If I ever make a blog...

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.

it's very important to me that you know this is real.

(On further reflection it's entirely possible that I was one of the fans who dragged them over it, and I was old enough to know better at the time, so I'll throw my apology on the pile just in case. Sorry! Anyway:)

Now that DR Chapter 3 is out we can take another look at why UT's moral universe is like that. A sentient camera guides us through Frisk's journey in one sentence: from the fridge to the sink to the stove, Undertale took place in the same house Kris is dreaming in, its underground dimly visible from the vast purple plains of the couch. With our newfound understanding of dark worlds and how they're made, we can conclude that Undertale is, canonically, a pretend game that a traumatized pre-teen made up with their older brother. It is a fix-it, as the UT Prime post postulates, but the target of the fix isn't Dragon Blazers: it's the life of one Kris Dreemurr, who created the half-archetypes in UT by attaching JRPG tropes to their real (and boy is that a loaded word) friends and family. The "I can save anyone" morality presented in UT is the perspective of a child, and of a child who isn't completely sure that they don't want to kill their dad.

We were primed to receive UT as a critique of video game violence because that was the topic du jour, with games like Spec Ops: The Line raising similarly adolescent questions about whether playing a military training simulator makes you a bad person. Something weirder was obviously going on in Undertale - my take at the time was that the very existence of the Genocide route pointed to something more complex than the standard read re: the game's moral system, and I stand by that - but we couldn't know how weird until we got a look at the story one layer higher in the continuum of truth and fantasy that is the UT/DR cosmology.

Undertale turns out to be Kris Deltarune working through a bunch of their anxieties. It's about the divorce of their parents, their alienation from their friends, their guilt over their (possibly genuine) culpability in the death of the neighbor kid who fell through the ice and drowned in the lake. (At least I think that's what happened, here in June of 2026.) Add to that their lingering feeling that they're not a real person, that they're not in control of their own life, and that there might be some other, realer version of themself out there who made all the right choices and ended up happy. Is it possible to do this reading without knowing that Deltarune exists? As the UT Prime post demonstrates - yeah, kind of! UT Asriel's chuuni powers and presentation tell us that this a story written from a child's perspective, and the way it presents violence and evil is freighted with a child's guilty fascination with transgression and with one's own capacity to do harm. UT has a secret scary route because kids love those. (Corporate art has noticed this and is now building multi-million dollar franchises around the idea.)

There are a bunch of fascinating things to dig into given this interpretation, but my favorite right now is this: all the major characters in Undertale are based on people Kris knew, except two. Kris invented Sans before they met in "real life." Can you imagine? The funny scary creepypasta man you made up with your brother lives here now, and he's dating your mom? Think about what's happening in Kris' head the moment you first see Sans Deltarune. The external scream of the nostalgic streamer echoed by the internal scream of a mentally ill teen as what remains of their ontological framework falls apart.

The punchline of Deltarune is that Kris is, in fact, a fictional character. DR is ultimately about trauma and unreality, and the thing about delusions is that they are self-evidently true within the framework of your subjectivity, your narrative - that's why you can't reason your way out of them. DR asks the question: what if there's something realer than you, the player? That's what all the religious symbolism is about, right, and why everyone talks like they're on drugs while they're in church? The derangement that comes from the incursion of a higher being into your sense of self, irrespective of whether it's "really happening" or not?

The horrible epistemological implications of believing that a person you invented might have some kind of consciousness - or to put it more succinctly, the question "what if my imaginary friend was real?" - has been a central theme in Toby's work dating back to the Halloween Hack. It's a question that Homestuck asked back in the day, it's a question that The Amazing Digital Circus is asking now. (It's a question I used to ask in my terrible teenage fiction. I have a core memory of an improv skit I saw at camp as a child where Winnie the Pooh learns that he's just a figment of Christopher Robin's imagination. The way the actor said "I don't want to be just a figment" has stayed with me ever since.) It's a silly, childish question, until it isn't - until you notice your parents believing in imaginary people and organizing their life around imaginary stories, until something in your life makes you wish you were imaginary too, until something breaks in your head and you don't remember how to be real anymore.

guy: the confused moral universe of Undertale feels like fanfiction people would make about A Very Generic RPG

Undertale fandom: You think A Very Generic RPG would be better than Undertale? Huh? Huh do you punk????

In the original, the folk religion the inhabitants of Summerisle practice is in fact a 19th century re-construction of various British folk traditions, which was explicitly invented by Christopher Lee's character's Victorian ancestor to rebuild a sense of community on the island while modernised agricultural science would save the islanders from the economic hardship that was causing them to move to the mainland.

In this sense, Lord Summerisle's religion was a constructed religion with a deliberate policial/social intent, in the same manner that the Welsh Druidic revival from approximately the same period (such as the one championed by Dr William Price), was intended to create a shared cultural heritage for the Welsh people after centuries of English colonial rule... Even though, due to the historical Druids never actually writing things down, Price and his peers kind of made up a lot of stuff to fill in the gaps.

In the case of the Wicker Man, the fact that the religion is made up of disparate bits and pieces from around the UK culturally (the song Sumer is icumen in that features in the movie is written in 13th century Wessex English, for example, while Summerisle is located off the coast of Scotland for example). Indeed even the titular Wicker Man has no actual historical basis, beyond it being something the Romans claimed was a practice in the British Isles prior to their colonial efforts... when it's also noted the Romans intentionally made stuff up about their enemies to justify their invasion and conquering them. Add to that how the Druids didn't write things down, and you can understand why Price and his peers had to get Inventive).

Hence the horror of the situation for Sgt. Howie. Not only is he being horribly murdered in a "pagan" sacrifice, but Lord Summerisle had already told him the religion was artificially created less than a century ago to control the worker population. So while the islanders may have believed there was a mystical significance and justification for Howie's horrible death, the guy who orchestrated it didn't actually believe in the religion himself and it was all a move to keep his tenants and workers compliant and under his thumb.

All of this historical context stands in contrast with the 2006 Wicker Man's version of Summerisle... which was founded by escaped Salem witches, and have explicit supernatural powers. No ambiguity, no historical context, and the closest to a social point is drawn from the director's own heavily misogynistic views on women.

temporal priority aside though, actually carrying out these objectives requires understanding, the most important currency of any complex activity: flying the plane is largely a mechanical procedure if you understand which angle it's pointing and how fast it's going and what autopilot mode it's in but a hellish nightmare if you don't, navigation and communication are also straightforward if you're keeping track of what's going on, but accidents usually result from the kind of confusion where people don't realise they are confused and are too busy or distracted to stop and notice they've lost touch with reality.

Colors are kind of the opposite. We try very hard to make colors stick to clothes, but they get unstuck when bright lights hit them too hard. Fortunately this is a slow process and you can enjoy your colors many times before they come unstuck.

It is unclear whether clothes can gain or lose taste through exposure. Most of taste is mediated by smell, and clothes tend not to be exposed to sweetness, sourness, bitterness or umami, and even if they did, they would not give up this taste in turn unless consumed, which one does not do with clothes. We'll call this 'not applicable'.

"Bond, it seems here that you used the Tactical Simulator to see whether you could throw ten men off the edge of a platform without going more than thirty seconds between each of them?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"And you spent almost an hour on this."

"Yes, ma'am. It was for training, ma'am."

"Do you anticipate that you'll need to throw men from ledges often?"

"Not just throw them, ma'am, but also activate convenient fans to blow them off. Yes, ma'am. And to practice the one-liners. 'Didn't seem he was a fan of that' or 'that really blew him away'. It's important to get the reps in."

So you’ve probably heard of the wulver, if you’re into werewolves on the internet. It’s supposedly a Scottish legend about a wolf-headed guy who left fish on the windowsills of the needy. How kind.

Well, frankly, I’m not at all convinced the wulver was ever really a thing in folklore. Hear me out. This is a tidbit about checking your sources.

I’m a folklorist. That means I professionally study this stuff and have degrees in it. I’ve given lectures and taught classes on subjects in folklore and mythology, especially werewolves. I’ve defended my research and my work from boards wanting to find some kind of hole in my work to prove I was wrong about something.

When it’s your job, it’s very important to check sources for accuracy - and to double-check them for authenticity. If you can, find the primary source. This means find the original documentation or the oldest possible occurrence or recording of the myth. If you can’t find one? It may not actually have been something people believed in.

This is where things get complicated. Lots of folklore and myth came from oral traditions, and as such, we’ve doubtlessly already lost tons of great things. That means people often didn’t write this stuff down, in part because these beliefs were occurring in time periods wherein literacy was hard to come by. When it comes to this, the best you can do is to find secondary proof in artwork or artifacts from the time period, or else a medieval monk’s chronicle of what the locals believe in, just to give a few examples.

All this said, let’s get back to the wulver…

As mentioned, the wulver myth of the kind, fish-giving werewolf supposedly comes from Shetland. It’s caught on on the internet to the point that when I mention werewolves, it often gets brought up by someone at some point. There were even some wacked-out ridiculous spiky silly monsters in the latest God of War game called wulvers (but they are, predictably, brainlessly malevolent and aggressive, so whoever randomly pulled the name “wulver” off the internet for the game’s development couldn’t even be kind enough to respect that supposed legend, either).

But finding “wulvers” mentioned in professional werewolf studies by academics in the field publishing well-researched work is virtually impossible. Wikipedia will claim to you that there are a few articles that mention them, but some of them actually don’t. Do we ever hear the big names in werewolf studies mention wulvers? No, nor do they ever mention anything like them.

Do we have a primary source for wulvers? No.

We have no monk’s account and no ancient piece of writing from the region that indicates any belief in wulvers, nor do we have any kind of illuminations, bestiaries, engravings, woodcuts, paintings - we have nothing. No proof at all.

True, this doesn’t entirely mean that people didn’t believe in them. Maybe they did. But without a source, we can’t responsibly claim in a professional work that wulvers were ever a thing in folklore.

But wait, Mav! There is a source!

Every single article I have ever seen on the internet (because I’ve never come across the wulver in professional werewolf studies) only ever cites just one source for the wulver: Jessie Saxby’s Shetland Traditional Lore, published in 1932.

It’s bordering on impossible to reasonably get a copy of this book. It’s not available digitally. It’s been out of print for years. The only print copies available range around $100 in price and are essentially falling to pieces from mishandling, at least the ones I’ve encountered.

Virtually every other werewolf legend you can name has multiple sources and often at least one primary source - sometimes multiple, especially in the case of Greek and Roman werewolf legends. The wulver doesn’t have even one.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to try to discredit Saxby’s work. If someone out there can offer me some good proof that people in Scotland ever actually believed in the Wulver, then… awesome.

But at this point and after years of trying to find one, I still can’t find any reliable historical source to actually say with confidence that the wulver is a legitimate folkloric belief.

Even if someone were to suddenly present to me a Scottish writing from whatever era that has overt mention of wulvers and prove me wrong, though, the principle of this idea still stands.

You really shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet (haven’t you ever heard the Abe Lincoln quote about that!? Oh wait…), especially about folklore. The internet is a vast and rich source for false information - and that seems to apply even more where folklore (sometimes especially werewolves) is involved. Always check your sources!

(If you like my werewolf blog, be sure to check out my other stuff!

https://www.shetlandmuseumandarchives.org.uk/blog/the-real-story-behind-the-shetland-wulver