NYT editor decries “intersectionality”, says Chicago Dyke March was wrong to ban the Jewish Pride flag; Dyke March says it was misunderstood.

June 30, 2017 • 12:00 pm

As I reported a few days ago, this year’s Dyke March, part of Chicago’s Gay Pride celebrations, kicked out a handful of Jewish women who were carrying “Jewish Pride” flags: multicolored Gay Pride flags with a white Star of David in the middle. I call that an act of anti-Semitism, and so does Bari Weiss, who happens to be a staff editor at the New York Times. She posted about it on Tuesday, in an op-ed with the intriguing title, “I’m glad the Dyke March banned Jewish stars“.

Why, pray tell, is Weiss glad? Because the Dyke March’s actions expose the hypocrisy and unworkability of “intersectionality” as a part of social justice. As she says,

I’m sorry for the women, like Ms. Grauer, who found themselves under genuine threat for carrying a colorful cloth falsely accused of being pernicious.

But I am also grateful.

Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of “intersectionality” than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March?

Intersectionality is the big idea of today’s progressive left. [JAC: I’d say “regressive” left, for many progressives don’t sign on to “intersectionality” as it’s used.] In theory, it’s the benign notion that every form of social oppression is linked to every other social oppression. This observation — coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw — sounds like just another way of rephrasing a slogan from a poster I had in college: My liberation is bound up with yours. That is, the fight for women’s rights is tied up with the fight for gay rights and civil rights and so forth. Who would dissent from the seductive notion of a global sisterhood?

Well, in practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.

Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.

. . . though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.

That’s why the march organizers and their sympathizers are now trying to smear Ms. Grauer as some sort of right-wing provocateur. Their evidence: She works at an organization called A Wider Bridge, which connects the L.G.B.T.Q. Jewish community in America with the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Israel. The organizers are also making the spurious claim that the Jewish star is necessarily a symbol of Zionist oppression — a breathtaking claim to anyone who has ever seen a picture of a Jew forced to wear a yellow one under the Nazis.

No, the truth is that it was no more and no less than anti-Semitism. Just read Ms. Shoshany Anderson’s account of her experience, which she posted on Facebook after being kicked out of the march.

Unfortunately, Ms, Weis isn’t all that woke, as she seems to be realizing only now that the Left harbors a large component of anti-Semitism, particularly on the Regressive Left. Here’s her last paragraph:

It may be wrong to read too much into an ugly incident at a single march, but Jews should take what happened in Chicago as a lesson that they might not be as welcome among progressives as they might imagine. That’s a warning for which to be grateful, even as it is a reminder that anti-Semitism remains as much a problem on the far-left as it is on the alt-right.

Earth to Bari Weiss: your piece is very good, but you can absolutely read what you did read into the March. The Cntrl-Left segment of “progressives” has been anti-Semitic for years. They call it “anti-Zionist”, but that’s just a euphemism. If you don’t think the state of Israel should exist, and was wrongly founded as a homeland for expelled Jews, then yes, you’re anti-Semitic.

Now one of the organizers of the Dyke March, Alexis Martinez, taken by surprise at the negative reaction to the expulsion of Jews, has responded in an interview on the gay site Windy City Times. I find the response disingenuous and unconvincing, motivated by the very bad press the Dyke March Collective got.  Their story is that the Jewish Pride Flag Wavers were expelled not for their flag, but because they were chanting. What were they chanting? Well, they were said to be chanting a response to pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist marchers who were already chanting “No walls from Mexico to Palestine.”

According to Martinez, the Jewish women then chanted, in response, “No walls anywhere.”

That was all it took to boot their asses out. Martinez doesn’t see the irony of her own account:

The first thing I want to say is that this was never about the Jewish Pride flags. They never came into the conversations. As long as I’ve been an organizer, Laurel has always marched [in the Dyke March] with that flag. I had a conversation on text message with Laurel the night before. She asked me if people would be protesting her Jewish flag. I told her “No. It’s never been an issue and it shouldn’t be an issue.” But I also told her very clearly that we were anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian and she needed to understand that and the nature of the event.

. . . They were taking ‘No walls from Mexico to Palestine’ and they started with “No walls anywhere.” They were disrupting the chants and nobody said anything to them.

What happened at the site [of the rally] was some Palestinian Queers who came up to organizers and said they were being antagonized verbally. The Jewish contingent kept agitating and being aggressive about presenting a pro-Zionist position to Palestinian women.

I would say 15 or 20 minutes after we entered the park. One of the organizers came to me and said “Alexis, you have to do something about this.” So, I went over and talked to Laurel. She tried to make it about the flag. I said “Nobody’s got anything against your flag. Wave it proudly. I am asking you if you’re trying to present a pro-Palestinian, pro-Zionist point-of-view.”

She said that she was proud of her Zionist views and she needed to be able to express them. I told her “This isn’t the format to do that. Either you have to stop or you have to leave.” They refused. We don’t have an armed security force to push people out so I left. They stayed around the park until the whole event was over. They were still there an hour and a half later.

So it wasn’t just a Dyke March, it was a pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic Dyke March, and the statement “no walls anywhere” was somehow taken to be disruptive, and offensive to the Palestinian Queers (n.b. Queers are prohibited in Palestine but not Israel). And that chant alone isn’t even pro-Zionist, much less pro-Israel.

It’s clear from Martinez’s long account that she’s trying to rationalize expelling the Jewish dykes because they were “Zionists,” yet at the same time saying that, vis-à-vis the world, they’re not an explicitly political march. The fact is, all this confusion just reflects their upset at being called out, and their haste to confect rationalizations, viz,:

. . . the media and social media outrage was almost instantaneous and we got hit from every possible site and angle. I have never seen any member of the Collective make anti-Semitic statements. We’re anti-Zionism and people are conflating that into being anti-Semitic. They’re saying that we acted against Jewish queer women and it’s just a complete falsehood. Anyone who interprets our political positions as anti-Semitic is profoundly wrong. They’re misinformed. There’s nothing in our history that indicates that.

and

 What we stand against is oppressive governments be they in Israel, El Salvador, Nicaragua; if people are struggling for their freedom, we try to show support in the context of the small organization that we are. The State of Israel is not endangered by anything we have to say at Dyke March and neither was Laurel. Nobody attacked her.

How hypocritical can you get? If they’re talking about oppression of women and gays, well, Palestine is infinitely worse than Israel—not to mention Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and so on. Why single out and demonize Israel? Because they oppress the oppressive and homophobic Palestinians.

But wait–there’s more! The Dyke March wasn’t political!

WCT: So, you are saying that, if the women had minded their own business, enjoyed the rally and not engaged others, that would have been fine?

AM: Right. We’re not there to resolve the political issues of the world. Laurel could have approached Dyke March at any point prior to the march and requested to make a statement but she used the occasion as a representative of A Wider Bridge to inject herself into a space and then ferment dissention.

They’re not there to resolve the political issues of the world—except to bring up Palestinian political issues and suppress dissent from them. Finally, there’s this:

WCT: There are a lot of nation states which are oppressive to populations. Example, the British to Northern Ireland, the Australians to the Aboriginal people, France to the Muslims living within its borders, Iran to the LGBTQ people living there. Is the presence of such people or open support of their government’s policies whether verbal or in a manner of dress or a sign also unacceptable at Dyke March?

AM: We’re not ignoring that. It’s why you see very few flags [at the march]. But we’re pro-Palestinian. We think that the Palestinian struggle demonstrates a good model for what constitutes oppression. [JAC: except for oppression of gays! Why not North Korea, which oppresses nearly all of its citizens?] You have a military power that subjugates a group of people. It could be any number of places in the world including the US. But I’m not going to stop somebody from wearing a US flag tattoo or whatever. It’s only if you begin to agitate a point of view that creates a condition that could explode into something much bigger. We have to be the judge of that. It’s not just hurt feelings. It could become physical. If somebody gets hurt, we are going to be held accountable. I don’t get sucked into arguments with circular logic. If you want to debate Zionism, there’s other forums for that. I’m not going to ban you from my event.

Who is “we”? I guess it’s all the dykes who aren’t Jewish, and if that’s the case, then Jewish lesbians aren’t welcome unless they keep their mouth shut. Pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic lesbians, of course, are free to chant.

You can read the long interview for yourselves; I’ll show just one more bit of dissimulation, pretending that all cultures are equally homophobic (my emphasis in Martinez’s answer):

WCT: Some commentators challenged you to hold the Dyke March in the middle of the Gaza Strip and “see what happens”—that the Palestinians would respond with violence. How do your respond to that argument?

AM: If we had our march nearly anywhere in the world, we run the risk of being attacked. There are Gay Pride marches being attacked everywhere. Even in Israel. Queer people have civil rights there but that doesn’t give you a free pass on not giving Palestinians equal rights. Having equal rights for queer people in the US doesn’t give us the right to ignore the problems that queer people of color face.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: you see how far the termites have gone, and how well they’ve dined. To buttress her anti-Semitism, Martinez pretends that gays are just as bad off in Palestine as in Israel. That, of course, is bullpucky.

What the whole interview demonstrates is what the Times’s Bari Weiss realized too late: the cancer of anti-Semitism, masquerading as anti-Zionism, is metastasizing through much of the Left, and has now infiltrated the gay community. One would think that a gay pride march would decry the oppression, hatred, and execution of gays by Muslims in Muslim-majority lands. But no, they ignore it. Because for them, “intersectionality” puts being brown (i.e., Palestinian) higher than being gay in the Scale of Oppression. What a confused pride of people!

My WaPo review of a new book on gene editing

June 30, 2017 • 10:45 am

I’ve reviewed the new book by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and The Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution; my piece is online at today’s Washington Post and will be on the first page of the “Outlook” section in the Sunday paper. The review is free to access, and is called “New gene-editing tool could cure disease. Or customize kids. Or aid bioterrorism.”

I won’t give excerpts here, as you should read it on the WaPo website, but I will say that the book is good and well worth reading; and I’ll add a few tidbits about the science.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system of gene editing, which hijacks bacterial immune-system genes as a tool to edit genes in other species, is immensely clever and has huge ramifications for biotechnology in many species, including ours. The most publicized use is, of course, to cure genetic diseases by replacing defective genes with normal ones in embryos or somatic tissue. It could, for instance, fix the mutant sickle-cell gene in those suffering from that horrible malady, or edit out the HIV virus lurking in the genomes of infected patients.

CRISPR/Cas9 also offers the possibility of customizing your child’s genome via “positive eugenics”, though I doubt that using the system to make your kids smarter or better looking is in the immediate offing. It’s also useful for changing the genes of crops (making them generate, for instance, their own insecticides) or domestic animals (it’s already been used to produce disease-resistant swine). And of course it’s the tool of choice to “resurrect” the wooly mammoth, but that’s not really happening the way we think. The plan for that involves replacing some Asian elephant genes with genes identified in the mammoth genome that are likely to produce longer hair and longer tusks. What we’ll really produce is an elephant that looks somewhat like a mammoth, but will be able to cross only with other such “hybrids” or with Asian elephants. We’re not even near the point where we can bring back extinct species with this technique.

Like the double-helix structure and the methods of DNA amplification and sequencing before it, there’s little doubt that the development of CRISPR/Cas9 as a gene-editing tool will garner a Nobel Prize. But who will get it? Several people could claim credit for the research, including Doudna, her French collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute, George Church at Harvard, and others. Each Nobel is limited to three recipients each, but you could get up to six if you award the prize for both Medicine & Physiology and Chemistry.

The Credit Wars are far more bitter with respect to the patents, as the Broad Institute is in court against the University of Californa at Berkeley (Doudna’s home), with both institutions claiming credit for developing CRISPR/Cas9. There are millions to be made from licensing the system out to biotech companies, though, as I say in my review, I consider it unethical for scientists and their universities to profit from taxpayer-funded research.

In the meantime, the Broad has won the preliminary patent rights, but Berkeley is appealing. And there’s an acrimonious fight between Eric Lander—head of the Broad, who wrote a self-serving article in Cell (“The heroes of CRISPR“) that basically gave his boy Zhang credit for it all and downplayed the contributions of Doudna and Charpentier—and Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley colleague of Doudna who ripped Lander apart on his own website’s post, “The Villiain of CRISPR.” (To give Eisen credit, he’s not simply defending Doudna because they’re colleagues, for he feels, as do I, that neither Zhang nor Doudna nor their academic homes should get patents on the CRISPR system.)  Having read a ton on CRISPR/Cas9 for my review—I figure that with the work I put in reading the book twice and doing background research, my fee works out to about $5 per hour—I side with Eisen on this one. Feng made a big contribution in getting CRISPR to work in human cells, and for that probably deserves a share of the Prize, but so, I think, do Doudna and Charpentier. Lander simply rewrote history in favor of his Institute, which, like Berkeley, could profit immensely from patents.

If you’re a fan of biology and genetics, do read Doudna and Sternberg’s book, for we’re going to hear a lot more about CRISPR in the future. You’ll want to learn how it works and something about its history. (It began simply with some curious investigators, having no thoughts about gene editing, wondering why there was a strange bit of palindromic DNA in the genomes of some bacteria.) A Crack in Creation (good title!) is excellent on this, and very accessible. Where it falls down is in its discussion of the ethics of gene editing (see my review) and in largely ignoring the battle for credit and patents swirling about CRISPR. My criticisms of these two points are largely quibbles, but a full recounting of the CRISPR story would show that scientists are human, and sometimes eager for credit and wealth.

New NRA ad is bigoted, divisive, and almost calls for violence

June 30, 2017 • 9:30 am

On the National Rifle Association’s (NRA’s) Facebook page. you can see their latest video, which has just gone up on YouTube. I’ve put it below (if it disappears, see it here). Listen to the rancor of NRA spokeswoman and conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch:

Here’s the transcript as it appears on Business Insider:

“They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.

“All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding — until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.

“And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America, and I’m freedom’s safest place.”

Who are “they”? Apparently liberals,  demonstrators (read: black people), and those who don’t like “President” Trump. What should we do about their actions? Shoot the bloody hell out of them! For “the clenched fist of truth” surely represents guns, though even the NRA dares not say, “Shoot those liberals and black people demonstrating in the streets.” I find the ad, as I said, bigoted, divisive, and almost an incitement to violence. It’s surely an incitement to join the NRA and BUY MORE GUNS.

As for Obama “endorsing the resistance,” all he’s done is say that Trump’s new policies are misguided, which they are. If that’s “resistance,” so be it.

And as Business Insider reports, liberals were predictably enraged, but so were some conservatives:

The ad prompted backlash from some progressives, who called it “an open call to violence” and “barely a whisper shy of a call for full civil war.”

The conservative columnist Anne Applebaum also denounced the ad, saying it called on Americans “to arm themselves to fight liberals. Violence is coming.”

Loesch doubled down in a Periscope video posted on Wednesday night, saying that “the language of the left is violence” and calling “these people … the dullest crayons in the box.”

The ad’s language echoes what NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

“Right now, we face a gathering of forces that are willing to use violence against us,” he said, citing “the leftist radical plan to tax capitalism to collapse” and “the ISIS dream of a worldwide caliphate.”

“A lot of people, for a lot of reasons, want to blow it all up and tear the whole thing down,” LaPierre said. “The left’s message is absolutely clear. They want revenge. You have to be punished. They say you are what is wrong with America and now you have to be purged.”

I can think of few organizations—besides those like the Klan or other white supremacist groups—that are as hateful as the NRA. But the NRA is even worse, for, by perpetuating America’s violent culture of guns, it’s immensely dangerous. 

_______

UPDATE: Reader Pliny the in Between produced this cartoon called “I think this is another NRA PSA”:

Friday: readers’ wildlife photographs

June 30, 2017 • 7:45 am

The Long Holiday Weekend is starting in America, and I may postpone readers’ wildlife photos till next Wednesday if readership is low: after all, anyone who sends in photos would want a lot of people to see them. But today we have our regular photos, and these come from Jacques Hausser in Switzerland and Stephen Barnard in Idaho. Jacques begins with a personal note:

There are still people working on the MIMs (Most Interesting Mammals)! It reminds me the good old times before my retirement, 9 years ago. . . tempus fugit. And two photos of invaders; hereunder with the comments.

The Sphecidae are solitary wasps towing their abdomen at the end of a long and thin pedicel. Adults feed on flowers, but for their future larvae, they catch and paralyse spiders, katydids or caterpillars, depending of the species. Larvae develop by slowly devouring the unfortunate prey, which remain alive. Here pictures of two allochtoon species that invaded Europe (which I didn’t know when I shot them).

Sceliphron curvatum is a Himalayan species that invaded Europe in the eighties. It hunts spiders to feed its larvae and installs them with its egg in individual “amphorae” built with mud. This one was born. . . in my bedroom, together with several sisters and brothers: it’s not always a good idea to leave the window open all the day for weeks. Unfortunately the “amphorae” were not easily reachable and I have no pictures (there are good ones in Wikipedia)..

JAC: Here’s a lovely mud amphora of this species from Wikipedia:

Isodontia mexicana is an American species accidentally introduced in Europe in the sixties. Until recently it was limited to Mediterranean regions, but with global warming it is progressing north and I found this one in my garden (foot of the Jura mountains, 750 metres high) two weeks ago. It hunts small katydids and makes its nest with plant debris in hollow twigs (or holes made by other insects), then closes it with dry grass.

Here it’s feeding on Aegopodium podagraria along with a tiny beetle, Anthrenus pimpinellae:


 

UPDATE: Roger Latour of Montreal has more on this wasp, both notes and photos:

For a few summers my apartment (Montreal) was invaded by that exotic wasp. I have no screens in my doors and windows so insects are always coming right in… moths, flies, bees and honeybees, wasps and even unknown species!
This species was not recorded before in North America and I had the opportunity to document its complete life cycle. I used to run a blog on mainly urban biodiversity and have published a few posts on the subject. In French: https://floraurbana.blogspot.ca/2013/07/la-pelopee-courbee-sceliphron-curvatum.html.I am sending you these photographs:
The first photo below shows the content of ONE amphora.
Look at all those spiders to eat!
Sitticus fasciger Salticus scenicus

The other photo shows an uncompleted amphora, not yet capped. You can see the larvae of the wasp sucking up the paralyzed (but still alive) jumping spider (Salticidae) apparently the favorite diet of that wasp:

Next, Stephen Barnard in Idaho is still amazed that Willie the Wilson’s Snipe (Gallinago delicata)is still hanging about:

Stephen sent another photo of the Idaho Gadwall Gang. His comment: “Eleven this morning.” That is, all eleven ducklings are still alive. The proof (and not that they’re growing):

And a photo Stephen titles, “Spot the eleven ducklings (Easy)”:

Friday: Hili dialogue

June 30, 2017 • 6:30 am

Well, we’re already halfway through the year, at least in terms of months, as it’s June 30, 2017, and a Friday. (It’s actually only the 181st day of the year.) This is a holiday weekend in the U.S., as Independence Day (July 4) is on Tuesday, and Americans (not me!) will be taking both taking Monday and Tuesday off. It’s also my sister’s birthday and thus my half-birthday, as I was born on December 30. Appropriately for a Friday, it’s National Mai Tai Day, though I usually eschew such sweet and fruity libations. It’s also International Asteroid Day, but nobody will observe that except, perhaps, at observatories. Count on Neil deGrasse Tyson to tweet it.

On this day in 1520, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his troops battled their way out of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital built on the site of what is now central Mexico City. In the next year Cortés retook the city, killing hundreds of thousands while losing few of his own troops. On June 30, 1859, the French acrobat Charles Blondin walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope, a feat I still find unimaginable, though many have now done it. Here’s a photo of his feat—he crossed in both directions, and on the way back carried a camera strapped to his back, stopping in the middle to take a photo!:

It’s a famous day for evolutionary biology, for on June 30, 1860, the Great Oxford evolution debate debate took place at the Oxford Museum of Natural History. The participants included Thomas Henry Huxley, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, Benjamin Brodie, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Robert FitzRoy, captain on the Beagle voyage. The famous exchange between Wilberforce and Huxley, in which the Bishop asked Huxley if he was descended from an ape on his mother’s or father’s side, and Huxley replying that he’d rather be descended from an ape than from a man who would use his great speaking powers to distort the truth—well, all that may not have happened exactly as it’s told. But it was still a great day for evolution!

Exactly two years later, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was completed; Google has celebrated it with a five-part Doodle. Click on the screenshot to see it:

On this day in the “Miracle Year” of 1905, Albert Einstein submitted his article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, introducing his theory of special relativity, for publication in Annalen der Physik. In 1966, The National Organization for Women was founded, and on this day in 1997, the UK handed over Hong Kong to China.

Notables born on June 30 include Susan Hayward and Lena Horne (both 1917), biochemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Berg (1926), and my sister Susan J. Coyne (1952; happy birthday, Sis!). Those who died on this day included Nancy Mitford (1973), Chet Atkins (2001), and Buddy Hackett 2003). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, having learned about her wild ancestors, pretends she is one:

A: Hili, What are you doing?
Hili: I’m hunting big game.
 In Polish:
Ja: Hili, co ty robisz?
Hili: Poluję na grubego zwierza.

Out in Winnipeg, Gus is again drinking from the watering can, and watching his favorite sight: a squirrel named Ginger/Fred, so called because a). it dances on the fence and b). its sex is still indeterminate. Staff member Taskin reports:

Gus at his favourite watering hole. and one of GingerFred, apparently waiting for someone to measure how long she is. Look at those great toes!

Finally, a nice tweet found by Matthew:

Cat learns how to knead from video

June 29, 2017 • 2:45 pm

When cats massage an object or a human by pushing their paws alternately, I call it “making biscuits”. Others call it kneading.  Why do they do it? Nobody knows for sure, but LiveScience has a number of explanations (I favor the first two, as the behavior, seen in nursing kittens, appears very early and seems instinctive):

The most oft-repeated explanation states that kneading is a leftover behavior from kittenhood. During nursing, a kitten will knead the area around its mother’s teat to promote the flow of milk.

In adulthood, a cat supposedly will knead when it’s feeling happy or content because it associates the motion with the comforts of nursing and its mother. Adding further weight to the explanation: Some cats even suckle on the surface they’re kneading.

Another hypothesis proposes that kneading harks back to a time before domestication, when wild cats supposedly patted down foliage to make a soft surface for sleeping or giving birth. The behavior may now be an instinctual part of settling down.

On the other hand, kneading may just be another way for cats to scent and claim an area — cats have scent glands in the pads of their paws.

Regardless, here’s a moggie learning how to do it right from a video.