receive the Fields Medal since it was first awarded in 1936.

The Fields Medal is conferred every four years upon up to four outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40. The other medalists this year were John Pardon of Stony Brook University and Jacob Tsimerman of the University of Toronto.

. . .Pardon was honored for his work in determining “how to count curves on specific shapes in the field of symplectic geometry,” proving a two-decades-old conjecture that posited that two different ways of counting curves were in fact the same, according to Stony Brook.

The award for Tsimerman recognized his work, among other achievements, in helping to prove the André-Oort conjecture, a longstanding problem in geometry, the University of Toronto said. Tsimerman said Thursday he would be starting a role at OpenAI in its safety division.

I’m not sure what, if any, the practical consequences of these discoveries are, but that’s not as important to me as understanding what was actually done. Which I don’t. So be it. The Fields Medal is somewhat endangered in that AI is now solving these longstanding mathematical conundrums faster than humans can—if the humans can even solve them. It’s ironic that Tsimerman is going to work for an AI company.

*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s news-and-snark column in The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Kids doing fireworks.”

→ Mao did nothing wrong: To deliver his special College Democrats of America 2026 Convention speech, progressive celebrity influencer Hasan Piker wore a frustratingly well-tailored Mao Zedong–style suit, buttoned to the top to show he means business

Soon after, a clip of Piker on Twitch praising Mao resurfaced. Referencing his trip to China in November 2025, Piker said, “I got stopped by a cop who thought I was, like, making fun of Mao Zedong, which I never would and never will. Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, okay? A man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet. Okay? For real, for real. . . . There was a lot of fucking excesses, let’s be real, but the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.” Anyway, this week Piker called the Great Chinese Famine—which killed tens of millions of people—“a famine due to mismanagement.” Mao’s only crime was basically an accounting error.

The news broke this week about Democratic politicians—including California Rep. Ro Khanna, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, former Missouri congresswoman and current candidate Cori Bush, and New York congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier—joining a livestream this past March where podcaster Kyle Kulinski compared the U.S. and Israeli governments to Hitler and Mussolini while defending Iran’s funding of groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. I think at this point we gotta believe these people. When someone wears a Mao suit, you pay attention. On the topic of Mao suits:

→ DSA releases their new platform: The Democratic Socialists of America, fresh off several big wins, have released their platform. And it’s extremely reasonable, normal, and achievable. All it calls for is expanding the House, abolishing the Senate, and giving felons and noncitizens full voting rights. It paints a beautiful vision of the future: “Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.” I’m gonna say it: The socialists have become full commies. All food, energy, medicine, and transportation is state-run, full communism.

The New York City DSA co-chair went on TV last week. When he was asked about bodega owners who might be upset over having to compete with new government grocery stores (which won’t have to pay property taxes or rent), here’s what he said: “Maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.” Oh, baby, they are heating up! The ponytails are tight for these DSA leaders, and they will tell the bodega owner to consider an alternative career in union-building. Let me cut to the chase: All private industry is evil. All private property is evil. Your bodega? Evil. Personally, I would love to be a communist, but I have access to the internet and have read 30 seconds of Wikipedia about all past communist efforts, including literal lesbian communes. It don’t work, kids. It never does.

→ Everything is Israel vs. Palestine, apparently: “Was Spain vs. Argentina a proxy for Palestine vs. Israel?” asks the interview description for the World Cup postgame live chat between Mehdi Hasan and Javier Bardem on Hasan’s far-left news site Zeteo. You’ll be shocked to hear Mehdi’s position: It was indeed! Spain is Palestine, by the way. Spain, the most ruthless colonizing power. When you’re so obsessed with Jews that it becomes your entire animating life force, you can only see any conflict—even a soccer game—through the prism of who’s the Jew.

In other news: Sixty percent of registered voters aged 18–24 support Hamas over Israel, according to the July Harvard CAPS-Harris poll. Just 40 percent selected Israel. And just to document where we are, for posterity, here’s a new viral video: “How Israelis Are Colonizing the World,” about how Israelis are colonists no matter where they go, even if they’re traveling to leave Israel because they think it’s a bad, irredeemable place. Quotes: “Israelis aren’t just settlers in Israel. They’re moving and colonizing the world,” the narrator opens, attempting a dramatic Attenborough-inspired nature documentary voice. “From backpacking trails in South and Southeast Asia to quiet European mountain towns, you’ll find Israelis. We’ve mostly seen them take two forms: the war criminals fresh from service, and the liberals fleeing what they claim is a failing democracy.” You’ll find them and We’ve mostly seen them—this is literally how safari guides describe the habits of wild orangutans. “On the surface, they couldn’t seem more different. But watch how they move through the world, and you can see how Zionism produces a particular relationship to land and other people—one that is exploitative and violent and that is not limited to Palestine.” Watch how they move through the world? Are we analyzing their gait? Curiously, because Jews are now described as colonizers in Israel and colonizers if they leave Israel, there is only one correct thing for them to do in this logic. One solution, if you will.

*The Seattle Times reports a new bipartisan federal proposal to kill seals to save salmon (h/t Wayne). Yes, that’s right. Native Americans need their lox, so the seals have to go.

Federal lawmakers are considering whether to expand the government’s authority to kill more sea lions and seals to bolster salmon recovery efforts in the Pacific Northwest.

The region’s critical salmon runs are on life support: Fourteen species and populations of salmon and steelhead trout in Washington are deemed at risk of extinction under the Endangered Species Act. The hurdles to their livelihood are numerous, spanning a worsening climate crisis, habitat loss, pollution and — as Congress members debated this week — proliferating predators.

The House Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife and Fisheries on Tuesday probed bipartisan legislation co-sponsored by Reps. Michael Baumgartner, R-Spokane, and Emily Randall, D-Bremerton, that would ease restrictions in the Marine Mammal Protection Act for killing sea lions and seals, renewing a decades-old conversation over whether humans should intervene to curb pinniped predation. It’s the second attempt this month by a Washington lawmaker to expand culling of the marine mammals.

The debate comes as marine wildlife officials investigate the shooting of a baby harbor seal found near Bellingham this month with a gunshot wound to its face. The pup, euthanized last week by medical professionals, is the third seal treated for a gunshot injury by SR3, a nonprofit sea life response, rehabilitation and research facility in Des Moines, in the past year, underscoring the tensions surrounding the animals even as Congress weighs broader lethal management.

Baumgartner in a statement before the hearing said his bill is a “common-sense” update that would allow Washington state and federally recognized tribes in Western Washington to explore new ways to responsibly manage booming pinniped populations. Randall told the committee that declining salmon runs also threaten tribal treaty-reserved fishing rights. “We have to find ecosystem balance,” she said. “Nonlethal methods of controlling the pinniped population haven’t worked for us.”

Both first-term members of Washington’s congressional delegation emphasized the bipartisan nature of the effort. Still, lawmakers representing the Pacific Northwest clashed on whether greater allowances to kill sea lions and seals is an effective — or prudent — solution.

Salmon recovery is widely viewed as vital to Washington state and the broader Pacific Northwest because salmon are a cornerstone of the region’s ecosystems and economy. They provide food for numerous species, including endangered southern resident orca whales, and are essential to sustaining Northwest commercial and recreational fisheries, as well as tribal treaty-protected fishing traditions.

Baumgartner and Randall’s Northwest Endangered Salmon Predation Prevention Act of 2026 would broaden where, and how, Washington state and Western Washington tribes with protected fishing rights can manage the growing sea lion and seal populations. In 2018, Congress authorized Washington state to expand a program to capture and euthanize sea lions in the Columbia River Basin due to concerns for salmon survival.

Their bill goes further, expanding the law from “sea lions” to all pinnipeds, including harbor seals, California sea lions and Steller’s sea lions. It would remove geographical restrictions limiting killings to portions of the Columbia River and eliminates the requirement that chemical euthanasia be the only approved killing method. It would take the effort beyond the Columbia River, too, establishing permits for tribes and state officials to kill pinnipeds in “each river and stream in the State of Washington that flows into the marine waters of the State.” The bill would also direct the development of nonlethal methods that prevent pinnipeds from traveling upstream into salmon habitats.

There are five species of pinnipeds that frequent Oregon and Washington (Pacific Harbor Seal, Northern Elephant Seal, California Sea Lion, Steller Sea Lion, and the Northern Fur Seal). As for regulating these populations, it seems that a major impetus is the need of indigenous people to harvest salmon.  Unless we are somehow responsible for the growing pinniped populations (and I haven’t seen any data supporting that), I’d like to know how this happened. You don’t go killing seals and sea lions so you can support a salmon-based economy.  It looks as if in fact humans are responsible for the decline of salmon, and we have no right to kill pinnipeds to rectify something that’s the fault of humanity. THERE WILL BE NO EUTHANIZING OF PINNIPEDS—not if I had any say in the matter.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s bossing Andrzej around:

Hili: It’s a good thing you swept the floor. It was getting pretty dirty.
Andrzej: Keep your comments to yourself.

In Polish:

Hili: Dobrze, że pozamiatałeś, bo było już bardzo brudno.
Ja: Zachowaj swoje uwagi dla siebie.

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From Meow Incorporated:

From The Grammar Police (strictly speaking, this is not ungrammatical):

From Things with Faces, a happy loaf:

From Masih:

From Barry: Evolution wins!

A bio-inspired robot crosses paths with a real insect , 400 million years of evolution face to face with human engineering.

— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) 2026-07-18T16:11:42.000Z

Carole Hooven vs. Agustín “Spectrum” Fuentes (click to go to original tweets):

The Number Ten Cat is looking for an assistant, but not one to turn the spotlight away from the Boss:

One from my feed; live and learn!

And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

And two from Matthew. He said the first one will leave you weeping (sound up):

From the brink of death,not a moment too soon.👍💙😍

— omgisme (@omgisme.bsky.social) 2026-07-23T18:59:35.494Z

And of this one he says “lovely molluscs!”. Yep, squid are molluscs:

👽🦑🛸👽🦑🛸 #squidsquad #caribbeanreefsquid #cephalopodsofcoralcity #squid #coralcitycamera

— Coral City Camera (@coralcitycamera.bsky.social) 2026-07-19T16:06:10.532Z

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ science

July 24, 2026 • 10:15 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo post, called “Cern2,” is a repost from 14 years ago, for the artist is on hols.

At Botany Pond yesterday, I met a woman who, after she found out I taught evolution, told me that evolution was a fiction because it couldn’t explain where everything came from in the first place. Then she asked me if I’d studied the Bible. I told her I actuall read the Bible (how many atheist scientists have done that?), and she said, “No, I mean really studied it.”  I told her to read my book Faith Versus Fact and politely made my farewells.

But I digress; here the boys attempt (but fail) to reconcile science and religion.

 

The rights of chimpanzees (and other sentient animals)

July 24, 2026 • 9:00 am

You’ll know Peter Singer as an Australian moral philosopher who does practical philosophy: stuff that helps us figour out how to lead better lives in the real world.  One of his well-known books is Animal Liberation (1975), which argued for animal rights from a utilitarian perspective. Though that perspective has been criticized, there are other philosophical arguments for animal rights.

Singer describes himself as a “flexible vegan” who occasionally eats dairy products. But he wears no animal products, i.e., stuff made of leather. He’s also against many forms of animal experimentation. Even if you think it’s okay to cage and make animals suffer to test drugs/vaccines intended for humans, I think most of us would find it unconscionable to test things like cosmetics on animals. And indeed, animal-free cosmetic testing has burgeoned in the last few decades, due largely, I think, to Singer’s book.

Which brings us to an article Singer wrote on his Substack “Bold Reasoning“, a site to which you can subscribe, even for free. Reader Keith brought the article below to my attention, and it’s heartbreaking (to me at least), but will surely make you think.

Although I’m not a vegetarian, I don’t eat much meat and am trying to eat less. I am a pretty staunch opponent of zoos and aquariums because they often restrict animals to the point where they become neurotic.  They are not needed for science (most zoos and aquaria don’t do or publish any science), and as for conservation, well, you can watch a video made in the wild if you want to teach people to conserve animals.  The sarcastic H. L. Mencken had a pretty good take on this stuff in his short essay “The Zoo” from 1918.

Singer’s piece begins with the story of a chimp taught some American Sign Language, who signed “Key Out” several times, meaning that the chimp knew that the key would let him out of his cage.  Maybe that was not the chimp’s intent, but it well could have been. Singer then moves to a recently-settled court case involving seven chimps held captive in Michigan—and not for research purposes—who were the subject of an unsuccessful lawsuit.  I quote Singer (his words are indented):

Bruno’s [the signing chimp] story is key to understanding the case that recently came before the Michigan Supreme Court.

The case concerns seven chimpanzees held at the roadside zoo called the DeYoung Family Zoo in Wallace, Michigan. The Nonhuman Rights Project, which brought the legal action on their behalf, calls them the DeYoung Prisoners.

The seven DeYoung Prisoners cannot make that request in American Sign Language. Nor can they walk into a courtroom and ask a judge to hear them. The Nonhuman Rights Project is asking the law to consider their claim to the fundamental right that all persons have, not to be deprived of their bodily liberty without sufficient cause.

Only one of the seven is publicly identified by name. Louie was brought to the DeYoung zoo in 2010, when he was six weeks old. He was used for at least the first two years of his life as a prop in paid photo opportunities. Photographs and videos show him restrained on a fixed leash and made to interact with children and other zoo visitors.

The evidence submitted in the case indicates that Louie later spent many years without the companionship of another chimpanzee.

The other six chimpanzees are identified in the complaint as Prisoners B through G. Five were previously held at the Missouri Primate Foundation, a chimpanzee breeding facility that supplied animals to the exotic-animal trade and entertainment industry. Another was born at the DeYoung zoo and was removed from her mother while still an infant.

Chimpanzees are profoundly social beings. Martha Nussbaum, who submitted an amicus brief supporting the case, noted that they naturally live in communities that may include between 20 and 200 individuals, moving among different social subgroups and forming complex relationships. The DeYoung Prisoners, by contrast, are limited to their small group of seven—when they have access even to one another.

In December 2023, The Nonhuman Rights Project filed a habeas corpus complaint on their behalf.

Habeas corpus is the legal procedure through which a court examines whether an individual is being lawfully confined. The Nonhuman Rights Project asked the court to require the roadside zoo to justify the chimpanzees’ confinement and, ultimately, to order their transfer to a chimpanzee sanctuary accredited by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries.

The case does not claim that chimpanzees are human beings. Nor does it ask that chimpanzees receive every legal right possessed by humans.

It asks a narrower but fundamental question:

Can these chimpanzees be recognized as legal “persons” for purposes of habeas corpus—that is, are they entitled to ask a court to examine whether their confinement is lawful?

Recognizing them as persons for this limited purpose would give them the opportunity to have the legality of their confinement considered.

Note that these chimps, highly sentient and social beings, were confined purely for breeding with the ultimate aim of entertaining others or going to zoos. (In my view, no chimp belongs in a zoo.)  There were no medical or research benefits to be gained. Yet a week ago the Michigan Supreme Court ruled against the “person” suit by refusing to take up the appeal after the “personhood” claim had been denied by a lower court. And this even though Singer himself and Martha Nussbaum filed amicus brie and Jane Goodall testified for the plaintiffs.

. . .The lower court reasoned that legal rights belong only to beings capable of taking on legal duties—for example, by understanding society’s laws and agreeing to follow them. Because chimpanzees cannot do that, the court concluded that they cannot be legal persons entitled to seek habeas corpus.

Justice Elizabeth Welch dissented from the Michigan Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case. She argued that the law should not be frozen by centuries-old ideas about animals as property, especially when modern science has revealed so much about chimpanzees’ minds and emotional lives.

She wrote that the evidence shows chimpanzees can “think, feel, love, grieve, and yearn.” She also referred to my book The Expanding Circle, which examines how moral progress has often required us to extend our concern beyond boundaries that earlier generations took for granted.

Justice Welch’s dissent does not free the DeYoung Prisoners. But it recognizes that calling an intelligent, self-aware, emotionally complex being “property” does not answer the question of whether that being has an interest in freedom.

Whether or not you can take on legal duties, which in the construal above surely does not apply to severely mentally ill or autistic people, cannot be a consideration for whether you can cage people, so why is it even a consideration for other animals, especially ones capable of humanlike suffering? One can of course do experiments to see what kind of habitat/life animals prefer, simply by giving them a choice, and such experiments have been done, showing things like chickens prefer more natural habitat than battery cages (see here).  Singer continues:

. . . . The seven DeYoung Prisoners remain confined.

Justice Welch’s dissent deserves to be widely read as it gives serious legal and moral consideration to a claim that American courts have so far rejected.

Read Justice Welch’s dissent in full.

The court’s website may be inaccessible in some countries, so I am also reproducing Justice Welch’s dissent in full below. [JAC: you can also read the dissent at the link.]

It’s a very good dissent, and includes these words:

Plaintiff, its expert witnesses, and supporting amici present considerable and seemingly undisputed scientific evidence that chimpanzees possess autonomy, self determination, and numerous advanced cognitive abilities.1 The evidence demonstrates that chimpanzees are remarkably intelligent, that they are self-aware, that they plan for the future, that they exhibit empathy and compassion toward other living beings, and that they grieve the loss of loved ones. Based on the evidence presented, chimpanzees appear unsuited for confinement.

Confinement for entertainment is doubly wrong, for there is no utilitarian benefit for “entertainment” that can plausibly outweigh the suffering of confined chimps.  And the “conservation” excuse holds no water for me.

Singer notes that you can sign a petition to transfer these chimps to a sanctuary, and the link is below. I have signed it.

Louie and the six other chimpanzees remain confined at the DeYoung Family Zoo. The Nonhuman Rights Project is calling for them to be transferred to an accredited sanctuary, where they could live in an environment suited to their social, physical, and psychological needs.

Sign the petition to demand their freedom.

The way we treat animals is one of the things that in the future will likely be seen as immoral (another is our refusal to let suffering and terminally ill patients get medical assistance in dying).  We are by no means sitting on an ethical “adaptive peak” in which movement in any direction leads to a decline in morality. Steve Pinker has documented the general increase in morality over time in several of his books.

Readers’ wildlife video

July 24, 2026 • 8:15 am

We have another short video from Tara Tanaka in Florida, whose property is a wetlands and also a wildlife sanctuary. Tara’s notes are indented below:

There is a large church property directly across the truck route from our wildlife sanctuary, and a developer is about to meet with the county to discuss building a 108-single family subdivision on part of the property. According to the neighbor who is working to inform those affected by the proposed development: “Any development of that size would have devastating impacts on the character of our surrounding neighborhoods. The traffic impacts would further clog our roads, making traffic even worse than it already is. The light pollution coming from a site with 108 new homes would disrupt our tranquil way of life. Water runoff from the site will only worsen the flooding we see after rain events, especially to our neighbors in Riverwood Acres. And no one really knows of the impacts a new development would have on the wildlife we currently enjoy year-round.”

Some in the neighborhood are meeting with a reporter from a local TV station to make people aware of what is happening, and I was asked to provide video footage of some of the wildlife that nest, spend time in, and pass through the sanctuary, and I wanted to share it here as well.

How many species can you identify?