I am relieved to see in the Independent that the supply of big scary cats has not yet dried up. The well-funded staff of the Forestry Commission, using thermal imagers to count deer at night, have seen two. As a cat owner person owned by cats I entirely approve of all felines, though I would prefer those actually trying to sleep on my bed to be, if possible, no larger than the present ones. The thought that the yappy and incontinent kick-dogs of Daily Mail-reading local councillors might provide nourishment (albeit inadequate and insanitary) for panthers (or, more topically, snow-leopards) quite warms the cockles, to be honest.
But the story says:
Under a Freedom of Information Act request, the government agency confirmed that two “reliable” sightings of large cats have taken place in the last seven years.
Why did it take an FoIA request to extract this hardly controversial information from the Forestry Commission? For what abstruse reason is state secrecy imposed by quangos on the zoology of this once happy land? Is the government afraid of mass panic and vigilantism? Or is it simply that, as it was once put (perhaps by Colonel Sir Vernon Kell), “If it is on an official file, then it is an official secret”?
Time & motion time. Case 1:
{phone rings}
“Forestry Commission; PR desk; good morning.”
“Good morning. My name’s Bloggins. Can you tell me, please, whether you know of any evidence of large cats ever being seen in your vast tracts of woodland?”
“Well, it doesn’t happen very often, you know, but I believe there have been a couple of sightings in the last few years. Let me just check… oh yes, the last one was quite recently. They even got a picture of it with a special camera they were using to look for deer. It’s actually on our website, if you’d like to have a look.”
“I’ll do that. Many thanks.”
“‘Bye then. Oh; do remember: never start fires!”
“I won’t. Thanks again. Bye.”
FC official’s time: 40 seconds. Phone calls: 1, paid for by information-seeker.
Case 2:
{phone rings}
“Forestry Commission; PR desk; good morning.”
“Good morning. My name’s Bloggins. Can you tell me, please, whether you know of any evidence of large cats ever being seen in your vast tracts of woodland?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”
“Really? You surprise me. I gather that there have been at least two sightings in the last few years.”
“We can neither confirm nor deny such allegations.”
“I think your caution is excessive. There is such a thing as the Freedom of Information Act, you know.”
“Freedom of Information Act requests are to be sent to our head office. Do you have the address?”
“No; perhaps you could let me have that…” [etc.]
FC officials’ time: 70 seconds (phone call); 4 hours (receiving and processing FoIA request); 3 days (referring request to higher authority); 6 weeks (seeking authorisation from government minister to release information); 2 months (preparing redacted version of information suitable for public release); 1 year (actually getting round to sending information to requestor).
Phone calls: 1, paid for by caller. Letters: eleven paid for by information-seeker (1 request, 2 chasing progress of request, 1 rebutting allegations of terrorist involvement in re thermal imagers, 1 rebutting allegations of bestiality in re deer, etc., 2 more chasing progress, 1 to MP, 1 bitter tirade accusing of gross inefficiency and notifying that MP has been informed; 1 to MP to acknowledge that there’s nothing he can do, 1 (sent per pro by psychiatric care worker) acknowledging final receipt of information) and one paid for by the taxpayer.
Imagine if you will the the shabby, despairing lines of hopeless unemployed resulting from the imposition upon a decent socialist society of the criminal capitalist-imperialist model represented by Case 1.
luc, I am sending you the Story of Emma Pouncer, the cat who orders me about nonstop (together now with a most unwelcome horde of new colleagues!) “And thereby hangs a tale!” as the mouse said when demonstrating the anatomy of a cat….
In the Fall, Emma ran out the door at about seven o’clock on Halloween night, and when I went “kitty, kitty!” she only mewed at me and ran down the end of the brick porch wall here and jumped off south into the dark. So much for Emma Pouncer! I supposed she’d be back in an hour for salmon for supper as usual, only no joy…and NO pussy. She didn’t come back and Mickey and I went all over the small town of Easton down here on the North Coast of Ioway, in Faribault County, sticking up posters and knocking on people’s doors. Or rather Mickey (who is a parttime Free Press reporter and used to this stuff) banged on people’s doors. I tend not to trust them and thought the young unwed father ones had maybe fed my cat to their pit bulls, it’s that sort of place kind of. So I went around putting up cat pictures, in the two bars, the post office and on some light poles as well as in the eating restaurant here. I covered all the businesses in this berg!
Only STILL no cat….
Mickey niggled and higgled and so I sent Emma-pictures and a short paragraph to the radio station over in Blue Earth, twenty-five miles west of here. The next day (at the end of the week after Halloween) the phone rang at sparrowfart, a lady had “your” cat in her car and dropped off the same on her way to work. Close…but no kitty, I mean no Emma. This cat was a near color-match, only she is altogether tamer and far more sweetnatured, has been declawed and well cared for, and sleeps sweetly under the covers with Mickey, gets on Mickey’s longtime little black cat Karma’s nerves and is now called Lydia.
That night or the next, the phone rang again — this is the power of radio! — and a young boy called Don said he had “your” cat. Southwest of Easton a couple of miles on a farm. We went sliding around out there in a wet fall of fresh snow, and wound up coming back with a little gray tiger with pink spots. “This is bogus!” Mickey complained, and so the following week we had Bogus spayed and given shots for the cat disease on account of she is only about middleschool size but was already obviously PG.
Are you with me so far?
At this point we had Mickey’s original little black cat Karma, who by now was just seething! And Lydia. And Bogus. Then, we boarded Mickey’s son’s 13-pound black tomcat, who is called for perfectly obvious and probably racist reasons Obama. He stayed for a week and a couple of the black steeplejacks, ex-cons in a mentoring program from Chicago, and who have been working for months on restoration of the ninety-year-old Catholic church here, asked me one morning at the post office, “Who this Obama you be calling all the time, man, ‘here kitty, kitty!’”
“I, er…ah…that’s our black tomcat, Felix, you know…Felix Obama?”
“Oh sure, man, FELIX! That mean Latin and it mean he a HAPPY cat, not like they other fool who be out there goin’ round an’ roun’ an’ gettin’ shit all the time from they Republicans! That’s cool!”
(Whew!)
Anyway, that afternoon or the next, when Felix Obama was stretched out all over Mickey (all four feet of him, nose to tail, in a straight line!), who was taking a lay down for a bad back, either Karma or Lydia, only I think it was probably (you guessed it!) Bogus, jumped onto the bed, startled the tomcat, he gave a hiss, Mickey put up a minatory hand to prevent mayhem…and practically got bit through (!) the wrist. I mean Felix Obama really drew blood and the next day I had to drive Mickey thirty-five miles up to Mankato to Urgent Care, for shots against the cat disease, antibiotics, you name it:
“Obama my ass!” said Mickey as we drove back to Easton, to her son on his cell phone and who was visiting his grandma in Green Bay, which is why we had Obama in the first place. “As far as I’m concerned from now on he’s…OJ!”
Now /that’s/ racist.
Anyway, all passed off in November about as expected, Barack Obama is now President (thank goodness), Felix “OJ” Obama is now back at home in St Louis Park, and meanwhile on Thanksgiving Mickey and me went into church in Wells, nine miles east of here, for dinner. That night here in the kitchen about six o’clock, we were moping round the fridge and wondering about eating some more food when when I caught a glimpse of movement south out the window over the sink, outside on the limestone ledge of the old convent we live in.
“Christ!”
I ran down the short passage to the back door beside the window…and there was Emma Pouncer.
She came back four weeks to the night, she was skinnier than all Hell but very clean, we suppose she got locked into some shed, only I wonder what she did for water? Well, the cat isn’t saying, but boy is she POed. When she ran off, there was only Karma, who was the Senior Cat anyway (my kids’ Aunt Mary can explain all about cat psychology), but now there are three (!) cats for her to contend with, plus occasionally the President (or his bro anyway!) hanging out here, and so now Emma Pouncer is the one who is just seething!
So much for her…and me! Happy New Year to all of you toilers there in the ruins of the English Constitution, all my best love and wishes to you all in 2009, Emmett!
Lol, great story…!
With regard to ‘British Big Cats’ (a trawl through the pages of ‘Fortean Times’ will net you a surprising amount of ‘evidence’ for them), what does the Ministry consider to be ‘reliable’ evidence..?
I mean, most of our civil servants are hatd-pressed to identify a looming recession or immigration crisis, never mind an out of place panthera pardus…
In /Ring Of Bright Water/ Gavin Maxwell wrote of Scottish wildcat toms coming down in the farmyards to kill their half-domestic kittens, “the evidence of their plebian wenching….”
Thanks, Emmett, for the fine cat story. I am still in some doubt as to whether or not it might in fact be a very clever allegory about American politics, about which I don’t know enough to be sure…:-)
JuliaM: I’m aware of ‘Fortean Times’ but to be honest I don’t read it because I find the ravings of the Occam’s Razor Defiance Society to be ever so slightly tedious.
Emmett again: I tried reading Maxwell once, but soon gave up. I’m sure he’s right about the wildcats, despite what all the zoologists say about their reclusiveness. People who write beastie stories attract this sort of thing.
“I’m aware of ‘Fortean Times’ but to be honest I don’t read it because I find the ravings of the Occam’s Razor Defiance Society to be ever so slightly tedious.”
Yeah, you can get some credulous articles, but on the subject of ‘British Big Cats’ they are usually quite skeptical.
I’m keen to see what they make of this story, because the ‘facts’ as quoted in the ‘Telegraph’ this morning don’t seem to add up to a hell of a lot.
I’ll post my thoughts on it later if I get a chance.
My friend, M, who is actually detestably rational about everything else, swears that she and her younger cuckoo saw a panther here six years ago, in the ditches of northeast Faribault County on Minnesota’s Southern Tier. She’s never scribbed to me about anything else and so there you have it. I personally would like to bring in Siberian Tigers in northern Minnesota as I think they’d feel right to home. Except I suppose the Finlanders and the ‘Shinobs’d shoot ‘em all. Dirty bastards. The only time I ever heard a panther let loose was on a frosty morning in March, 1984, hunting turkeys outside of Leakesville, Mis’ssippi, with my brother-in-law Enmon Ray Shoemaker. My goodness, they do scream exactly like a woman!