At the rate the socio-economic collapse of the United States is going, it won’t be long before people find out if cat tastes like chicken…
(by Half Dollar) While cutting the grass one day about a month ago, I noticed a clump of bird feathers in the back yard.
Poor fella.
A couple of weeks ago, one day when I was also cutting the grass, I noticed some guts and intestines and whatnot in the back yard.
Poor other fella.
Last week, I saw a random cat creeping on the side of my neighbor’s house.
The cat disappeared into some shrubs, I heard a squeal, and out popped the cat with a mole wiggling in its mouth.
Poor other fella, again.
So I started to keep my eye on that cat.
A couple of days later, my wife saw the cat, and this time the cat was walking in a front yard across the street, and there was a small animal in the cat’s mouth.
Poor other fella again, again.
I noticed the cat has a really interesting range of about ten or fifteen houses, houses which are built on lots of about one-quarter of an acre each, but I’m not sure exactly who the cat belongs to.
The cat does have a collar, but I’ve never seen the collar up close.
Interestingly, I have not seen the cat in the last several days, and it’s not that I’m some kind of paranoid wacko who can’t stop looking out of his windows, but rather, I’ve been active in our yard and very observant of the wildlife in particular because it is growing season and I want to make sure my garden does very well this year.
Needless to say, my family is already eating food from the garden, such as these freshly picked strawberries (please excuse my lousy photography skills):
In the humble back yard garden, there are signs of the first green bell pepper coming in, the jalapenos will hopefully be big & spicy, and not only are the two tomato plants doing well, but about ten tomato plants just kind of sprouted on their own and grew like weeds from last year’s tomatoes.
Woot!
So our garden is doing really, really well, but then again, I am smart enough to live in an area of the country that is so super-duper fertile and the weather conditions are so ultra-favorable that even an idiot like me can grow food when he’s not even trying, so there’s that too.
A few days ago, my wife and I noticed four kittens playing by the fence in the back yard, on our neighbor’s side, playing as kittens do.
The kittens had no collars, and then all of the sudden it dawned on us: The cat had been hunting all of those animals to feed its kittens!
Now, a couple of nights ago, I went out to do some pruning and watering and stuff in our garden, and I saw that a huge strawberry had a huge bite taken out of it, and the berry was lying on top of the garden bed next to a freshly dug mole’s hole.
You see, I must admit, embarrassingly, that I’m still learning a lot about gardening, and so is my wife, and I was so focused on our strawberries not getting eaten by the rabbits from the sides or by the birds from above that I neglected to think about the potential for theft from below.
Dang moles!
I covered up the mole’s hole, I was kind of bummed because that strawberry was really robust, and the next morning I went out to assess the damage.
In my estimation, we lost about 10 strawberries that night from the mole eating them, baby strawberries too, and so began my quest to deal with a problem that I didn’t really have last year, and I was about to buy some Juicy Fruit gum, because as far as I can tell, that’s the best way to get rid of garden moles, with perhaps the exception of killing them directly myself, of course, which I’d rather not do.
Regardless, I check on the garden a couple of times each day, including tending to it every night as needed, and just last night as my wife and I were about to go outside, we noticed one of the kittens beside our garden, tracking what was obviously a mole tunnel in the yard, and the young cat was smelling the yard closely as if a mole was tunneling at that very moment.
And then all of the sudden, out pops another one of the kittens from underneath our deck!
And then another!
Yikes!
We saw three kittens beside our garden, and the three had come out from underneath our wooden deck.
We did not see the fourth kitten, and haven’t yet, but one thing is certain: These young cats are wild.
They are literally wild cats that were born somewhere in the neighborhood, and now, they’re underneath our deck.
So we have an interesting dilemma in that on the one hand, we don’t really want feral cats living in our back yard underneath our wooden deck, but on the other hand, we also don’t want a mole problem in the garden because I’d like for my family to eat the strawberries that we grow, and I’d rather not have some dang rodent eating the fruits of our labor.
Of course, I want those kittens to hunt the moles and eat them, and I’m hoping the cats will just move on or move somewhere else after that happens, as I know for a fact that moles are part of those cats’ regular diet, but my wife wants the cats gone, and I don’t blame her.
We have a collie, and we’re totally a dog family, but I really don’t like cats, much less do I want them living in my back yard.
But I hate the moles in our garden even more than I dislike the cats underneath my deck.
What do we do?
We decided to give it a couple of days to see if the savage kitties eat the moles and then move on, and if the cats don’t move on, the plan was to call Animal Control and make the cats disappear.
But as my luck would have it, just like my luck always has it, there’s a problem with our sweet plan: There ain’t no dang stinkin’ Animal Control!
Animal Control isn’t even a thing anymore!
At least, not in my area.
Nope.
I’m not really sure why there is no Animal Control, for I even pay a “local income tax”, and that’s on top of the state income tax, which is on top of the Federal income tax, but I am pretty sure that when push comes to shove, or when departments come to be slashed, or when jobs come to be cut, or whatever, it’s not as easy to extort a groundhog for the failure to use a turn signal like it is to extort a rebel driver, just like it’s not really all that easy to fine a beaver for parking in some stupid “no parking” zone like it is to fine a fat guy who doesn’t want to walk in the hot sun, and so the dog catcher gets the boot.
Over the phone, they didn’t say the reason they can’t come out to get the kittens is because they can’t make money off of the house call:
Even though that’s exactly what the reason is.
And what it is just happens to be nothing less than the third-worldification of the United States.
OK, “Hey Half Dollar, why don’t you just take the kittens to the local animal shelter you big doofus?”.
Oh, good grief.
I’ll see your animal shelter and raise it, because not only is the local shelter not taking any animals of any kind, but none of the shelters anywhere in my region are taking any animals of any kind.
So, yeah.
Good luck with that.
Something about being up the creek without a canoe?
So welcome to the Third World America!
Just wait until the hunger pangs kick in!
Although who knows, because at the rate America’s collapsing, I might be able to sell my cat-tle to the butcher down the street and make a nice little profit in the process?
Tastes like chicken?
It might not be as crazy of a question as it seems.
If this concerns you, here’s the best hedge against eating weird meat:
Sure, it may be taboo now, but pretty soon?
Pretty soon owning silver will be just like owning gold:
Only better.
Shameless plug time: Here is a deep dive into the charts that I took on Wednesday.
[embedded content]
Thank you for your consideration!
The gold-to-silver ratio is still stuck in the mid-to-upper 60s, and there’s been no progress made on closing that massive gap:
The longer we wait on a spark, however, the closer we are to that spark.
It’s hard to argue against palladium’s bearish trend in the short-term:
If the technicals matter, of course.
Deeper-pocketed investors may want to take note of platinum:
It’s really hard not to recommend platinum here, and if we move even lower, as I’ve been expecting platinum to do, it will pretty much be impossible to not recommend platinum.
The Fear Gauge closed the week with a 15-handle:
Just like a wild cat pouncing on a mole, however, fortunes can change without warning.
Sure, it looks like nothing but clear skies and beautiful weather forever and ever:
Do you even climate engineer, bro?
People are saying “the reflation trade is over”:
Uh, no.
That’s called interest rate suppression.
And it comes at a cost of the US dollar:
Where “sale price” turns into “full price” turns into “not at any price”.
It’s all about gold, silver and skills, and I haven’t said that in a while, but those things are more important now than ever.
So if you are lacking in one, then make it up in another, for time is running out, and some skills take quite a while to learn in the best of times.
Like growing food.
Thanks for reading.
Stack accordingly,
Paul “Half Dollar” Eberhart