Author: Laura Lee Cascada

I Brought a Tiny Tiger into My Home—and Did Not Get Eaten

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Companions, Rescue

“Why would anyone keep a tiny tiger in the house?” I asked my immediate circle approximately 1,000 times over the course of the last 20 years. Never mind that I’d made it a lifelong habit of always having at least one tiny wolf by my side.

To me, housecats were miscreants who spent their days plotting the overthrow of their rulers à la Animal Farm’s Napoleon and Snowball. That was made quite clear by the multitudes of felines I’d met who’d bat their eyes for a gentle pet only to sink their claws into my wrist moments later. Or, a decade ago, when my (very temporary) foster kitten, Elphaba Bean, would glare at me and then effortlessly slide my houseplant off the edge of the dining room table. Never mind that I internally cherished the moments she’d scale my entire body for the chance to lie on my chest purring with content, or that I volunteered monthly with a local cat rescue, or that I secretly melted every time a kitten photo crossed my social media feeds.

Devious schemers, those cats—every last one of them. Every last one, that is, until I encountered a 2-pound kitten with a black nose bordered by a white face lurking on my porch in the summer of 2021.

She was too young, too bold, for the wild, with her contrasting tones that blew the gaff on her charade as a chameleon amidst the shrubbery. I secured a kitten-sized trap from the cat rescue. I knew what I had to do.

By the next day, there was a dazed tuxedo kitten pressing herself so tightly into the corner of my laundry room that she just might have metamorphosized into the wallpaper. Success. I would spend the next few weeks vetting, spaying, and socializing her before finding her a loving home, wiping my hands clean, and calling it a day. I could add the victory to my list of good deeds for the year.

Then I stepped back outside, and there she was again, blinking up at me—only reversed? White nose, black face.

Oh. Her brother.

Soon, they were both squeezing themselves behind, above, and under cabinets, the washing machine, my fish tank. I shoved balls of towels and blankets and miscellaneous boards into every orifice to keep them out of these crevices and in my sights until I realized I had nothing left to dry off with after a shower. But despite their digging (coupled with an uncanny ability to shrink to approximately a quarter of their girth), my makeshift blockades worked, and the kittens soon acquiesced to being gently petted as they devoured their meals.  

But this isn’t their story, those two kittens who, after weeks of living in my laundry room, being inundated by my persistent company, and being carted to and from traumatizing vet visits, are now hulking, thriving cats living their best lives with my boyfriend’s mother.

This is the story of their birth mother, whom I made the executive decision to trap just two nights into the kittens’ perceived imprisonment after I nearly ran her over as she chilled in the middle of my street, unperturbed by my oncoming headlights. With raindrops pattering on my roof, I set a trap and 10 minutes later returned to vibrant emerald eyes blinking into mine and a jet black face accentuated by a petite white mustache.

Mother and kittens hissed and fought at first, as though they’d lost their memory of one another. But by the next morning, all misgivings had been abandoned, and the 8-week-old twins had returned to suckling their young mom, who was crawling with intestinal parasites and lethargic. She silently tolerated my incessant visits to her nursery room, apparently teetering between relief at the breaks from nursing and suspicion over my intentions with her progeny.

As she healed, she remained aloof, but this mama cat I began calling Chia barely uttered a hiss and never once tried to bite. It was hard to fathom that she’d always been alone, feral; perhaps, rather, she’d been raised by a neighborhood family and then been abandoned. But I posted online; I sought her people—and no one ever came looking.

At a mere two years of age, according to Chia’s vet, she was a dedicated, focused mom. She let those kittens nurse until 13 weeks when they finally went to their new home. And though she retreated under the fish tank for almost two days after their departure, I knew the agonizing decision to split them up was what needed to be done. In my humble abode with a pig and one of those aforementioned tiny wolves, a family of three felines would not fit.

It was time for Chia, too, to find a home of her own, yet a month or so in, it had become apparent that home was with me. After all, she’d chosen my yard, of all yards, in which to deposit her kittens, somehow knowing, or hoping, she’d find safety. A tiny tiger had taken up permanent residence, and it felt perfectly rational to accommodate this conspiratorial predator. She camped out in the laundry room by day, averse to confrontations with my tiny wolf, Powder, and prowled for unsuspecting crickets at night. The tenuous relationship she’d begun to forge with Powder, though, was cut short upon Powder’s sudden departure due to a massive cancer of the heart that December. I was all Chia had left, apart from the potbellied pig inhabiting the living room with whom she had no desire to associate.

Chia’s nightly escapades throughout the house grew longer, and her hours beneath the fish tank shrank. She yowled like a lost child while I slept, so I invited her into my room. When she’d finally recovered from her worm-induced malnutrition, she instituted a ritual of early morning rampages with her stuffed mouse that led to many sleep-deprived workdays on my part.

Although grumpy with fatigue, I relished in Chia’s youthful frenzy, which injected life into a household left vacant of Powder’s once effervescent presence. Still, in my season of grief, I couldn’t reciprocate that energy. We both needed a friend.

That’s when Chia’s new sister, Lip Gloss, a formerly neglected senior lady from a hoarding case, entered the picture, or rather, strutted in with the air of a queen claiming her rightly throne on my pillow. Chia’s first reaction was to smack LG and run away. But LG didn’t blink—she simply smacked her back. She could take it.

Over the coming weeks, the new frenemies interacted like stars of a cat soap opera. Despite their overt daily scuffles over tensions invisible to me, though, Chia’s confidence was soaring. Her midnight mewling simmered out, she became willing to nap within six feet of her sister, and the two tested the waters at brief games of tag. Peace descended on the household, punctuated only periodically by mutual slaps. The challenge, it seemed, had inspired compromise and adaptation.

If only humans handled conflicts like these cats, I mused one day. We’d just hurl a bad word, storm off, and sit in our respective corners to mull over what we’d done before coming back and apologizing an hour later. Perhaps we’d stop threatening nuclear warfare to prove our own might, or at least stop passive aggressively blasting our neighbor on Nextdoor when they let their grass get 6 inches too tall.

A few months in, I was narrating my adventures in feline companionship to my aunt, a lifelong cat lady. “Just wait. Chia has some surprises in store for you,” she declared.

I didn’t really believe her, assuming that with Chia, and cats broadly, “What you see is what you get.” But one day, during my newly acquired habit of reading about cats in my free time as I worked toward completing my own transition into a cat lady, I learned that it can take between 6 and 12 months for two cats to form a solid friendship. In my experience with dogs, generally, they either were or they weren’t friends. They wore their feelings on their sleeves. Cats, meanwhile, quietly survey their surroundings, formulate a hypothesis, hash out a plan of action, assess the results, and repeat until they’ve refined a strategy. They’re subtle scientists, on a path of evolution.

Sure enough, over the next year, my aunt’s predictions came to fruition. Chia and Lip Gloss are not only in an intense love-hate sisterhood consisting of Chia fervently grooming Lip Gloss’ face until the latter bats her away with impudence (only to beckon her to come play hours later)—but Chia also offers me, the human she’s supposed to be dethroning any day now, plentiful sandpaper kisses in return for a mere scratch on the back. The pair started to sleep cuddled on either side of me all night, purring like a massage chair. And now, Chia only disappears under the fish tank when the vacuum comes out.

For over 30 years, I surrounded myself with canines who felt often like an extension of me, with their unwavering affection and codependency. I couldn’t have conceived of welcoming into my home an unpredictable being who clears countertops in one leap and inexplicably, according to science, is aware at all times of my exact position in the house without even laying eyes on me. (Seriously, if that spy skill isn’t evidence of a conspiracy waiting to happen, I’ve got nothing.) I never could have predicted becoming the narrator in Taylor Swift’s “Gorgeous,” who sings, “Guess I’ll just stumble on home to my cats.” But here I am, enamored by my cats so much that I even painted the line on a cat-themed cardigan, which I purchased through an auction benefiting that cat rescue that let me borrow those traps that summer. And it all started because of the mama cat I came so close to running over that August night who now, with a complete lack of ferocity, licks my nose every time I offer her a kiss.

Oh, and as of early 2023, we’re now a three-cat family.

This story was written with the help of Tina Marie Johnson of Blue Mountain Creative Consulting.

Investigation: The Murky Truth Behind Hawaii’s Octopus Farm

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Investigations, Petitions, Wildlife

UPDATE — SEPTEMBR 1, 2023: VICTORY! Kanaloa Octopus Farm’s location near Kona on the Big Island has permanently closed! The state of Hawaii has decided not to renew Kanaloa’s lease after months of pressure from animal activists, media exposure, and even a complaint led by Harvard Law School in the wake of our investigation exposing the facility as little more than a petting zoo that collected tourists’ dollars to fund the creation of an octopus factory farming industry. Read on for the groundbreaking exposé that led to this triumph for octopuses everywhere.

UPDATE — JANUARY 28, 2023: Late last year, I published the below investigation into Kanaloa Octopus Farm on the Big Island of Hawaii, which captures wild Hawaiian day octopuses, entrapping them in tiny, isolated tanks and subjecting them to breeding experiments under the guise of “conservation.” This week, the Hawaii Division of Aquatic Resources issued a cease-and-desist letter to Kanaloa for operating without required permits. Owner Jake Conroy has reportedly claimed that these octopuses were not captured in West Hawaii waters—in direct conflict with what I was told on my tour: that Kanaloa pays someone to capture octopuses off-shore. My investigation revealed that, funding itself through petting zoo-like tours and state support, the facility has attempted to breed hundreds of these octopuses, a process that’s always fatal—but as of 2022, babies had only survived up to 13 days. Despite Kanaloa’s public claims that it isn’t interested in farming, government records show plans for supplying octopus and squid to the restaurant industry. For now, the octopus program has been temporarily shut down, and Kanaloa is shifting to bobtail squids, a species it is already profiting off of through breeding and selling (and for which there is insufficient data for Kanaloa to claim they are doing so in the name of conservation).

FULL INVESTIGATIVE STORY BELOW

(October 9, 2022) I stood under the blazing Hawaiian sun, gazing out at the ocean while imagining myself diving in, dancing among the fish, and extending a friendly finger (à la E.T.) to a curious cephalopod—just like the protagonist of My Octopus Teacher had done before me. Instead, I snapped back into reality and glanced down at several rows of white boxes filled with water and lined at their upper edges by spiky green Astroturf. I gingerly plucked off a row of suction cups that had been ascending my forearm, sending their owner, a Hawaiian day octopus, or heʻe mauli, gliding back down into her home, one of those white boxes—no bigger than a bathtub.

I’d always thought my first real encounter with an octopus would occur on their terms, out in the open sea. But when I heard about the 73-million-dollar forthcoming octopus farm that’s making waves in the Canary Islands—and then learned that there was already a dollhouse-sized version of one on the Big Island my family calls home—I knew I had to go. I had to see the reality behind Kanaloa Octopus Farm’s claims on its website, like that it’s “committed to developing green bio-technologies that decrease our demand for ocean resources,” and find out whether they really held water.

On the surface, the small facility on Hawaii’s Kona coast that I visited this past spring seemed akin to a petting zoo of the sea. An exuberant tour guide instructed us to wash our hands and led us over to the small collection of tanks, each holding an individual octopus, who was barred from leaving—as octopuses are wont to do (recall, for instance, Inky, an octopus who slid out of her tank at a New Zealand aquarium, down a drainpipe, and back into the ocean several years ago)—by the aforementioned strips of Astroturf. Guests plunged their hands into the tanks and wriggled their fingers, and one by one, the octopuses emerged from their hideaways to examine the intruders. Attaching their arms to our fingers and wrists, eliciting shrieks of joy from the guests, they used their suckers to taste, smell, and feel us.

Useful appendages—those eight, self-regenerating arms lined with a collective 2,240 suction cups, which help them not only sense their environments, but climb any surface; use tools (like those who hide themselves tightly inside shells like armor, not just in response to danger, but in preparation for future danger); and even ride on a befuddled shark’s back to escape hungry jaws. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These cephalopods have also been documented opening and closing jars, squeezing through the tiniest cracks to climb a flight of stairs culminating in the kitchen, retrieving lobsters from nearby tanks, changing colors while dreaming in a state similar to REM sleep in humans, and recognizing and holding grudges against a specific researcher (evidenced by their repeated spraying of water at said researcher).

Yet we often find ourselves relying on rudimentary, anthropocentric measures of intelligence to define our spheres of moral consideration, like the so-called “mirror test,” or the ability of animals to recognize their own appearance in a mirror—as though such a device would be of any use to an otherworldly animal who can camouflage herself and disappear into her environment in an instant by shifting her coloration. (Meanwhile, Homo sapiens is relegated to fantasizing about magical Invisibility Cloaks in literature, or investing billions of dollars into developing technologies these animals are simply born with. But, if I must play along, octopuses have indeed taught themselves how to engage “correctly” with a mirror—they enjoy grooming themselves and using it to spot crabs to feast on.)

Ponders Erin Anderssen in a recent thought piece in The Globe and Mail, “Should we assume dominion over an exceptional brain that developed parallel to our own, in a foreign place and against the odds? Do we too often assume that thinking differently means thinking less?”

With the Canary Islands’ massive commercial operation looming on the horizon, projected to kill nearly 300,000 octopuses per year, animal activists worldwide are responding with a resounding “no!”—and fervently campaigning to stop the project through petitions, protests, conferences, tweetstorms, and more. These marine advocates are reminding decisionmakers that we’re only on the cusp of grasping the remarkable capabilities of these alien-like beings, who thrive in their own underwater realms—and that factory farming them will be among this century’s greatest perils inflicted by humanity on sea life.

Has the ship already sailed on thwarting the creation of this entirely new industry? Already, octopus farming—the latest iteration of the 20th century’s destructive brainchild, industrial animal agriculture—has attracted tens of millions in investments, outwardly in the name of reducing pressures on wild octopus populations (while apparently the notion of shifting demand away from these sea beings altogether didn’t seem quite so profitable to said investors). So, to hell with the myriad environmental consequences of aquaculture, such as nitrogen and phosphorous pollution, antibiotic misuse, and, perhaps the linchpin of them all: octopuses are carnivores, eating two to three times their own weight. As such, their captive production will increase pressures on other fisheries—either wild or farmed—to sustain them. According to a Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) report, “[O]ctopus farming would contribute to further food security issues in regions such as West Africa, Southeast Asia and South America where the main industrial fishmeal factories are located.” Facing such a dire picture, activists aren’t relenting in their upstream fight.

But what does a gigantic forthcoming factory farm across the globe have to do with the seemingly innocuous octopus playground in Hawaii, where I stood flanked by tourists gawking over a dozen or so of these creatures playfully throwing rubber duckies? I listened to our guide, clearly enamored by cephalopods herself, extoll their virtues and spout off their individual names and favorite toys. She spoke of how Kanaloa Octopus Farm was not actually a farm at all, but a research facility developed with conservation in mind, just like the website had told me. They did not raise octopuses for consumption, she declared repeatedly throughout the hour.

It would have been easy to grab an octo-plush from the gift store and stroll off to lunch at one of Kona’s oceanside eateries, where I could then type up a Google review over a frozen açaí bowl about how cute and curious and fun those Kanaloa octopuses were, just as hundreds or thousands of visitors before me have done. But something unsettling was washing over me as the tour neared its end.

I couldn’t count how many utterances of the word “conservation” I’d heard, and seen, that day (if only I had a nickel for every time…). So I approached the guide and asked what this meant—what, precisely, was their plan? Were these octopuses endangered?

No, she replied, not in Hawaii, but in other parts of the world, where demand for octopus meat has surged. Kanaloa, though, hoped that through successful research, they could share their findings on breeding octopuses with other countries. All in the name of “replenishing the natural population,” she told me.

Essentially, Hawaii’s octopus farm intended to teach their breeding strategies to other countries, which could then turn around to farm octopuses for food and reduce their own reliance on wild-caught populations. Ah, well, we mustn’t kill the messenger, right?

But I was left wondering: could Kanaloa really be a neutral middleman, laboring all for the good of Planet Earth—or did it stand to benefit from the fruits of its labor? At the time of my visit in March 2022, Kanaloa’s claim-to-fame was that it had gotten the furthest in closing the octopus life cycle by rearing babies to a mere 13 days of age before die-off. According to our guide, “no single person” has ever been able to raise an octopus from baby to adulthood. It seems, though, that Kanaloa staff is overstating their two-week milestone, achieved only with a single species, Hawaii’s day octopus: After all, the Nueva Pescanova Group, the corporation behind the upcoming Canary Islands facility, had successfully bred and reared common octopus, or Octopus vulgaris, larvae to adults by 2019. If that’s the case, perhaps Kanaloa is looking forward to playing a foundational role in a separate, future day octopus farming industry, piggybacking off the lessons of its Spanish predecessor. After all, it’s a vast ocean out there, with plenty of species for every ambitious capitalist to, well, capitalize on.

On Facebook, Kanaloa touts that it “strive[s] to produce a sustainable alternative to wild caught octopus for aquariums, researchers and saltwater aquarium hobbyists,” but by the end of my visit, I already knew this didn’t encompass the full scope of its aims. So, while bedridden with COVID this spring and finally exhausted after days of 18-hour-long sleeps, one night I dove down an internet black hole ‘til sunrise (as one does) to get to the bottom of it all.

Like most small businesses, Kanaloa Octopus Farm’s beginnings in 2015 were meager, with founder and impassioned researcher Jake Conroy sinking his own savings into the commercial aquaculture project after witnessing the cashflow challenges scientific research typically faces. The “petting zoo” front seemed a promising way to fund his altruistic vision at the time, keeping the lights on and the water flowing. He consistently explained in interviews that his plans did not include farming octopus for food, but only gifting the world the tool of breeding octopuses to help wild species survive.

The man was, overtly, a true animal lover. To National Geographic, Conroy declared, “Nine times out of ten we wind up convincing people not to eat octopus. … We’re fine with that.” And in another interview, Conroy explained that the octopuses at Kanaloa were purchased from fishermen who would have used them for bait. “We call them our rescue animals. … Their fate is a little better than what it was.” (Today, according to our tour guide, the farm has graduated to hiring its own octopus-catcher.) But in that same interview, Hawaii Magazine reported that the “goal of Kanaloa is to someday create a viable and sustainable on-land octopus farm.” And to a Hawaiian food writer, Conroy described selling octopus to local restaurants as a “pie-in-the-sky dream” of his.

Then, in the fall of 2021, as the aforementioned CIWF report condemned the budding octopus farming industry and accused Kanaloa of harvesting young octopuses to fatten them up in tanks, Conroy fired back: “They’re claiming we’re the only octopus farm in the U.S. and that’s not true — there are no octopus farms in the U.S. … We market ourselves as an octopus farm, it’s a fun thing for tourists to hear, but we’re not farming anything for meat.”

That month he also appeared on Hawaii Public Radio and launched into a slew of defenses, first by downplaying octopus intelligence (“I don’t see a lot of evidence of them being more intelligent,” said Conroy, while accusing activists of anthropomorphizing the animals—a bold claim from a businessowner whose captives are endowed with names like Stretch and Shrek). Then, he cast doubt on the economic viability of pursuing octopus farming (I know some Spanish executives who’d beg to differ), as though hoping to quietly excuse himself from this fight and swim back under the radar. Had Conroy already forgotten his 2019 remarks about his plans to scale up to become an exclusive supplier of octopus to Hawaii’s gourmet restaurants?

Kanaloa’s inconsistencies and flip-flopping are arguably a simple battle over semantics, or perhaps over its present and future. But public records and currency flows don’t lie, so I dug deeper. I discovered that Kanaloa was founded as a partnership between both a non-profit research foundation and a for-profit company, Fatfish Farms, LLC, operating off its ticket sales. Through tours, the business grew its revenue by 273 percent over just two years, landing it recognition as Hawaii’s 5th fastest growing company. The first red flag I uncovered was a revelation in 2018 by Environment Hawaii that as a tenants of the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA), the rapidly growing for-profit arm of Kanaloa Octopus Farm, “like all other tenants of state-owned lands, [should be] expected to pay property taxes based on the assessed value of the land and improvements they occupy,” yet as an occupant of NELHA’s “research campus,” the farm has never been billed. The executive director of NELHA at the time claimed that such “pre-commercial or research projects” are “considered short-term,” but there’s no end in sight for Kanaloa. The company has not only been granted a front-row, tax-free plot of land, but also its own supply of deep-sea water channeled up by NELHA from 3,000 feet below sea level to be distributed at a rate of up to 100,000 gallons per minute throughout the state-funded (to the tune of $130 million) research park.

And then, buried in 2019 NELHA meeting minutes, I stumbled upon an expansion proposal from Kanaloa which, though eventually sidelined by the pandemic, was telling. Planned growth areas included not only research, but also “ink for food products, ornamental trade and octopus meat for local restaurants,” accompanied by the note: “see confidential proposal in Attachment 3.” (I’ve yet to obtain the full proposal.) Further, the document revealed that Kanaloa had already begun selling aquaculture products the prior year—not from octopuses, but from bobtail squids, whom they’d apparently already successfully bred. “If Kanaloa starts selling [bobtail squids] in mass [sic],” it read, “they would be the only supplier in the world.” And although publicly describing itself as fully funded by its tours, Kanaloa claimed in its proposal that it had secured over $600 thousand from investors, including Marissa Meyer, former CEO of Yahoo, to pursue its commercial aspirations.

As sunlight began to creep through my bedroom window, interrupting my research frenzy long enough for me to seek out more tissues, I began to reflect on my findings. Could a few tanks on a palm-lined seashore really be as dangerous to cephalopods as the mammoth Canary Islands operation slated to slaughter millions of them within the next several years? I’m sure that Kanaloa will continue to split hairs over its business model and intentions—conservation, partnering with gourmet restaurants, or even entertaining smiling children—but in the early morning haze, it dawned on me that none of that mattered. In the business of raising and killing sea creatures on land, away from their homes, there is no impartial researcher, supplier, or middleman—only individual, critical cogs in the machine.

I realized that, for a wild octopus yearning to stretch her arms beyond impassable blades of Astroturf and glide off into the depths of the Pacific, any farm is a factory farm.

And by positing itself as an octo-friend, a champion of the seas, an environmental savior, Kanaloa obscures its role in building this new industrial machine and setting us on an uncharted course we can’t ever come back from, using a species never before raised entirely in captivity. Its marketing is, then, a greenwashing and humanewashing front to lure in dollars, and support, from captivated tourists who might be otherwise appalled at the colossal venture under construction across the Atlantic.

In the weeks before I visited Kanaloa Octopus Farm, my dad had just returned home to the Big Island from a seven-month-long, gut-wrenching stay in the hospital and a rehabilitation facility in Honolulu after a failed coronary bypass operation nearly killed him. As every single second dragged by, day after day, he was reminded of his predicament, confined to a single bed within a single room. And even as his body progressively healed, his mind, deprived of stimulation and disconnected from the outside world, was stuck in a state of delirium until he finally could return home and reestablish his bearings.

On the farm, as I observed our tour guide scurrying about reminding guests over and over to pry any wandering octopus arms off the top edges of the tanks and return them to their confinement, I recalled the most harrowing part of my dad’s experience, which still haunts him today: month after month, lying there, he was prevented from even touching his toes to the ground before a team of nurses rushed in to hoist them back into bed.

Given the profound anguish that being trapped, with no control over one’s surroundings, provokes, it’s no wonder that octopuses forced into cramped conditions are prone to fighting and cannibalism. In nature, these highly sensitive beings are already extremely particular about their homes and social lives. In two octopus communities, Octopolis and Octlantis, in Australia, the creatures have built complex cities, complete with their own version of evictions. Within Octopolis, males protect their territories, meticulously etched out to the square meter, by “throwing debris at one another and boxing,” according to Science Alert. In concocting an octopus factory farm, the author of that article argues, we will essentially be engineering an entirely novel octopus culture, one that scales up Octopolis’ “battleground of boxing octopuses” by the thousands. Like other species we’ve domesticated before them, this new society of octopuses will be utterly dependent on us—and we, thus far, have woefully underestimated their labyrinth of both physical and psychological needs.

When you fight factory farming for a living as I have for the better part of 15 years, you spend a lot of time focusing on the most blatant ills: the chopping off of beaks and tails, the forced impregnation, the genetic manipulation for rapid growth. But my research into octopuses has reminded me that for some animals, and especially for cephalopods, the psychological agony we inflict on other animals through confined farming can be even more excruciating than the physical horrors.

Kanaloa Octopus Farm might be small, but its impact on the octopus psyche will run deep.

Beyond its benevolent façade, the farm’s money-making work, at its core, hinges upon controlling the reproductive cycle of female octopuses. At the finale of My Octopus Teacher (SPOILER), I erupted into hysterical sobs as the titular character finally met her destiny: laying her eggs and then fiercely protecting her brood as she withered away without food, encircled by hungry predators. Researchers in 2014 made an astonishing announcement: they’d documented, over the course of 4.5 years, a mother octopus clinging to a rock to protect her growing clutch, all the while rejecting food, before finally perishing.

Without this ultimate sacrifice made by mother octopuses for their young, their species would not continue. And so at Kanaloa, month after month, the team repeatedly induces this always-fatal reproductive stage, within the confines of the farms’ tiny, foreign enclosures and at their own whim, to generate hundreds of thousands of eggs, none of which—as of March of this year—had yet survived into adulthood.

In its quest to crack octopus reproduction, Kanaloa is not only helping to spawn the octopus factory farming industry—it is, like a ship’s sail, a core part of it.

WATCH MY INVESTIGATIVE FOOTAGE

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This World Octopus Day, I’m calling on my readers to help turn the tides on octopus farming for good. Take action below:

Medicine Must Evolve Away from Prehistoric Crabs’ Blue Blood—Before the Next Pandemic

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Investigations, Petitions, Wildlife

UPDATE (August 1, 2024): Two years after our investigative piece, and due to campaigning by major environmental organizations like Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Pharmacopeia has finally issued new guidance to push U.S. biomedical companies toward synthetic alternatives to horseshoe crab blood! As we previously exposed, a half million of these sentient, prehistoric animals have their blood drained and are left weak and dying each year for the medical industry, despite alternatives being available! This historic step will finally give these animals a chance to rebuild their dwindling populations and live in peace. But we must remain vigilant to ensure that the industry continues moving in the right direction over the coming months, and continue to urge regulators to make the shift mandatory. Thank you to everyone who has taken action to speak out for these remarkable sea animals!

Original story posted July 31, 2022

If you got a COVID vaccine, or any vaccine—or really any medical intervention over the past several decades—you can be sure that the blue blood of 450-million-year-old prehistoric arthropods known as horseshoe crabs was used to keep you safe. But in the U.S., lurking behind this magic potion is a fragile industry stubbornly dependent upon the traumatic bloodletting of a vulnerable species, compounded by a sea of red tape thwarting the widespread adoption of a viable alternative.

I have a bundle of murky memories of visiting the Baltimore Aquarium periodically with my grandparents as a youngster, but vividly I remember two things: laughing with glee while being splashed by a wall of water at the end of a dolphin show (which I now, regretfully, reflect upon much differently: from the dolphins’ perspective of perpetual captivity); and being horrorstruck when a horseshoe crab in a touch tank was flipped over, revealing what appeared, to my 7-year-old self, to be hundreds of sharp robotic claws.

My grandparents told me to go on and touch him. So I extended a finger slowly like E.T., just barely making contact with the shiny surface, and then recoiled with a shriek. Thus marked the beginning and end of my childhood foray into hands-on horseshoe crab encounters.

Until this year, at age 34. I was planning to visit a friend in New Jersey this past June and remembered having read recently that these crabs (who are really more closely related to spiders than actual crabs) congregate annually on the shores of the Delaware Bay, home to their largest population in the world, to spawn and continue on their ancient species. Google Maps told me my friend’s place was just under an hour from the nearest hotspot. I had also read of the role these living fossils’ blood had played in concocting vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, a fact that plunged me into an ethical quandary: I knew we desperately needed the shot, but I also knew that the “bleeding” of horseshoe crabs left me feeling oddly seasick. Ultimately, then, I knew I had to make it there to witness them, the beings to whom we owed our life-saving intervention, in order to process my inner tsunami.

In advance of my trip, I dove into researching just how, exactly, to maximize my chances of spotting horseshoe crabs in this pivotal act that has kept them surviving, without evolving, for eons. They aren’t just hanging out on any beach at any given moment. Each May and June, these magnificent beings appear in vast numbers on the shores of the Bay only at the evening high tide, and most abundantly during the full and new moons. Thus, the best time to spot their gatherings with enough daylight is on the few days of the month when sunset and high tide collide, within a few days of a full or new moon. It took my human brain an entire hour of matching up tide, sunset, and moon charts to pinpoint that sweet spot. I have no idea how these creatures make all of these calculations themselves, except that they must have unlocked some sort of ancient wisdom unbeknownst to our species.

After wrapping up a fun weekend with friends, I chomped down a vegan cupcake from Wildflower Vegan Café in Millville, New Jersey, and set off. As I drove down the lengthy road toward the East Point Lighthouse, a popular crab destination, I noticed my cell phone losing signal. My battery was hovering around 7 percent, the GPS sucking up all the juice my car charger had to offer. The sun was sinking lower into the sky. I knew I had mere minutes to arrive with enough light and enough cell phone battery to capture the spectacle. The road suddenly came to an end almost at the water’s edge, and I slid to a stop. I scampered over the dune, clasping my Canon camera and cell phone in each hand, hoping at least one would succeed in documenting the magical moment. There were several other people dotted about, lured by the vibrant hues of the sunset against the lighthouse. But I looked downward.

Immediately, I saw them, a group of greyish brown helmets playing bumper cars in a relatively calm pocket of water by the shore. I knelt down and, fingers shaking, started snapping photos furiously between my phone and camera, aware that it was the only chance I would have for the remainder of the season when sunset, high tide, and the eve of the full moon would all align. Through my lenses, I watched as the crabs tangoed together, males sliding up on females’ backs for their chance to pass on their 450-million-year-old, virtually unchanged DNA. Then a wave would pass, separating the pairs and leaving them to swim in circles again to resume the act.

I bent down for a clearer look. The entirety of their visible, above-water bodies, or carapace, comprised two connected, smooth structures, bending at the middle joint—plus a rigid tail jutting out of the rear end. Bordering this tail, on each side of the posterior shell, was a row of spikes. And seamlessly embedded into the round front shell were two deep brown, hard pearls—their eyes. They did not blink or move; there were no corneas or pupils. Yet, somehow, they stared back at me. As I moved my lens toward them, they’d slowly steer away.

The sunlight retreated as I walked along the shoreline atop a geotube. The Bay waves crashed with more fervor here. Clumps of horseshoe crabs attempting to spawn were knocked about, flipped around, and jettied back and forth. They were at the mercy of the sea, carried by its unrelenting movement. Were they relying on luck to eventually float them into less violent waters? Somehow, this strange methodology has worked without modifications for hundreds of millions of years. Despite eroding shorelines and rising temperatures, these crabs resist change, century after century, millennium after millennium. They stagnate in an apparently already impeccable state; it’s only the world around them, our world, that has evolved, unleashing troubled waters.

I reached a tiny inlet, where water had dug a channel into the sea grass, and the stench of rotten seafood met my nostrils. Upon their retreat back to low tide, the Bay had left dozens of flipped-over horseshoe crabs behind to die. I took in the sight over their undersides, the complex joints and appendages that were normally hidden underneath their sturdy shells. Their legs, wielding those alien-like pincers that had intimidated me as a child, pointed upwards, motionless. Here, they now fascinated me, a relic of a time long before I, or any of us, had ever been conceived. Plus, as an adult, I now knew they posed no threat. Alien as they seemed, these “claws” do not pinch; they simply swim and dig, the instruments that carry the crabs through their underwater realm.

I carefully stepped around the upside-down crabs and poked their bodies with my toes, one after another. All dead. Then, one began to move her legs like a claw game in an arcade. I reached down and carefully flipped her over just before the next wave approached. Slowly, she pushed herself back into the water and was joined by one of her peers. There was no time to reflect on her near-death experience; only to complete that singular mission of carrying on the species.

I sat on the geotube, filming as the final rays of sun were overtaken by moonlight. In those 30 minutes, I saw dozens, maybe hundreds, of crabs flipped around by the waves. Any who were left on land flung their rigid tails up and down, bucking their bodies and waving their legs frantically. Through this series of motions, most were able to right themselves without help. Their peculiar methods, again, worked.

By the time I packed up to leave, everyone else who’d come for the sun’s glorious exit was long gone. I drove back up the dirt road with 4 percent left on my phone battery, begging my signal to return and chart my course home. But the surrealness of the experience lingered; awe rushed over me and calmed my nerves. I’d just seen a process that originated long before humankind, and that somehow persisted, just as it always was, through the birth and death of the dinosaurs, alternating ice ages and interglacials, and the rise and fall of emperors and dynasties.

But now, their species will either sink or swim in response to perhaps their greatest threat yet: modern man.

The decline of the American horseshoe crab, also known as the Atlantic horseshoe crab, began decades ago, first spawned by the roundup of millions of crabs to be ground up into fertilizer in the early 1900s, and then exacerbated by overfishing for bait (used to catch other fishes and sea snails), as well as strandings on man-made structures. By 2002, there remained only just over 300,000 individuals left in the Delaware Bay, down from over 1 million in 1990.

The most calculated, organized, and enduring assault on horseshoe crabs in the 21st century, though, has been that thing that propelled my visit to the Delaware Bay in the first place: horseshoe crab bleeding for human medicine. Scientifically (or at least pharmaceutically) speaking, their blue blood is pure gold—to the tune of about $60,000 per gallon. The clotting agent unique to horseshoe crab blood is used to create Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL), which is instrumental in modern medicine because it detects endotoxins—deadly poisons to the human bloodstream. Today in the United States, crab-derived LAL is the nearly universal tool used to protect vaccines and other medical equipment from these toxins. Every single childhood shot, every intravenous drug, dialysis equipment, insulin, medical implants, and yes, every single American COVID vaccine, were brought to you by horseshoe crabs. All in all, LAL has evolved into an approximately $100 million industry in this country alone.

Among the Atlantic horseshoe crab’s cousins, the Chinese horseshoe crab was recently classified as “endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List, owing to intensive harvesting by the medical industry in Asia, and now conservationists worry that the American species isn’t far behind. Here, since their crash in the early 2000s, populations of the American species had somewhat stabilized, thanks both to nonprofit programs like reTURN the Favor, whose volunteers patrol beaches and flip over thousands of stranded crabs, as well as legal protections, like bans on the capture of female crabs for fishing bait. Such regulations, promulgated by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), were designed not for the crabs’ sake, but to protect migrating shorebirds like the red knot, who feast on horseshoe crab eggs each summer.

Despite these efforts, though, by 2013, red knot population levels had dropped by 80 percent over the course of 10 years, earning the bird a designation of “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Yet that didn’t faze the ASMFC earlier this year when it voted to lift horseshoe crab harvesting restrictions in blatant defiance of the ESA in a move Defenders of Wildlife blasted as “hastening the [red knot] species’ march toward extinction.” Environmentalists further warn that horseshoe crab numbers correspondingly remain at historically low numbers, and the IUCN still lists the American crab as “vulnerable to extinction.” (It should be noted that IUCN classifications carry no legal mandate, and although some countries have implemented protective measures at a national scale, the United States has missed the boat.)

Each year, the American biomedical industry uses 500,000 horseshoe crabs, a figure that has likely surged with the rush to deliver a COVID vaccine to billions worldwide. The so-called “harvesting” process is as follows: “Collectors” wade through the waters, grabbing crabs who come ashore to spawn. South Carolinian crabs in particular have fared prolonged disturbances, as they’re rounded up into ponds for days or weeks by the $22-billion Charles River Laboratories (aided and abetted by the state’s lax policies) before it extracts up to half of the crabs’ entire blood volume. (Update: As I was finalizing this story for publication, I learned of a monumental legal victory for crabs who were being poached by the thousands in the dead of night by Charles River contractors in South Carolina’s Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. Thanks to Defenders of Wildlife and the Southern Environmental Law Center, this region is now protected.)

At the lab, crabs are fastened into what looks like a stationary assembly line, and a needle inserted into the middle of their backs, in the highly sensitive area containing their heart between the two sections of their shell, siphons their pale blue blood into glass bottles reminiscent of milk jugs. They are bled just enough to be weakened, but not enough to die. About 30 percent perish anyway. The remainder are released, exhausted, to attempt to recover in the wilderness. Many don’t, succumbing to the effects of blood loss compounded by water deprivation and temperature changes. Piles of dead horseshoe crab bodies have been documented on the shoreline in the aftermath of these harvests. After studying these consequences, researchers from Plymouth State University declared that “it is critical that their role in medical research does not disrupt their natural role as a keystone species.”

In the midst of a catastrophe like COVID, where a robust vaccine supply is crucial to our own species, we especially should not be relying on the blood of such a vulnerable animal to ensure our safe supply of medical tools. For the past 20 years, an effective, man-made alternative has been at the ready, in which a horseshoe crab gene is cloned, and cells grown from it are cultured in a lab to produce commercial-grade recombinant factor (rFC). rFC is already displacing horseshoe crab blood across Europe and trickling into Asia. In the United States, though, our revolving-door bureaucracy, like the crabs themselves, appears steadfastly opposed to evolution.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates LAL, has excused itself from governing rFC, so, technically, biomedical companies may make the shift—with a small catch. According to U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP), which sets standards for the medical industry that are then enforced by the FDA, they must undertake time-consuming and costly steps to document that rFC is performing just as well as its animal-based predecessor. Plus, in the U.S., rFC has been patented by a single company (at least, until it expires later this year), which can fix its prices and make it less attractive to vaccine and device makers. In this foaming mess of red tape, only one maker, Eli Lilly, has set sail on a more humane trajectory with rFC, while the rest of the industry tightly clings to their billions. (As I publish this, news has just broken that the aforementioned foe, Charles River Laboratories, not to be thwarted by its South Carolina defeat, has expanded its crab harvesting operations into Cape Cod—rather than shift to rFC.)

In mid-2020, as the pandemic floodgates opened, USP, which had been considering changes to its standards to recommend rFC, abruptly reversed course, citing “comments” it received (perhaps by the industry itself, which stood to turn immediate profits amidst the calamity) requesting further research on the alternative’s efficacy. The move cemented the use of Atlantic horseshoe crabs in hundreds of millions of COVID vaccines and will likely stall a widespread transition to rFC for another four years—despite the European Pharmacopeia already embracing it, and existing scientific research touting its success.

If I’ve learned anything from my encounters with horseshoe crabs—once marked by horror, now by marvel—it’s that human beings, unlike them, are imperfect but have an infinite capacity for transformation of thought and behavior. And, unlike theirs, our 300,000-year presence has been but a mere blip on this 4.5-billion-year-old rock. We must turn the tides on our destructive conquest of sea life before the next global health crisis drives horseshoe crabs, and with them, shorebirds like red knots, to extinction. Or, if not for them, let’s do it to ensure a stable supply of our own life-saving innovations, lest we, like t-rex and brontosaurus before us, become just another visitor on the horseshoe crab’s 450-million-year journey.

Thank you to Tina Marie Johnson of Blue Mountain Poetry Salon for the coaching behind this piece.

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A Profound Lesson on Death from Bugs Who Spend 17 Years Underground

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Wildlife

It’s a sizzling afternoon in the summer of 2013 in the suburbs of Virginia, and the air is filled with shrieks. An insect flutters to the ground, nearly colliding with my head. As she perches on a nearby tree stump, I capture her silhouette on camera, the intersecting orange lines of her wings against her jet-black body. To the screaming children at the park playground, she’s a menace. To me, it’s like the earth has opened up to deliver a marvel that has been hidden right under our feet for the last 17 years: the cicadas of Brood II.

A Brood II cicada in 2013

To this day, I’ve been fascinated by cicadas—their love songs in the afternoon, their alien-like faces, the skins they leave behind that, as a child, I plucked from the trees and stuck to my own t-shirt like Velcro to show off to my friends.

I eagerly awaited the arrival of the cicadas each summer, growing up in Richmond, Virginia, and their songs became my lullaby. Memories of eating ice cream at dusk in flip flops are punctuated by the soundtrack of the singing insects. As an adult, instead of counting sheep, I often play cicada sounds on Alexa to soothe me to sleep. They’ve always been a reliable constant, a reminder of the days when stress from schoolwork faded into endless daytimes, barefoot adventures, and magical forts in the woods.

But In 2013, when I was 25, I met Brood II, the East Coast brood that arrives every 17 years, for the first time, at least that I can remember with clarity. Their last appearance, in 1996, had been when I was merely eight, a tumultuous year that served as my introduction to death and loss: first, it was my beloved family dog and protector, Wookie, and then, I met the savage and swift glioblastoma that consumed my grandfather’s brain and expunged him from my life for good. Had I crossed paths with Brood II that summer, their memory would have been as temporary in my mind as their aboveground lives had been.

But in 2013, when hundreds of millions of insects flooded the sky, the trees, the roads, and basically every orifice of nature once more, I arrived to the spectacle with open eyes. They flew through car windows, got smashed in the streets, were consumed by dogs, and invited themselves to cookouts like that nosy neighbor who doesn’t know when to leave. They were no longer a soft, warm friend. They were here, they were louder than ever—and I loved every minute of it.

That summer, I dove into learning everything I could about these faerie-like beings and the groups of “broods” that appear at different intervals in different regions of the country. Annual cicadas were always a soothing accompaniment to summer, predictable, reliable, steady. But periodical cicadas like Brood II—they were rare, bold, fleeting. They descended on humanity like a meteor, and then vanished just as quickly. They were “Dust in the Wind,” as Kansas says, and that made them a spectacle to behold.

In August of 2013, while America embarked on back-to-school shopping and end-of-summer soirees, Brood II vanished right on schedule. And just like after the departure of my grandfather so many years before, I continued on.

By the time the summer of 2021 touched down, I was 33, living alone with my dog and pig in the foothills of the Shenandoah mountains in a new town that was home to yet another periodical cicada, Brood X. What seemed like a lifetime had transpired since I last came face to face with Brood II, the only periodical cicada that ever emerged in my hometown of Richmond. I’d fallen in and out and in and out (and in and out) of love, gotten divorced, moved at least four times, watched death steal even more loved ones, grew bonds with dogs and pigs who captured my heart, navigated isolation during a global pandemic. I’d raged; I’d spent time holing up inside myself; I’d become weathered.

But I never forgot them, the cicadas of Brood II. And in 2021, I frothed with excitement as the headlines started popping up about the impending the arrival of their cousins in Brood X, overflowing with cicada recipes and spawning cicada memes. In those first few days, my ears perked up at the sound of faraway sirens. It was as though an alarm was malfunctioning at the nearby hospital. But it grew closer, and closer, and closer. As it did, I became antsy and began to steal glimpses of those insects I’d accidentally discovered in the earth while doing yardwork. I’d lift a rock and find them hovering, waiting in their tiny round holes in the ground for their cue. Finally, one of them, who had a nose like Q*Bert’s (and whom I had named, simply, George), finally ascended my nearby fig tree, to my delight. By the end of the first week, my yard had seemingly morphed into cicada HQ.

George

One evening, camera in one hand and flashlight in the other, I set off into the dark. Immediately, I caught sight of a cicada on my left whose needle-like legs were clasped tightly to the blue paint on my house. His exoskeleton was frozen delicately in place, as his tender, cream-colored body emerged from within at a glacial pace. My flashlight illuminated his vivid yellow, newborn wings, unfurling into the pitch-black night. His red eyes seemed to glare back at me like an ambulance’s lights.

In my encounters with Brood II almost a decade earlier, or with the many annual cicadas, I had never seen this exact moment of birth—not of a new life, but of life in a new place, in my place. Silently, undetected, these creatures crawl beneath our feet for nearly two decades, experiencing a world we never will. They tunnel through thick dirt, passing earthworms and grubs, with no need for vision, for the set of five senses that define our lives. Those 17 years comprise 99 percent of their lives; above-ground, they exist for mere weeks. What we see—their crisp, shining wings—and what we hear—their piercing cries—actually, then, are the beginnings of their deaths.

That night I got a glimpse into their hour of transfiguration. For 17 years, as we drive to and from work, journey from city to city, walk our dogs and ride our bikes on the sidewalk, they are just underneath us, excavating, sucking on tree sap, burrowing. Then, on that seventeenth year, they lie in wait for the day that the temperature of the earth reaches 64 degrees. As the sun sets, the grub-like nymphs begin their ascent. With their hooked front legs, they dig through the top layer of soil, thrust themselves onto the land, and begin to scale the nearest tree (or, today, fence, house, or other structure). Once lodged in a comfortable position, in the dead of night, the process begins: a slit forms along their backs and slowly, the adult cicadas’ pale, delicate, soft bodies extract themselves from their former skin. In the hours that follow, the cicadas sit motionless as their crumpled-up wings miraculously unfold and harden into tools that will lift them high into the trees come morning. In one night, as we sleep, millions of formerly beetle-like nymphs have taken to the skies like tiny, glittery birds.

I began to walk the perimeter of my fence and saw dozens, then hundreds, of tiny insects dotting the wooden panels. I approached a cicada who sat silently adjacent to her once-protective skin that encapsulated her through her sightless journey underground, encased by mud. This was her first night in the open air, filled with the aromas of freshly cut grass. My flashlight was her first time seeing light in her 17 years of life. That night, her new skin would harden and turn from cream to black, preparing her for a whole new life aboveground.

A short life, already stamped with an expiration date. As I snapped her photo, the novelty we both witnessed—me, meeting a tiny backyard alien, and her, breathing in open air—lasted only seconds. I would persist into August, while she would soon succumb to old age and gracefully fall from the forest canopy, if not first devoured by a hungry bird, dog, or pig.

Yes, a pig—specifically, the 100-pound potbellied pig inhabiting my home who quite quickly and gleefully developed his own cicada transfixion.

Early into my 2021 Brood X festivities, when it was time to turn off the lights and head to bed, Peppercorn the pig was not nestled into his pod (the dog bed topped with a comforter topped with an old beanbag chair into which he burrows/disappears at night). I called for him outside, and I heard nothing. After a moment, I located him in the far corner of the fenced yard, munching on something crunchy. As I approached him, commanding him to return to bed, he began running along the fenceline away from me, grabbing bites of treats all the while.

To Pepper, the earth had apparently gifted him with an endless supply of Ferraro Rocher truffles. I gaped in horror.

Once I finally corralled the pig into the house and covered the flap of his pig door, I realized the battle had just begun. He paced back and forth in front of the door, nudging it with his nose and squealing. It was as though he’d not been fed for weeks. He was obsessed. I resorted to sleeping in front of the door to keep him at bay until he finally wore out and went back to the pod for the night.

Thus commenced a monthlong, fruitless endeavor to save every cicada. At night, before a new batch of them broke through the soil and journeyed up the fence to commence their molt that would enable them to retreat to the trees, I’d close up Pepper’s pig door. Then, before he was due to relieve himself at bedtime, I’d head out with my flashlight and patrol the fence, moving every climbing cicada to the other side of the fence, away from Pepper’s wrath. Only then, after this 30-minute ritual, would he be allowed outside.

In the morning, back around the fence I would go, relocating any still-hardening new cicadas from the lower to upper parts of the fence, where they were out of reach of my determined pig.

Like Pepper, I’d become obsessed. While he was intent upon devouring as many cicada candies as could fit in his belly, I was intent upon rescuing just as many. After all, I reasoned: they’d spent 17 years tunneling underground, never seeing the light of day, preparing for this culminating moment. Their final mission in life was to sing into the summer air, woo their soulmate, deposit approximately 500 babies into a tree branch to carry on the species, and then go out with glory. The future of Brood X depended on these very cicadas to survive and continue the cycle.

Yet, as soon as they reached their destination, Pepper was there with a toothy grin to abort their mission.

One Thursday afternoon, I finally brought up to my therapist, a fellow animal lover, the ongoing distress and drain on my internal resources that the Brood X debacle was causing me. I expected a wave of empathy, but instead I got a chortle.

It was not, however, because she was among the millions of Americans who found the cicadas to be, at best, a loud annoyance, and, at worst, an all-out invasion on our senses. On the contrary, she truly empathized with these miniature sirens, valuing them for who they were.

Who they were—not who they weren’t.

They were a species that had evolved over eons to swarm the earth in massive numbers every 17 years, leaving virtually no remaining members protected and safe underground. Their ongoing survival depended not on the individual, but on the hoards. It was as though a certain mortality rate was baked into their DNA—only the lucky will ultimately survive long enough to reproduce. Owing to their apparently delicious flavor profile (according to Pepper), most would become snacks for ravenous carnivores, or victims of car crashes and other collisions.

But they were not me. When peering into the sunlight for the first time, perhaps they felt warmth; perhaps they, too, felt wonder. But perhaps they did not plot out their mating mission, like a single 20-something creating a dating profile and ranking potential suiters according to compatibility and alignment with their lifelong goals. Perhaps their goal was simply to reach the nearest tree and sing. Or perhaps they did not have goals, at least in the way I envisioned them.

Perhaps, the 17 years leading up to that culminating summer were the true voyage, invisible to us yet teeming with adventure: charting out new root systems, bumping into fleshy worms, getting acquainted with their peers, plotting their territories. Perhaps, then, in our world of yellow sunshine, high-speed internet, and automobiles, they are like an elderly woman in her rocking chair, sighing a final satisfied breath. They are ready.

Yes, their extermination by a hungry pig was unfortunate; my sadness, I decided, was justified. But my anthropomorphizing of these mystical creatures with bulging eyes had derailed my life as I sought to preserve them in the same way I’d rescue a cat from in front of a car or a chicken who’d fallen off a slaughter-bound truck. Unlike cicadas, cats and chickens aren’t popping up from between blades of grass by the trillions and overwhelming the landscape so that a sufficient fraction will survive to carry on their species’ legacy. If they did, the animal lovers among us would have an unprecedented ethical quandary on our hands.

As someone who cannot turn her back on an animal in need, ever—I actually stopped my car about 11 times along a drive down dark country roads this past March to move toads out of harm’s way—relinquishing control and facing the reality that I could not save every cicada was rough. Not patrolling the fence felt irresponsible. If a life could be spared, shouldn’t it be?

But the mortality of the cicadas was way beyond me, or any of us. It was a universal inevitability. I was whisking them from Pepper’s tusks knowing full well that by summer’s end, they’d be long gone. “Dust in the Wind” echoed in my mind.

So, with all my might, I stopped—well, almost. I still kept Pepper indoors during cicada primetime. And I decided that if I could not save them all, I could save a few. When I came along those who, without my assistance, would surely wither away, I stepped in: I took in two cicadas with wings that hadn’t quite unfurled and had hardened into a twisted shape, rendering them unable to fly, and hence to mate, and to have a chance to help carry on their species at all.

I named my two rescues Nick and June (Handmaid’s Tale, anyone?), and for two weeks, I brought them fresh tree branches each day in a large glass jar inside my kitchen and watched them climb and eat, and climb and eat. The heaviness of the countless fatalities, the smashed cicadas in the roadways and those picked from the trees by crows, faded away as I observed Nick and June thrive.

Then, one day, as I was cooking spaghetti, June withdrew her ovipositor and began laying her eggs, hundreds of them, into a branch. I filmed her, marveling at the life cycle playing out before my eyes.

Then, of course, she died. Nick went with her; it was rather “Romeo and Juliet” of them. Like that of the octopus—a wonderfully complex animal oozing with intelligence and skills and adaptations who ultimately perishes after creating new life for the very first time—the plight of the cicadas felt unfair. A remarkable existence tied to a ticking clock.

But it was the only way it could be, according to whatever laws govern our world and our universe, and there was no surmounting it. Spending hours monitoring the fence would not stop it. And, obviously, caring for this betrothed pair with crumpled wings wouldn’t either, although it provided the relief I needed in that moment to grapple with that immense powerless. That relief, that settling of inner turmoil, means something to a human wrestling with insurmountable existential dread. I cannot end death, the shadow that has clung to my heels a little too tightly in recent seasons. But the knowing that I had helped, in some way, in the only way I could, mattered.

A few weeks later, I went out and tied the egg-filled branch into a bush to allow these new cicada-lings to crawl into the earth, not to be seen again by humans until 2038. That summer, I’ll be freshly 50. Presumably, I will no longer live in these mountains, or even in this state, to greet these young teenagers as they come up for their brief and only season of lovemaking. By then, I will have loved, and lost, many more beings, friends, and family, compounding the recent losses I’ve endured—my soul dog Powder, my second mom Sherrie, my aunt, my father’s near-death experiences—and by then, perhaps I will have inched slightly closer to accepting the inevitable mortality of myself and everyone I know. Today, in 2022, I face the looming threat of death like a terror greater than skydiving, or tightrope-walking, even as the losses pile up around me.

But Nick and June the cicadas brought me some semblance of control, of seizing the steering wheel on the train called mortality that every living behind rides. Yet, a final reminder that permanence and immortality are still far beyond my reach hit me as I was readying this story for publication. I was searching high and low, but ultimately came up empty, for the footage I had taken of June laying her precious eggs last year. Apparently, it was one of the many victims of a phone hacking incident I faced last summer. Now, the evidence of her final deed exists only as specks in my memory⁠—and, hopefully, in hundreds of baby cicadas who will be digging invisibly around my yard for 16 more years.

Today, when I strum Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” on my ukulele, singing, “Don’t hang on; nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky,” I think fondly of June, Nick, and their babies. And I remind myself that cicadas are not us, and we are not them. But in their deaths, I have learned about my own. And their beautiful overnight transfiguration, from hidden nymph to shimmering wings in the summer sky, and their utter transience in our aboveground world—that’s precisely what makes them magical.

If I’m lucky, this summer, I’ll get a peek of the stragglers of Brood X, the few who opted out of last year’s rendezvous in favor of one more year of tunneling and drinking sap, as they hit the skies as 18-year-olds, ready to go out with a bang.

Special thank you to Tina Marie Johnson of Blue Mountain Poetry Salon for the exceptional writing coaching that guided me through the creation of this piece.

Cat’s Permanent Grin Was Caused by Years of Neglect

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Companions, Rescue

Exactly 3 months, 12 days, and 4 hours ago, my entire world was shattered. Powder—my soul dog, my best friend—was ripped from my life by an aggressive cancer just as fast as she’d collided with it in early 2009 when my car nearly collided with her, a white puppy lost in the road at midnight. The pain has been so raw, so jarring, so unimaginable that I still can’t write about it. But in the depths of this sadness, an almost equally unimaginable being pounced into my life. That being is Lip Gloss.

It was only a couple weeks into the hurricane that had become my new normal after Powder’s loss, intensified by the near death (twice) of my father and the actual death of my second mom, Sherrie (2021 was quite the year for me), that I began the search for a feline friend on Petfinder. Nightly, I pored over pages and pages containing tens of thousands of cats, knowing it would be years, maybe decades, before I could welcome another dog into my heart—but that I still had a lonely cat at home and the space to offer to another in need. Yet equally needy, equally sad, they all appeared, yearning not to become one of the millions who enter shelters and never emerge alive each year. I couldn’t choose which cat to save and which to turn my back on. Although I don’t believe in “signs,” I needed one to overcome the paralysis.

The “sign” came when the name “Powder” flickered across my screen above the image of a plain white cat. Without even reading his description, I rushed to put in my application. This was the cat I had to have to fill that hole in my heart, if it could ever be filled.

Not an hour later, I was reading more about my cat-to-be and immediately learned that he had a brother who had to be adopted with him. They were an inseparable pair, but space for two in my humble abode, I did not have. I sighed as I emailed the shelter, Shenandoah Valley Animal Services Center (SVASC) of Lyndhurst, Virginia, withdrawing my application. Fate seemed to be taunting me like an uncatchable laser pointer.

But SVASC wasn’t ready to give up on me. “Is there another cat you’re interested in?” they replied. I halfheartedly scrolled the website, knowing I’d never find another Powder. And I was right—there will never be another of Powder, not for me, and not for this world. She is irreplaceable, and her loss is incurable.

But who I did find was Lip Gloss, a 12-year-old feline with a permanent grin—or grimace, depending on how you look at her—etched onto her face. She was strange; she was beautiful; and she was a sweet senior who had been looked over for two straight months. She instantly became mine, and I, hers.

Lip Gloss’ curious expression is actually the result of a “rodent ulcer,” or indolent ulcer, resulting from an ongoing, untreated flea infestation at her former home, where she was hoarded along with 12 other cats. According to the shelter, her fitting name “Lip Gloss” comes from the so-titled song by recording artist Lil Mama. Her original name, given by her previous family, was Mama, which makes me wonder if she’d previously been bred. The neglect at that home also left her with a cauliflower ear, crumpled because of a hematoma due to ear mites or an infection.

Despite her humbled appearance, Lip Gloss strutted into my house and made herself at home immediately. Like the queen she is, she has taken over my bed, roosting each night on my entire pillow and leaving me the corners. Sometimes, she prefers to burrow under the blanket and will meow until I oblige her by lifting the covers so she can crawl in—almost perfectly mimicking Powder, who whined incessantly for the same prize: being tucked in for a good night’s sleep.

Lip Gloss carries not only her unique physical features from her past, but also her own emotional baggage. She hoards each meal like it might be her last, nearly tripping me as she awaits feeding and then scarfing the food down so fast she occasionally throws it back up. I’ve resorted to feeding my other cat, Chia, in a separate room, lest Lip Gloss devour her entire bowl, too. But at least I’ve taught Lip Gloss some manners: she’ll sit every time, without fail, for a meal or even a morsel of food.

As predictably as her insatiable appetite, Lip Gloss does something else every day: she makes me laugh—a feat I never thought possible after Powder’s passing. Whether appearing apparently from nowhere beside my face baring her teeth and breathing like Darth Vader through her mouth (she also suffers from periodic bouts of stuffy nose brought on by feline herpes), sleeping upside-down with her fangs on display, or using her paw to hold up her bulbous tummy as she grooms herself, Lip Gloss is a perpetual comedian.

It was terrifying to adopt a senior cat so soon after I lost Powder. I thought I might lose Lip Gloss, too, in mere days. I rushed her to the vet in those early weeks at every sneeze or excessive trip to the water bowl (we’re exploring a possible, treatable thyroid issue currently, so my fears haven’t been completely unjustified). Death has surrounded me lately, stealing my ability to enjoy beautiful moments and replacing it with a loudly ticking clock in the back of my mind that counts down my own mortality, and that of everyone I know and love. At first, all I could think about was that I might only have two, or maybe four, years with Lip Gloss, if I’m lucky. And days ticked by unappreciated, and with them, beautiful moments. I broke down in bed for days and nearly missed the first time my cats broached their inexplicable silent battle over territory, lowered their batting paws, and simply played together.

Lip Gloss has forced me to stop missing those moments. I know her years are short. In the scheme of things, mine are too. We will all be plunged into the unknowable oblivion, like Powder before us. But we can make something of each day. I might not move mountains, but I can play a song on my ukulele; I can write a blog; I can post a photo revealing the marvels of the tiny shrimp who mate for life at the Hawaiian seashore on social media and reach untold people with a compassionate message. I can laugh at my cat snoring upside-down, knowing she had the strength to leave behind her years of neglect and keep grinning.

Thanks to Lip Gloss, today, I’m wide awake, and I grin, too.

These Dive-Bombing, Deck-Destroying Bees Can Outsmart Us All

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Rescue, Wildlife

I love spring, the season of rebirth. Every day the leaves grow bigger, new flowers burst into bloom, and the yellow buzzing cotton balls known as carpenter bees dive-bomb me nonstop on my back deck. One might presume this would be quite the annoyance, and in the past, I’d have heartily agreed. Until the day I met Dandelion two years ago and fell in love.

It was late March in Virginia, where the whether changes from day to day like a wardrobe. The daffodils had already sprung up, but the crisp 40-degree winds of winter still kissed my cheeks. Hunched over almost lifelessly on my front porch one morning was a fuzzy yellow and black ball, a carpenter bee who’d crawled out to greet the sun and been stunned by the plunging overnight temperatures. He’d lost the energy to fly, and without his wings, he’d never be able to travel to his next meal.

I scooped up the creature, and he buzzed in my hands. I quickly filled an oversized Tupperware with a damp paper towel, some blades of grass, a few dandelions, and a capful of organic sugar water. I coaxed this new friend to the dish, where he immediately began sucking up the liquid with his long proboscis, resembling a miniscule winged elephant of sorts.

Dandelion, as I immediately christened him, spent about a week with me. Each morning I’d replace his supply of flowers and sugar water, and he’d lap up the beverage and spend the day sipping from the array of flowers like a wine tasting at a vineyard. He’d hang out in my lap buzzing sporadically, yet still unable to muster enough strength to take flight. While he was in my care, I read up on these fascinating insects, learning pretty early on not to fear Dandelion or others of his kind: despite their overt aggression and stalker-like behavior (anyone else been followed around your yard by a zealous bee, hovering inches from your face and staring menacingly yet adorably into your soul?), male carpenter bees can’t actually sting.

While males are out strutting their stuff, female carpenter bees, I learned, live with their sisters in sorority fashion, caring for one another and taking on specific roles within a social hierarchy to keep the nest running smoothly. And while they can sting, they only do so under dire circumstances.

Since that spring, I’ve spent hours watching carpenter bees diligently deconstruct the wooden boards in my deck, as, true to their name, they burrow into wood to nest. Listening closely, I can hear their soft scratching sounds like tiny saws. Instead of agonizing over how much putty I’ll need to fill these precisely carved tunnels, I remind myself that I’m a mere visitor here, in their home. And my deck is host to an extraordinary, unbreakable sisterhood.

If you’re still unconvinced of the magic I see in bees, consider this: researchers at Queen Mary University of London taught a group of bees in 2017 to move a ball to a certain position to access sugar water. The bees easily mastered this task, unsurprisingly. Then, when new bees were introduced to the experiment and observed their peers completing the task and being rewarded, they, too, learned to do it. But their intelligence didn’t stop there—the new bees invented more efficient ways to get their sugar fix, like picking balls that were situated closer to the target. They innovated.

These results support an earlier study that discovered that bees could learn new tasks with increasing complexity for food, and they could subsequently somehow communicate their discoveries to their friends.

Perhaps, most remarkable, however, is how bees’ social adaptation skills can measure up to, or even actually trump, our own. Bees have long been observed to perform a “waggle dance” to show other bees abundant food sources. But when a find is unappetizing, the bees do a smaller dance, or don’t dance at all. Other bees respond appropriately in either case and will even leave more crowded feeding spots for a higher quality opportunity, avoiding “maladaptive herding,” a phenomenon in which blindly following the masses results in the spread of misinformation (2020 conspiracy theories, anyone?).

To test this capability in humans, researchers devised an experiment in which participants had to choose among three slot machines, trying to win as much money as possible, while being allowed to observe other participants. The results:

“[A] challenging task elicited greater conformity and the copying increased with group size. This suggests that unlike bees, when large groups are confronted with tough challenges, collective decision-making becomes inflexible, and maladaptive herding behaviour is prominent. … [W]e should be more aware of the risk of maladaptive herding when these conditions – large group size and a difficult problem – prevail. We should take account of not just the most popular opinion, but also other minority opinions.”

Imagine where we’d be if more of us humans detected and strayed from harmful ideologies, platforms, and demagogues. Imagine if we were as discerning and skilled participants as bees are in our own democracy.

Back to that spring two years ago. One morning I came downstairs to find Dandelion zipping around his enclosure, and I knew his time had come. I picked a balmy 70-degree day and released him soaring back into the wild. His departure saddened me, but I knew it was his job to go out and pollinate the world. After all, bees are responsible for pollinating 90 percent of our food, and without them, in a reality that could be right around the corner, we’d lose half the groceries we take for granted today. I can’t imagine a bee-less world, but we’re catapulting toward it every day with our pesticides, pollution, and habitat destruction.

In the U.S., for instance, between 1947 and 2008, the honeybee population plunged from 6 million to 2.4 million, or about 60 percent. This is largely attributable to our pesticide use on massive scale. According to Greenpeace, scientists have discovered over 150 different pesticides within granules of pollen, and major corporations like Bayer and DuPont “shrug their shoulders at the systemic complexity, as if the mystery were too complicated. They advocate no change in pesticide policy. After all, selling poisons to the world’s farmers is profitable.”

Do your part to protect our pollinators. Maintain a bee-friendly yard with no pesticides. Leave the dandelions in your yard, as they are emerging bees’ first spring snack. Purchase organic produce when you can, and work to secure better access for others, especially those in food apartheids. Support an American ban on neonicotinoids, a particularly deadly class of pesticides that’s already banned in the European Union and which may be responsible for the deaths of up to up to a third of U.S. beehives. Be on the lookout for stunned bees like Dandelion in early spring, and leave out shallow bowls of water (filled with rocks) for them and other insects.

Despite their (endearing) dive-bombing and deck-destroying proclivities, bees give us life—so let’s preserve theirs.

The Story of a Little June Bug and the Woman Who Saved Him

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Rescue, Wildlife

This is a story about a little green bug—and the woman who saved his life.

In the summer of 2018, Sherrie Carter had offered up her beautiful beach home on Buckroe Beach in Hampton, Virginia, as she frequently did, to a group of volunteers from the local VegFest for a pool party. That evening, as we laughed and said our goodbyes in the front parking lot, my eye caught a glinting green beetle struggling in a spider web—the predator with her menacing fangs just inches away, preparing to descend on her new meal.

I couldn’t take it, the horror of this feast. I swept in and scooped the little beetle out of harm’s way and gently set him down in the bushes, hoping the spider would find a new victim to sustain herself when I wasn’t there to witness it. I know—we shouldn’t interrupt nature, good, bad, or ugly—but that’s who I am. The suffering overcomes me.

Later that night, the beetle had somehow managed to climb all the way up onto Sherrie’s second-floor deck and was waiting for her with a broken wing, unable to fly. Of course, within moments, the beetle was in a Tupperware with a capful of water and some fruit in Sherrie’s kitchen, because that’s who Sherrie was: she couldn’t ever turn her back on a problem, or on someone in need.

Sherrie quickly updated me with a barrage of pictures, showing the little June bug—whom we immediately and fittingly named June after the daunting, fearless protagonist of our shared favorite show The Handmaid’s Tale—in his new little home. Climbing branches, devouring blueberries, nestling among leaves. Deprived of his wings from the damage of the spider’s web, he could not survive outdoors ever again. Alongside her four felines, he would be Sherrie’s forever companion.

Pretty soon, June Bug got an upgrade: a full aquarium from the pet store. For the entire summer, Sherrie documented his progress, frequently sharing photos with me about how proud she was of the little bug who somehow climbed an entire story after losing his flight. His perseverance, his will to live, all encapsulated in such a tiny body. To most, he was just an annoying June bug, swarming in the light of our porches on warm summer nights. But behind his dazzling emerald shell, Sherrie saw so much more. To Sherrie, he was brave, determined, a survivor. He was a voracious eater whose favorite food was blueberries. He was an individual. To Sherrie, every little being was remarkable, worthy, important.

I promised her I’d write a story about little June on my blog, where I share true and remarkable animal stories with the world, but between life and moving and chores and my potbellied pig who enjoys biting holes in my drywall for fun, I never did.

And as the sweltering summer gave way to the September breeze, June Bug, as nature had always intended, finally left this Earth. Sherrie kept his little shelled body, his exoskeleton, on her condo mantle in remembrance. She shed tears. I did too.

On January 2, 2021, after an illness, Sherrie joined him, leaving me and all of those who knew her with more tears and a giant hole in our hearts. That month, as I opened her computer and begin the arduous process of digging through her files trying to make sense of what I had lost, I found a gold mine: an entire folder dedicated to June Bug, with dozens upon dozens of photographs. It was time to write.

To understand Sherrie’s remarkable relationship with such an insect, you only had to know Sherrie for a moment. I knew her for almost 13 years. As I was winding down my college career and simultaneously discovering the horrors we inflict upon the beings with whom we share our world—from dismal factory farms to barren zoo cages and bathtub-sized pools confining magnificent orcas—I plunged into the world of activism, aching for a better world. It was then, through the newly hatched advocacy group Richmond Friends of Animals, that Sherrie and I joined forces.

We attended dozens and dozens of demonstrations together over the years and plotted alongside other group members how we could overthrow the evil powers-that-be, or at least put the wicked proprietors of Alan Furs out of business. Sherrie, several other activists, and I soon became penpals of sort, emailing and texting day in and day out about our trials and tribulations of life between our monthly protests and vegan potlucks. I learned of Sherrie’s incredible heartbreaks one after another—her mother, her brother, her father, her cat Boogie (who chased balls like a puppy and suspended himself from the back door window to watch the comings and goings), her dog Jack (whom she’d plucked from a filthy hoarder disguised as a rescue operation and whisked off to the vet to have an enormous abscess removed). Yet Sherrie persevered, just like June Bug. She showed up with a smile on her face, refusing to let the ache swallow her whole.

In 2010, Sherrie was named one of Allen and Allen’s 100 Hometown Heroes for her work in animal rescue and advocacy and was presented her award at the local baseball stadium. She made no fanfare of it—that’s who she was. She was always bailing out shelter dogs from high-kill areas like Rome, Georgia, funneling funding to their medical care and even helping transport them to safety. On her computer, I’d later find files and files of folders and spreadsheets documenting the hundreds of donations and animals she’d saved.

One day last fall, I got a flood of texts from Sherrie. She’d liberated two lobsters from the grocery store because she couldn’t bear to watch them alone in that tank, awaiting their fate of being boiled alive (disclaimer: please don’t repeat this; though Sherrie’s heart was pure, her money was, of course, just going to fund their replacements in that tank). The previous year, I had conducted a lobster rescue of the great Lawrence von Croydon and released him into the Atlantic, and Sherrie wanted to do the same. Of course, being Sherrie, she leapt into action. I walked her through how to release the two crustaceans safely, all while she filled my phone with expletives about how cruelly they had been wrapped up like produce. Sherrie was nothing if not passionate about her compassion.

Like that clawed pair, so many of us owe our lives to Sherrie.

About six years ago, Sherrie started calling me her daughter. We, of course, had our own families—me with my parents in Hawaii and her with her grown step-kids—but both of us were physically distanced from our families. After both of our divorces, we were two women on our own, forging our uncertain paths forward. That shared purpose, that surrogate familial bond, meant the world to me. Sherrie was the person I called late at night as I cried lonely tears. She was the one who doled out financial advice and reminded me that I could carry on despite my doubts and insecurities. Honestly, I can’t imagine where I’d be today had I not had her by my side through several years of hardship. She was always there, without fail, for me, and for countless others—even when it took a ginormous toll on herself.

I think back about the burden she carried for me, and others, who needed her. I wish now more than anything we could all tell her how much it meant, and tell her it’s okay to rest easy now. But I know it was what she felt compelled to do with her life—to help, to serve—just like she helped June Bug.

In her final months, Sherrie and her four cats took to the road in her new RV, and she told me often that she was living her dream, like pioneer woman in Barbie dreamhouse. After years of giving and serving, Sherrie found her path, a way to nurture her own soul the way she nurtured countless others’ who crossed her path.

Managing her estate has been straining, draining, impossible. It is the futile attempt at wrapping up a life unfinished with a neat little bow. It is the water over a gas-fueled flame, a fire that yearns to keep breathing warmth into everything it touches.

So when I cry, when I want to shut down, I pull out the postcard I found in her RV, which features two prancing puppies alongside the text: “If we are ever to enjoy life, now is the time, not tomorrow or next year… Today should always be our most wonderful day.” -Thomas Dreier

Sherrie will continue breathing life into us all for years to come, to help us make each day the most wonderful day.

Cover Your Snout and Save a (Pig) Snout!

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Companions, Farmed Animals, Rescue

Today’s story is a little different. Today I invite you to become a little part of the story of a serene place called Ranger’s Refuge–a slice of paradise where hundreds of unwanted and discarded farmed animals have found a new lease on life.

Tucked away in rural Virginia, Ranger’s Refuge has been special to me, as a rescue pig mom, for some time because of its specific devotion to our porcine friends who are all-too-often abandoned and abused. I even decided to make it the beneficiary of sales for my first novel, Dellie’s Run.

It all started on Easter morning in 2001. Lorelei and Ron Pulliam discovered a small black pig scampering about, afraid, with their horses at their equine center. Slowly, Lorelei earned this little pig’s trust and provided him with a forever home at what would become Ranger’s Refuge–named, rightly, after him.

Lorelei then went digging to discover Ranger’s origins and was appalled to learn that his family was living at a farm in extreme neglect. Fortunately, the farmer was persuaded to turn over these pigs, who were soon reunited with Ranger.

Lorelei with Ranger

Ranger not only founded a what would become a permanent home for hundreds to follow in his hoof-steps over the years–but he sparked waves of compassion for all, and even a little laughter, in everyone who met him. Writes Lorelei about Ranger’s role in Gallastar’s therapy program for children:

We began using him in our therapy program as an example of how to overcome abuse and neglect. He was the epitome of power around the other pigs but with grace and gentleness. We used him to teach group after group about not stereotyping or pre-judging. He affected many people. He always ate lunch with the children and even had a slumber party with his friend Regis the dog and the therapeutic riding students. He and Regis would follow me on my horse. One day, he explored too far and the only way to bring him home was to use my bra as a harness. I didn’t care what the neighbors thought – I had my Ranger. Those were the happiest days of my life.

Ranger was also fiercely loyal. When his best friend Bart became very ill, Ranger stood stubbornly by his side. Whenever Bart had to have a shot, Lorelei and Ron would have to lock Ranger out–but he’d just try to break through the door the whole time as Bart cried.

Sadly, after many years of love and unforgettable antics, Ranger passed away in early 2019. But his legacy lives on through every single animal who sets foot, hoof, or paw onto the pastures at Ranger’s Refuge. Currently, there are over 200 animals–pigs, horses, ponies, donkeys, goats, cows, rabbits, and chickens–calling Lorelei and Ron’s place a forever home.

And somehow, through the daily toil, sweat, and even tears, Lorelei manages to not only care for this rescued pack–but to give back to the wider community but helping find homes and secure care for animals in need all over the East coast.

Right now, thanks to Lorelei’s tireless work, three Kune Kune pigs–two of whom were being bred repeatedly, only to have their babies taken away for meat time and time again–have been rescued and are heading to new homes to live out their days in peace. One, a tiny girl named Cardigan, especially caught my eye, not just because of Taylor Swift’s new song, but because of this fluffy face.

Funds are urgently needed to vet and spay these girls–and to keep everyone happy and healthy over at Ranger’s Refuge.

Lorelei and Ron have given their hearts and souls to countless animals, and now it’s time for us to give back to them. Fortunately, we can help hundreds of piggy snouts to enjoy rooting and snorting for years to come, simply by purchasing a mask from Pig Wow to cover our own snouts.

Me in my Pig Wow masks, with Peppercorn the pig

Each mask is handmade by Teresa Burton for only $10.00, with 100 percent of proceeds going to Ranger’s Refuge. You can choose from the lovable array of pig, dog, chicken, cat, and more designs below (plus, more available not pictured!) in either adult or kid sizing. To order, simply visit the Pig Wow Facebook page and comment on the post with your desired mask(s)–or head straight to PayPal and send $10.00 per mask to Teresa at datnky@aol.com, noting your address and desired mask(s) in the comment field.

Thank you for becoming part of the story of Ranger’s Refuge–and helping Ranger’s legacy live on for years to come.

Need a Breath of Fresh Air? Two Words: Sea Puppies.

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Petitions, Wildlife

It’s been a rough week–hell, it’s been a rough year. Fellow humans are fighting for their lives, both in hospitals and on the streets in the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd. And we’ve gotten our first glimpse inside a factory farm that was forced to mass-exterminate pigs because of slaughterhouse shutdowns due to workers contracting COVID-19.

I’ve spent the week trudging through the desolate headlines, taking action for our Black family and friends where I can, and soaking up tips to become a better ally. As an animal advocate, I must also be a human advocate. Animal oppression is rooted in the same oppressive system that kills Black and Brown people, and our work won’t be done until we’ve addressed all of it.

Over the last few months as the world seems to be topping down around me–and especially now–it’s been hard to find a time to write an inspiring story about animals that feels meaningful. So I’ve stagnated in my writing while waging on with other forms of social justice activism.

The truth is that there’s not going to be that perfect moment, as the flaws in our society keep bubbling up to the surface: cruel factory farms and slaughterhouses that serve as breeding grounds for disease and keep farmers and workers trapped in an exploitative cycle, systemic racism etched into the fabric of the very force that’s supposed to protect citizens of all skin colors, and constant reminders that the powers-that-be care more about profits and economic activity than immigrant, elderly, non-white, poor, and animal lives.

At some point, though, I have to take a breather and find comfort in the world–if only to help refuel me to get back into battle. So, during those brief minutes, I figured we could all use a dose of snuggly puppies.

And these very special puppies happen to live in the sea.

Photo credit: Jonathan Rosenberry

Back when cruises were a thing, my friends Jonathan Rosenberry and Maureen Cohen Harrington had the opportunity to hop aboard the Holistic Holiday at Sea, an all-vegan Caribbean cruise centered on plant-based eating and wellness.

There, in the glittering teal waters, they encountered soft, cuddly beings eager to embrace them with their massive flapping wings. These beings can only be described accurately as floppy, curious, silly puppies–of the sea.

Photo credit: Maureen Cohen Harrington

Their actual name is, of course, rays, a group of cartilaginous fish comprising more than 600 species. Unfortunately, more than 500 of these species are on the IUCN Red List, threatened by human fishing.

Like all fishes, rays are remarkably intelligent, adaptable, and innovative. The behemoth manta ray, whose wingspan can reach nearly 30 feet, was documented in a 2016 study to use a mirror to check out body parts that this animal normally can’t see. Individuals were also fixated by their reflection as they furled and unfurled their horn-shaped mouth fins repeatedly. While we should take care not to use such anthropocentric measures like the use of mirrors as definitive metrics of animal intelligence, we can at least appreciate these results as fascinating yet limited glimpses into complex minds we are barely beginning to understand.

Despite their clear sentience and complexity, though, these fish are violently killed by the thousands for human food and medicine–often even being cut apart into pieces while still conscious because their enormous bodies don’t fit onto boats.

But perhaps such research can lead us to reassess our propensity for ripping these rays–and other fish–en masse from their oceanic homes. In response to the 2016 study, a student blogger at the University of Washington wrote, “If manta rays are self-aware, what about other fish and shark species? Have we been underestimating them all along? For years humans vainly believed we were the only ones with higher-order intelligence. Maybe it is time to take a step back and give our wild counterparts more credit.”

Photo credit: Jonathan Rosenberry

Close to my home, another fight has been unfolding for the past several years over the much smaller cownose ray. Every May, these gentle rays migrate to the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, where females give birth to a single live pup after an 11-month-long gestation period.

As the rays arrive to labor over their long-awaited newborns, fishermen armed with arrows lurk, preparing for an annual killing contest. They don’t discriminate, often shooting pregnant rays and babies alike. Until three years ago.

In 2017, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan signed a bill into law placing a moratorium on the savage killing contests through July 2019, during which time the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was to develop a ray management plan.

Yet the DNR failed to do so in time, necessitating further protection for cownose rays upon the expiration of the moratorium. Thus, activists from the Save the Rays Coalition banded together and successfully achieved an extension on the moratorium until a management plan is created.

But it’s been a full year, and there’s still no sign of a more permanent ban on cruel ray killing contests. It’s time to demand that cownose rays are shielded once and for all from being mercilessly hunted as part of a twisted competition.

Even amidst multiple national crises, sea puppies have managed to warm my heart ever so slightly. Join me in making sure they’ll have a safe harbor in the waters of our Bay for years to come.

Petition closed with 226 signatures.

You Need a Smile. This 3-Legged Goat’s Got You.

by Laura Lee Cascada, posted in Farmed Animals, Rescue

The world as we know it is crumbling to our feet. We’re locked in our homes, we’ve lost employment, and loved ones are dying. We long for someone to wake us up and tell us that it’s all been a cruel joke. While I can’t make that happen, I can introduce you to someone who will make it all feel a little better, at least for a moment. Meet Toby the three-legged goat.

I first encountered Toby in the summer of 2015 at Richmond, Virginia’s famous Vegetarian Festival. I wandered between booths overflowing with “I Don’t Eat My Friends” t-shirts and So Delicious vegan ice cream bars, and then I saw him: At the center of a curious crowd of onlookers was a beagle-sized being with a bandaged front leg enjoying being coddled by his new caretakers.

I learned that earlier that same month, this baby goat had been taken in by Peaceful Fields Sanctuary in Winchester, Virginia, at just one week of age–and still nursing. He’d been born in Chesapeake, Virginia, and had suffered a severe leg injury–but had not been provided any medical treatment. The young goat had only ever known pain and was clinging to his life, in danger of being euthanized, before his rescue.

Fortunately, Toby was surrendered to PFS, where his new family began to work around the clock to stabilize him. He’d already received a partial leg amputation by the time I met him and had come to the fest so that he could be continuously watched and cared for–yet there he stood so tranquil and calm, looking just a bit goofy. He was, already, a cheerful ambassador for the sanctuary who had saved his life, seemingly unfazed by his trauma.

Peaceful Fields is one of hundreds of farmed animal sanctuaries that have sprung up around the country–and the world–in response to a growing need for refuge for the fortunate animals who escape the animal agriculture industry and can live in freedom to share their stories with the public, representing the millions of others of their kind, the ones who haven’t been so lucky.

On factory farms, cows, chickens, turkeys, and goats like Toby often spend their lives in cramped, filthy conditions before their untimely slaughter. Perhaps most devastatingly, in the dairy industry, young calves and goats are separated from their mothers within hours of birth so that the milk can be spared for humans instead of being consumed by the young animals who need it.

Toby might be the famous face of PFS because of his annual appearances at Richmond VegFest, but he’s just one of the dozens of animals who have found their permanent home there. Located in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, PFS provides safe harbor to more than a handful of gregarious goats, as well as chickens, turkeys, two sheep, a pig, a cow, a donkey, and a horse named Elvis.

When you pay PFS a visit (post-coronavirus quarantine), you’ll be showered with cuddles and head rubs from the loving goat Warren, and if you’re lucky, Elvis the horse might give you a kiss–a remarkable sign of his rehabilitation after being rescued from a severe abuse case in Montgomery County, Maryland, from which one of his friends was so neglected that he was unable to be nursed back to health. But at PFS, Elvis thrives–alongside his shy but sweet best friend Brownie the donkey, who’s also healthy and happy after being abandoned in a field.

Chickens will dart about your feet, begging for the banana in your pocket–which the turkeys will steal if you’re not paying attention. And as you admire the diverse melting pot of feathered beings around you–like a rainbow of crayons all nestled together, despite their differences–you’ll savor this rare paradise in a world that’s often so bleak.

But back to Toby. Shortly after his VegFest debut, he was transported to Virginia Tech, where the rest of his leg was removed and he was given a blood transfusion so that he could finally fully heal from his injury.

According to PFS, “So many people generously donated to cover his medical costs and now he scampers and plays as any kid!”

Despite being three-legged, Toby hasn’t slowed down. He’s tenacious, jubilant, and silly. And he’s a stark reminder of how, against all odds, when you’re literally losing limbs, it’s possible to persevere–and to thrive.

Now, nearly five years later, I found myself encountering Toby’s antics–as a fully healed adult–up close. I recently moved to Front Royal, Virginia, just a short drive from PFS, and began attending the sanctuary’s volunteer days and tours. Last month, during the last few days before the COVID-19 lockdown, I made my way up to Winchester for a final visit.

As I snapped my camera, Toby seemed to know exactly what was up. He immediately put on his model face, grinning and baring his teeth.

He just couldn’t stop.

And just when he seemed to be done, he poked out his little pink tongue–as though tasting the sweet air of freedom around him.

While the coronavirus pandemic rages on, to Toby and his friends, life proceeds as normal: green fields, tasty meals, yellow sunshine, and mountains of love. Put simply, Peaceful Fields is, well, exactly as its name describes: peaceful–a smooth sea in these turbulent times.

Yet in this new normal, sanctuaries like PFS are being hit hard. They depend on donations and exposure from events like tabling at festivals and open houses. Now, more than ever, your donations are needed to keep them afloat.

If Toby made you smile, please considering paying it forward. For those who are in a position to give, there’s an easy way to support Toby and his friends: through a sponsorship. And it’s the perfect gift for a loved one this spring, with no need to leave your house. Just make a quick donation, and your chosen animal’s story and photo will be sent to your friend or family member–who can even schedule a visit with their new friend once the quarantine has been lifted.

Click Toby’s card below to get started. And don’t forget to share a smile today.