Facetious is my first language.

Sources:

https://ask.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/UW468 “How Effective and Humane Is Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) for Feral Cats?” 

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6523511/ “A Case of Letting the Cat out of The Bag—Why Trap-Neuter-Return Is Not an Ethical Solution for Stray Cat (Felis catus) Management” (also has a thousand references attached that are handy)

Not a reference so much as the human society actively admitting that TNR does nothing to decrease population, actively contributes to harming wildlife, and doesn’t actually help the cats in any way, just reduces some of the nuisance behavior that people complain about: https://www.animalhumanesociety.org/resource/real-impacts-trap-neuter-return

Unscientific from here on out as i don’t feel like trying to find the studies i read in like January of last year:

https://hahf.org/awake/the-trouble-with-trap-vaccinate-neuter-return/ “The Trouble With Trap-Neuter-Re (Abandon!) from the hillsborough animal health foundation, articles also link to studies

Animal Emergency and Referral Center of Minnesota. (2022, October 26). Indoor cats vs. outdoor cats. Animal Emergency & Referral Center of Minnesota. https://aercmn.com/indoor-cats-vs-outdoor-cats/

Campbell, V. (2017, January 25). The Obituary of the Stephens Island Wren. All About Birds. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/the-obituary-of-the-stephens-island-wren/

Castillo, D., & Clarke, A. L. (2003). Trap/neuter/release methods ineffective in controlling domestic cat “colonies” on public lands. Natural Areas Journal, 23(3).

Coe, S. T., Elmore, J. A., Elizondo, E. C., & Loss, S. R. (2021). Free-ranging domestic cat abundance and sterilization percentage following five years of a trap–neuter–return program. Wildlife Biology, 2021(1). https://doi.org/10.2981/wlb.00799

del Hoyo, J., Collar, N., Kirwan, G. M., & Sharpe, C. J. (2022, October 25). Guadalupe storm-petrel (Hydrobates Macrodactylus), version 1.2. Birds of the World. https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/guspet/cur/introduction

Dickman, C. R., & Newsome, T. M. (2015). Individual hunting behaviour and prey specialisation in the house cat Felis catus: Implications for conservation and management. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 173, 76–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2014.09.021

Edge. (2019, June 19). Guadalupe storm-petrel. EDGE of Existence. https://www.edgeofexistence.org/species/guadalupe-storm-petrel/

Galbreath, R., & Brown, D. (2004). The tale of the lighthouse-keeper’s cat: Discovery and extinction of the Stephens Island wren (Traversia lyalli). Notornis, 51(4).

Hawai’i Department of Land and Natural Resources. (2025). Feral cats. Feral Cats. https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/hisc/info/invasive-species-profiles/feral-cats/#:~:text=Feral%20cats%20on%20islands%20have,kill%20approximately%202.4%20billion%20birds.

Loss, S. R., Will, T., & Marra, P. P. (2013). The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States. Nature Communications, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380

McGregor, H., Legge, S., Jones, M. E., & Johnson, C. N. (2015). Feral cats are better killers in open habitats, revealed by animal-borne video. PLOS ONE, 10(8). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0133915

Medina, F. M., Bonnaud, E., Vidal, E., Tershy, B. R., Zavaleta, E. S., Josh Donlan, C., Keitt, B. S., Corre, M., Horwath, S. V., & Nogales, M. (2011). A global review of the impacts of invasive cats on Island Endangered Vertebrates. Global Change Biology, 17(11), 3503–3510. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2011.02464.x

National Research Council. (1992, January 1). Scientific Bases for the Preservation of the Hawaiian Crow. U.S. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235935/

NOAA. (2024, August 29). Toxoplasmosis and its effects on Hawaiʻi Marine Wildlife. NOAA Fisheries. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/pacific-islands/endangered-species-conservation/toxoplasmosis-and-its-effects-hawaii-marine

Read, J. L., Dickman, C. R., Boardman, W. S., & Lepczyk, C. A. (2020). Reply to Wolf et al.: Why trap-neuter-return (TNR) is not an ethical solution for Stray Cat Management. Animals, 10(9), 1525. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10091525

Reed, L. (2022). The effects of free-roaming cats on native wildlife populations. Wildlife Rehabilitation Bulletin, 40(1), 17–21. https://doi.org/10.53607/wrb.v40.250

Salano, E. (2024, October 5). Eliciting the effect free roaming cats have on Native Hawaiian wildlife using stable isotope analysis. UKnowledge. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/biology_etds/103/ 

Steele, J. H., Thorpe, S. A., & Turekian, K. K. (2009). Encyclopedia of Ocean Sciences. Academic Press. 

My friend told me how he'd seen her before but she always vanished before he could catch her. He works far too many hours and is always tired so he couldn't prioritize catching this cat.

Three months pass with no sign of her. I go back with my partner to check on carcasses and this same little grey cat appears. This time, however, a tooth has been snapped off and her tongue is so badly cut that she can't keep it in her mouth. She was thin and dirty and screaming to please be given some food.

This time I couldn't look away. I asked my friend's girlfriend if I could borrow a cat carrier. She loaned me one and a tin of wet food that the grey cat willingly followed into the carrier. She didn't care at all about being put into the carrier - all she wanted was a hand on her. She'd arch up against the top just so my hand would rest on her back for a moment.

We drove through rush hour traffic to the only shelter still open. We knew we couldn't keep her and I couldn't stand the thought of putting her back out on the streets to die slowly.

The shelter couldn't take her. Her ear was clipped so she was a "community cat" and outside their ability to help. They tried desperately to offer alternatives to me as I cried over her carrier, knowing I couldn't take her home but also that if I didn't I couldn't live with the thought of her back on the streets.

I made a Hail Mary call to a local friend who is very connected in our city. They didn't have my number saved but answered all the same to hear me sobbing about a cat I'd found and to please help me find a place for her. Please. If I don't find something then she'll be alone on the streets again to die.

My friend came through. I could keep the cat in their garage overnight and in the morning my friend would be back in the city and could find someone to help the cat.

The shelter folk gave me a crate and some food - their hands were tied but they didn't want to leave me with nothing. They were good people doing the best they could in their own system. Community cats were ones they weren't allowed to "waste" resources on. Ostensibly they'd been dealt with and their fate decided. There was nothing the shelter folks were allowed to do for them.

I took the cat to my friend's garage. She was settled into a crate on towels, happy as a clam to be warm and safe. This was a cat made to be loved and to love, as she immediately began trying to groom one of my friend's roommates. He stayed in the garage with her, giving her food and water and in exchange having no say on whether she was in his lap or not. She was always in his lap.

Nobby Nobbs (so named for the only other character known to man that is as scrungly as she is) was then formally adopted by my friend. Her tongue has healed, her fur remains scrungly, and she's every bit the rabid love bug I suspected her to be when she came to me yelling to be pet.

She's a TNR cat. Someone thought they were doing her a kindness in that and if nothing else she didn't add kittens to the world but that doesn't negate the pain she suffered before I found her - the broken teeth, the lacerated tongue, the ulcerated cheeks, the flea-bald patchiness of her coat.

I say this as someone who adores this cat and has the privilege to see her loved and cherished: I wish she'd never had to suffer what she did. I wish people were alright making the harder call that leads to less misery on the side of the cats.

TNR is a polite fiction, nothing more. Just so the humans can pretend they've done right by the same cats they're letting loose to die miserably somewhere else. As long as the humans don't see it it's fine.

The shelter folks told me she's a community cat and that I could take her home and release her by my house. Then I could feed her myself and keep up with her and know where she was! I could still keep her, after a fashion.

I am not proud of how I snarled back that I would never exchange a quick death for a slow one. I would be giving her a different funeral plot, not giving her a life. Even near me she'd be just as vulnerable to the innumerable predators that find cats quite delicious, let alone cars and poisons and the other cruelties humans practice on stray cats.

She's the second stray cat I've met that when I held them the cat melted in my arms, purring and so desperately wanting to be loved. The first cat I was able to trap and take to a local shelter only to find when I called to check on him a day later that his health had been so terrible, so beyond help, that he'd been put down. All the love in that tiny body lost because the people I lived beside didn't care enough to trap the cats they had.

My partner was asleep. I woke her up to crawl into her arms and sob, my heart breaking for the stupidity of the humans who hadn't cared enough to grant this poor little cat the chance to be either an indoor cat, loved and cared for, or to grant him a quick death long before I met him. I've other stories of the cats they kept around, essentially feeding the poor souls to the predatory birds and wandering dogs that frequented our area.

Now, it would be possible to have crow/prairie garlic (a related allium that tastes very similar to garlic-garlic), spices (off the top of my head, Spicebush berries reportedly taste somewhere between allspice and pepper; allspice is also a New World plant), potatoes, and a corn(maize) based bread in medieval (roughly 400-1400 CE) North America, but cheese and butter are gonna be sticking points because the only animals Indigenous peoples of the Americas really domesticated that would produce milk are alpacas and llamas, and as far as I know their milk was never a viable food source for the people who kept them. Theoretically, you could milk an alpaca and produce cheese and butter, but from what I glean their milk is similar to goat milk so butter making would be tricky. Goat milk is “naturally homogenized” so unlike un-homogenized cow’s milk (which is safe to drink - raw milk is un-pasteurized! Homogenization is unnecessary to food safety, it’s done more for convenience and consistency purposes), the cream doesn’t start collecting at the top of the vessel it’s kept in very quickly. Unless you use a cream separator, it can take days for goat cream to separate from the milk.

And remember! Horses were reintroduced to North America post-Columbian contact. I know most USAmericans imagine First Nations/Plains Native Americans on horseback, but that’s actually a relatively recent thing.

Now, American buffalo/bison were present but undomesticated, however, from what I can glean, their milk is somewhat similar to cow milk (makes sense they’re both bovine species) so making butter might be a little easier. But remember there is a reason that one reporter in Yellowstone took one look at bison moving towards him and said “oh no. Oh no no no” and noped on outta there. They’re big, they’re prey animals, they gore wolves regularly.

However! Counterpoint! Humans are fucking insane as a survival strategy!*

So, theoretically, you could have had an absolutely unhinged medieval denizen of Turtle Island who hand-raised bison, figured out how to milk them, and how to make both cheese and butter! And then that absolute unit of a person could then sit down and have a wonderful meal of bison cheese and butter with corn-cakes, potatoes, spices, and prairie garlic.

Or, you could just switch the European peasant’s potatoes out for a warm bowl of grain porridge. In addition to plain wheat, barley, spelt, and oats were cereal grains that could be cooked into a porridge that could form the starchy basis of a hearty meal, much like a nice warm potato.

Not gonna lie, I love potatoes, but garlic, spices, butter, bread, cheese, and a warm bowl of steel cut oats sounds like heaven.

@queenlua Happily! This is going to be long, so here's some set dressing first:

Eton College, for anyone unfamiliar, is a prestigious boys' school in England that has famously educated MANY MANY politicians, royals, nobility, and other assorted famous people. All you really need to know about it is that's it's incredibly posh and expensive and exclusive

The Eton Society (called “Pop” internally) is a self-selecting body of senior students at Eton that have historically held a decent amount of power at the school. If you’ve ever attended a school with a prefect system/house system etc you probably know a little bit about how obnoxious this kind of group can get. Now imagine they're all called Lord Godfrey Pickerington or something. Are you getting it? Is the set being dressed? Good.

Now that the scene is set, here’s our tale!!

I stumbled into Eton’s archives while doing research for a fanfiction and we’ll just leave that admission where it is!! It was in reading old issues of their student-run paper, The Chronicle, from 1883 that myself and @carebewear started becoming fixated on one guy in particular.

Cecil B. Gedge (from this point on known as Gedge) was a member of the Eton Society in 1883/84. He won a few Science awards during his time there (Biology!!) and seemed to like rowing during school sports events. He went on to become a barrister, which will make sense once you know more about him.

The best part of Gedge, though, is his appearances in the minutes for the Eton Society meetings. At least at Gedge’s time, the Eton Society seemed really fond of staging debates (more like loosely organised discussions) on a wide variety of topics.

Here are some of the riveting questions they discussed!

And my personal favourite: "Are Ghosts Real?"

(They were very divided)

Gedge first came to our attention in debate about the annexation of New Guinea, in which he apparently started an "abusive attack on the British army and missionaries":

Wow! Based Gedge!? He continues to spit period-typical truths about things like how we shouldn't tax bicycles actually because it would disproportionately affect poor people. YIMBY Gedge?? He would've loved light rail.

The final nail in our Gedge obsession was a debate on women's suffrage, in which Gedge vehemently advocates for women's right to vote and then gets no supporters at the end of the meeting. But I appreciate that he said it anyway and kept saying it. He is more persecuted that Christ, to me.

Here are some more, from anti-conscription sentiment to indirectly calling his classmates stupid to weirding everyone out by saying he wants to donate his body to science (his friend dissecting him for fun):

We started getting the feeling people might not have liked Gedge that much, mainly since one of the Society members wrote a poem about all his friends and Gedge isn't in it.

In 1884, there was some extended drama in the Chronicle where someone whom I groundlessly suspect was Gedge under a pseudonym ("A Socialist"), wrote to the editor complaining that the "debates" published by the Eton Society were "bad" (genuine quote) and that they should make a REAL debate society at the school that ALL boys, not just the self-selected seniors, could participate in:

To make a long story short most of the vocal members of the Eton Society threw up their hands at this and refused to do anything, basically boiling down to "Just because we're the prefects of the school doesn't mean we should have to actually DO anything!! Unfair!!" and also this quote which reads exactly like at least a thousand real tweets I've seen in my life

Liberal. Gedge, of course, was there giving practical suggestions, but the discussion was ultimately cut short because their principal died and they had to push a memorial issue of the paper. We have a working theory that the staff might've used that interruption as an opportunity to get the boys to cut it the fuck out.

Anyway it's a little unclear what happens to Gedge after that. He isn't credited as being in the 1884 Eton Society in the larger school register but it's unclear if that's because he wasn't re-elected or if he just graduated. Either way, he went on to become a barrister in London, which makes a lot of sense. Sadly though, he passed away in WW1, which we were really normal about

Thank you Lt. Gedge, for truly embodying the eternal spirit of an outspoken debate-kid, a friend to the lefties, a proto-yimby, a terminal back-talker, and the kid in a biology class that's a little too excited for the dissections. I hope your life, however short, was a rich and bright one. Thanks for the incredibly entertaining afternoon, brother 🫡

Xanth was always one of those series that I was aware of growing up that I just never got around to trying. I think after I finished reading Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series (although apparently he wrote an eighth one of those in 2007? Guess I haven't finished that series) I decided I didn't really want to keep going with his stuff.

It’s been awhile since I’ve read Mercedes Lackey, but I remember her books being good. Also, Lackey’s Elemental Masters series struck me as delightful since not only did she have a pretty cool magic system, but each novel was basically a fairy tale retelling. Her 500 Kingdoms books are in the same vein of fairy tale retelling, but very tongue-in-cheek as deconstructions and reconstructions of various folktales, fairy tales, and myths.

The one thing that I ding her on is that while she isn’t afraid to include non-European cultures in her settings, she does sometimes fall prey to xenophobic or racist tropes. The most egregious example I can think of is the Indian villain from one of her Elemental Masters novels who - you guessed it! - is a Kali-Durga devotee straight out of Temple of Doom. Her treatment of Hinduism in that book isn’t great overall, but oof the villain. To her credit, though, the non-Fantasy-Europeans of the Valdemar books felt like actual people and not caricatures, but admittedly your mileage may vary on that one.

I will say that her strength was in allowing protags to be somewhat unlikable, as well as not being shy about including queer characters. I still sometimes think about the one main character that was (at least in my interpretation) romantically attracted to but undeniably codependent with his Not-Horse/Companion.

In general, I find there’s a weird tension in her writing of female characters where they’re allowed to be “strong” but there’s still a flavor of - not condescension, but I guess paternalism is the best word? I dunno, it just feels like the majority of the time, her female characters need their men more than want their men. Or are just weird about their men.

And IRL, McCaffrey was just weird about gay people and very controlling about fan fiction. She was also pretty litigious about copyright at first because I do remember FFN having her right above Anne Rice on the list of authors that did not allow fan fiction. She relaxed later on but I’ve seen discussions of how she apparently had rules that fan fic had to follow at first and even though her entire set up with the dragon Weyrs was ripe for queer fan fic (my god the mating flights) part of those rules was apparently No Homo for the dragon riders. Eventually she gave up on that too from what I understand, but it’s still a wild evolution.

Xanth was always one of those series that I was aware of growing up that I just never got around to trying. I think after I finished reading Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series (although apparently he wrote an eighth one of those in 2007? Guess I haven't finished that series) I decided I didn't really want to keep going with his stuff.

It’s been awhile since I’ve read Mercedes Lackey, but I remember her books being good. Also, Lackey’s Elemental Masters series struck me as delightful since not only did she have a pretty cool magic system, but each novel was basically a fairy tale retelling. Her 500 Kingdoms books are in the same vein of fairy tale retelling, but very tongue-in-cheek as deconstructions and reconstructions of various folktales, fairy tales, and myths.

The one thing that I ding her on is that while she isn’t afraid to include non-European cultures in her settings, she does sometimes fall prey to xenophobic or racist tropes. The most egregious example I can think of is the Indian villain from one of her Elemental Masters novels who - you guessed it! - is a Kali-Durga devotee straight out of Temple of Doom. Her treatment of Hinduism in that book isn’t great overall, but oof the villain. To her credit, though, the non-Fantasy-Europeans of the Valdemar books felt like actual people and not caricatures, but admittedly your mileage may vary on that one.

I will say that her strength was in allowing protags to be somewhat unlikable, as well as not being shy about including queer characters. I still sometimes think about the one main character that was (at least in my interpretation) romantically attracted to but undeniably codependent with his Not-Horse/Companion.

In general, I find there’s a weird tension in her writing of female characters where they’re allowed to be “strong” but there’s still a flavor of - not condescension, but I guess paternalism is the best word? I dunno, it just feels like the majority of the time, her female characters need their men more than want their men. Or are just weird about their men.

And IRL, McCaffrey was just weird about gay people and very controlling about fan fiction. She was also pretty litigious about copyright at first because I do remember FFN having her right above Anne Rice on the list of authors that did not allow fan fiction. She relaxed later on but I’ve seen discussions of how she apparently had rules that fan fic had to follow at first and even though her entire set up with the dragon Weyrs was ripe for queer fan fic (my god the mating flights) part of those rules was apparently No Homo for the dragon riders. Eventually she gave up on that too from what I understand, but it’s still a wild evolution.

Xanth was always one of those series that I was aware of growing up that I just never got around to trying. I think after I finished reading Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series (although apparently he wrote an eighth one of those in 2007? Guess I haven't finished that series) I decided I didn't really want to keep going with his stuff.

It’s been awhile since I’ve read Mercedes Lackey, but I remember her books being good. Also, Lackey’s Elemental Masters series struck me as delightful since not only did she have a pretty cool magic system, but each novel was basically a fairy tale retelling. Her 500 Kingdoms books are in the same vein of fairy tale retelling, but very tongue-in-cheek as deconstructions and reconstructions of various folktales, fairy tales, and myths.

The one thing that I ding her on is that while she isn’t afraid to include non-European cultures in her settings, she does sometimes fall prey to xenophobic or racist tropes. The most egregious example I can think of is the Indian villain from one of her Elemental Masters novels who - you guessed it! - is a Kali-Durga devotee straight out of Temple of Doom. Her treatment of Hinduism in that book isn’t great overall, but oof the villain. To her credit, though, the non-Fantasy-Europeans of the Valdemar books felt like actual people and not caricatures, but admittedly your mileage may vary on that one.

I will say that her strength was in allowing protags to be somewhat unlikable, as well as not being shy about including queer characters. I still sometimes think about the one main character that was (at least in my interpretation) romantically attracted to but undeniably codependent with his Not-Horse/Companion.

Do you fucking know how stressful it is to do that job? How exhausting it is to juggle the needs of toddlers, the scrutiny of the law, and the pure torture of dealing with the spectrum of parental interest? One mishap - one fucking mistake - and firing might be the least of your worries.