Luna enters our world.

In 2018 we sadly said goodbye to our two oldest feline friends. Hugo and Nadia both departed the planet at the age of 16, and as noted previously, their absence impelled our feral adoptee Mila to opt for a degree of self-domestication.

Nearing middle age (circa 7 years old), she's generally sedate and perfectly content to kick back and survey the scene without undue motion.

Now for something completely different. This is Luna, and the 1117 East Spring Street Neighborhood Association welcomes her to the house.

Luna is around 8 months old, and recently was brought to Access Veterinary with a broken right rear leg by a family who couldn't care for her any longer. Our friends Dr. Smock and Dr. Rowland repaired the damage; Luna has a pin in her leg and is currently equipped with a plastic head guard to prevent her from tearing the sutures.

Hopefully she'll be as right as rain in three weeks, and we are delighted to give a kitty a home. It's a serendipitous reboot to our household cat program, and we're grateful to the docs and their excellent team at Access for letting us know Luna needed us.

For the first three or so weeks, Luna gets to camp in this nice tent. That's because she cannot wander the house unattended owing to the danger of jumping on tables and furniture, and possibly reinjuring her leg. Diana set up Luna's perimeter.

Luna isn't tremendously happy with being restricted to quarters.

Job one is to wait until the incision is healed so she can be relieved of her head gear. Then it's a matter of grinding out the weeks until she can be set free to roam.

Will Mila approve? Stay tuned. I'm already exhausted, but the house feels like a home again.

R.I.P. Miss Nadia, our spark plug gourmand comedian and longtime feline companion.

Our cherished friend Miss Nadia cashed out her ninth and final life on December 20, while we were in Bamberg during the Munich trip. Our human friends and diligent cat-sitters Karen and Jeff were with Nadia at the end, for which we're extremely grateful.

People don't come any better than those two.

Nadia was 16, around 80 in human years. She'd suddenly lost her appetite in early November, and for a cat whose life revolved around food, this was a warning sign. After a couple of visits to the vet, the collective decision was bad teeth, which implied extensive oral surgery. We knew there were risks. Although weakened, Nadia seemed to make it through this ordeal fairly well. She was getting better, but there came a sudden turn, and she was gone.

We were asked to consider a necropsy (an autopsy for animals), and agreed. It showed the blood work lab results to have been errant, somehow missing a metastatic cancer stemming from Nadia's thyroid issues -- a phenomenon rarely triggered, but fast-moving and deadly. Of course, had we known this, there'd have been only one sad course of action. As it stands, Nadia died peacefully at home. We can only hope she wasn't in too much pain.

In 2018, we said goodbye to both our elderly cats, as Hugo's death preceded Nadia's by 10 months (he also was 16). Ironically, Hugo passed away just prior to our return from Portugal in February. What are the odds?

At any rate, let's not regret Nadia's passing. After all, we'll be eternally thankful for having experienced her amazingly out-sized personality.

Nadia didn't walk into a room, but sashayed, exaggeratedly shaking her butt and announcing her presence -- and the imminent need for a tasty morsel. She was an epic chatterbox with a startling array of sounds and noises that might have led the untutored to believe a duck or squirrel had wandered past. I'm unembarrassed to concede that Nadia and I had daily conversations, during which I'd harangue her and she'd answer, or sometimes vice versa.

I'll miss those. She was a receptive sounding board for my writing ideas, and never once advised me to tone it down. 

With Nadia and Hugo both gone, there no longer exists any need to separate them, which we'd done for behavioral reasons seven or eight years ago. The interior doors have been thrown open, and our second-floor-only feral refugee Mila (circa seven years old) has the run of the whole house.

Following Hugo's loss, Mila abruptly executed a quantum leap in terms of opting for a degree of domestication, and now that Nadia is gone, she's done it yet again.

Mila sometimes spends the bulk of the night on the bed with us, which is amazing given that she essentially refused to be touched by human hands prior to March of 2018. She'll never be a lap cat, and that's fine. We're just beginning to witness the range of her distinctive personality, and it's fascinating. 

Uncharacteristically for me, it's taken all this time to gird up for the task of reporting Nadia's passing and eulogizing this wonderful creature, who brought so much mirth and joy into our household. It's been a month, and maybe I'm still a tad numb. Life's about death, and speaking candidly, there's been too damn much death in my life these past couple of years.

However, when we sign on to be adults, we accept the conditions of mourning. As noted, lamentations for the departed are another way to celebrate their lives, and make no mistake: Nadia had one hell of a rollicking, exuberant life. We probably won't see the likes of her again.

And yet ... yesterday we heard about a injured kitten in need of a home. After all, serendipity forever lurks beyond the shady corners of our conscious lives, and kismet inevitably awaits. 

I'll keep you posted.

Cats keep rodents in check -- well, except for this one.

And then there were two.

Since 20011, the oldest and youngest house cats have departed for that great litter box in the sky, leaving Hugo (below; the No Tolls Kitty) and Nadia (above). At roughly 12 and 11 years of age, respectively, they've both raced past me, into their sixties. Nadia is noticeable graying. As the missus often has pointed out, it's gratifying to share in their life spans; both were rescued at a tender age, and they're part of the family.

The article here resonates because of its reference to evolution in the form of reward for feline work performed v.v. rodents. In all the time Nadia's been with us, she's managed to kill exactly one mouse. In fairness, we haven't had many mice over the years, but lately, she's been particularly inept. She seems to be playing with the mouse, not making a sincere effort to dispatch it.

We've concluded that the one and only successful kill was no kill at all. It must have been accidental homicide.

Why cats never became man’s best friend, by Gwynn Guilford (Quartz)

Dog lovers will find it baffling that cats are the world’s most popular pet. After all, they’re passive-aggressive, emotionally unavailable, and known for their chilly independence—traits that at most qualify felines for the role of “man’s best frenemy.”

It turns out, though, there’s an evolutionary reason for this tense relationship. That is, cats are in many ways still wild.

“Cats, unlike dogs, are really only semi-domesticated,” says Wes Warren, professor of genetics Washington University and co-author of the first complete mapping (paywall) of the house cat genome—specifically, that of an Abyssinian named Cinnamon.

Comparing the DNA differences between house cats and wild cats, Warren and his colleagues found that where the genes of domesticated kitties and wild cats diverge has to do with fur patterns, grace, and docility. The latter are the genes that influence behaviors such as reward-seeking and response to fear.

The divergence likely began some 9,000 years ago, after humans had made the shift to agriculture. Drawn to the teeming rodent populations that gathered during grain harvests, wild cats began interacting with humans. And because cats kept rodents in check, the researchers hypothesize, humans likely encouraged them to stay by offering them food scraps as a reward. These early farmers eventually kept cats that stuck around.

“Selection for docility, as a result of becoming accustomed to humans for food rewards,” write the researchers, “was most likely the major force that altered the first domesticated cat genomes.” In other words, the ones that stuck around were the cats with those genes that encouraged interaction with humans, thereby making those traits prevalent in what became the global domestic cat population.
As intriguing, though, is what didn’t change in human-friendly cats during those nine millennia. House cats still have the broadest hearing range among carnivores, which allows them to detect their prey’s movement. They also retain their night-vision abilities and the ability to digest high-protein, high-fat diets. This implies that, unlike those of dogs, their genes haven’t evolved to make cats dependent on humans for food.
This indicates only a modest influence of domestication on cat genes, compared with dogs, say the researchers. In fact, according to recent research on canine genomes, dogs became man’s best friend back when humans were still hunting and gathering—between 11,000 and 16,000 years ago. Their typically more omnivorous diets evolved as human lifestyle shifted toward agrarian living.
So why have kitties stayed wilder? The genome-mappers theorize it’s because house cat populations have continued to interbreed with wild cats. Also, humans’ “cat fancy”—meaning, our fanaticism about creating weird cat breeds—only began in the last 200 or so years.
They came for the mice, stayed for the food scraps, and whenever it suited, kept cuddly with the cats from the other side of the granary. In other words, not only are cats still mostly wild, but they pretty much tamed themselves. Maybe that means humans are “cats’ best friend.”

Egyptians.

Banner headline Tuesday, Part Three: Nadia's nine-year slump ends with slaying of undersized mouse.

Her victory beer.

Nine years after taking up residence at the 1117 East Spring Neighborhood Association, Nadia has at last killed a mouse. The corpse was casually discarded by the kitchen counter.

The assassin was congratulated, then rewarded with a beer and her favorite gruel. Life goes on, but things will never be the same around here. Now, the mice KNOW.

Listening to Morrissey with red wine -- again. Now for the Mozz book.

When I posted this photo on Facebook a couple weeks back and suggested that Nadia had ignored my warnings and insisted on listening to Morrissey while drinking red wine, it got rave reviews.

It's been a good year for aging Smiths fans. First, an excellent solo album by Johnny Marr. Now, a Mozz autobiography in time for the holidaze.

Autobiography by Morrissey – review, by Terry Eagleton (Guardian)

The celebrated literary critic judges Mozzer's book to be superb: he is so devastatingly articulate he could win the Booker

... Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is.