Marvin Is Betrayed, Abducted, and Murdered by a Journalist and a Shelter Who Preposterously Maintain That They Were Doing Him a Favor

"Murmurings of love on his lips, and murder in his damn black heart."
-- John D. MacDonald

Long-suffering and handsome Marvin spent the lion's share of his all-too-brief sixteen or so years on this earth living in a parking lot off of Stone Pine Road in Half Moon Bay. It was a hard life to be sure but it was still a life just the same.

Along with all the deprivations there no doubt were many happy moments as well and, best of all, during the last decade of his life he had a companion named Mocha who was a tremendous comfort to him. (See photo of him above.)

People occasionally left food for him but generally speaking he was forced most of the time to scrounge around for his next meal. He apparently did not have anywhere to hang his hat either but since the thermometer in the San Franciscoan suburb of twelve-thousand souls rarely dips below 43° Fahrenheit during the wintertime or climbs much above 65° Fahrenheit in the summertime, the elements were the least of his travails.

Not much else is known about the black, reddish-brown, and white tom other than that somewhere along the way he had been neutered and that is a pretty strong indication that at one time or another he belonged to either someone or a managed TNR colony. That also is superficial evidence that he likely wound up on his own as the result of some unforeseen calamity because individuals who are willing to foot the bill in order to sterilize a cat are considerably less prone to simply abandon it.

Most important of all, he likely still would be gracing the parking lot and hanging out with Mocha if it had not been for a chance encounter that occurred about a year ago with a false-hearted Machiavellian journalist named Jane Ganahl who, incidentally, also is co-founder of San Francisco's annual literary festival, Litquake. (See a mug shot of her on the right below.)

"Dude, that's a good way to get killed!" she berated him then and there after nearly stepping on him according to her September 20th column in the Half Moon Bay Review. (See "Parking Lot Cat Opened Eyes and Hearts.")

It just as easily could be argued that Ganahl should keep her head out of her ass and watch where she was strutting. As things eventually turned out, she had a far more sinister fate planned for Marvin than merely squashing him to death underneath her heels as porno actresses routinely do to kittens in crush videos.

After the passage of an unspecified amount of time, Marvin unwittingly succumbed to Ganahl's cajolery and lies and consented to allow her to pet him. That ultimately paved the way for his eventual downfall and untimely demise.

A healthy fear of their number one predator, man, is in most instances beneficial for cats. More often than not, it is precisely domesticated cats that suffer the worst abuses from ailurophobes.

Ganahl does not, however, mention in her column that she ever provided Marvin with any food, water, shelter, or veterinary care. That is in spite of the fact that she claims that he was emaciated, his fur in tatters, and his face shrunken. She furthermore claims that he had a badly mangled ear which could have been sustained in either a fight or as the result of the odious practice that veterinarians have of slicing up the ears of homeless cats so that they can be readily identified as having been sterilized.

Ganahl further insists that Marvin was getting to be too old in order to hunt mice and voles even though she hardly was in any position to make such a declaration considering the minuscule amount of time that she spent with him. Even if that is true, it serves only to underscore how cheaply and shabbily that she treated him because any true lover of the species would have made doubly sure that he received regular meals.

Sometime in early August she cruelly abandoned him to his own devices in order to hightail it to France for a vacation. "I'm going away," she told him according to her column in the Half Moon Bay Review. "Please hold on until I get back."

The exact sequence of events that ensued is unclear because Ganahl, like all members of the capitalist media, only tells her readers what she wants them to know. Based upon the fact that she not only never secured a loving home for Marvin but ran out on him as well, it seems highly probable that she already had signed off on his death warrant long before she boarded her plane to France.

Nevertheless, according to her account of events, an unidentified individual ratted out Marvin to the cold-blooded exterminators at the Peninsula Humane Society (PHS) who promptly traveled to Half Moon Bay, trapped him, and removed him to their death camp twenty-one kilometers away in San Mateo. The ease with which PHS corralled Marvin conflicts with Ganahl's assertion that employees and customers of the Half Moon Bay Coffee Company at 20 Stone Pine Road had been unsuccessfully attempting to trap and relocate him for years.

Once the knackers at the PHS got their murderous hands on him they did not waste any time in snuffing out Marvin's precious, albeit fragile, life and he was dead within hours of his capture. Besides Ganahl, the two individuals principally responsible for this heinous crime were her bosom buddies, a woman identified only as Barbara and the PHS's very own reincarnation of Josef Rudolf Mengele, Ken White. (See a mug shot of him on the left below.)

"Animals have so much to teach us about acceptance and forgiveness," is how Ganahl philosophically summed up her brief association with Marvin. "I like to think I helped make Marvin's life a bit more joyful in the end, but the truth is that is just how he made mine."

She could say that again! Not only did she get a newspaper column out of the deal but she is working on a children's book about Marvin and Mocha.

Like Iowa librarian Vicki Myron, she is destined to be laughing all the way to the bank for a long time to come. (See Cat Defender posts of December 7, 2006 and May 10, 2007 entitled, respectively, "After Nineteen Years of Service and Companionship, Ingrates at Iowa Library Murder Dewey Readmore Books" and "Iowa Librarian Vicki Myron Inks Million Dollar Deal for Memoir About Dewey Readmore Books.")

Despite her literary coups, absolutely nothing will ever change the fact that Ganahl's ill-gotten gain is blood money. As for poor Marvin, the only thing that he ever got out of his relationship with her was the gallows.

As far as White is concerned, liquidating Marvin was strictly old hat to him. "Others knew him, I did not," he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle on August 25th. (See "Musings Toward the End of a Long Day, and After Watching a Cat Die.") "I was just there to help see him off, something I've done more times than I can count."

It is truly shocking that an individual could be so morally depraved as not to be able to distinguish any material difference between taking the life of another and seeing someone off, as on either a plane or a train. Nonetheless, revealing statement such as that offer a rare glimpse into the diseased and perverted minds of those individuals who operate and work in shelters.

"He was failing, and this was the last gift from people who cared about him," White continued in an utterly abhorrent line of reasoning that sounds as if it were taken verbatim from PETA's sordid play book. Being a slick blabber like Ganahl, White is careful to omit any mention of exactly what was so terribly wrong with Marvin that necessitated ending his life so cruelly and prematurely.

As Hamlet understood only too well, death is anything but a gift and for White and Ganahl to pretend otherwise is nothing but self-serving sophistry. Marvin persevered in that crummy parking lot for sixteen years and at the very least deserved to have been allowed to die there with Mocha at his side.

Instead he was trapped by strangers, taken for a ride, and then killed off in a sterile and forbidding death house operated by diabolical monsters. The poor fellow's last hours on this earth could not possibly have been anything except a terrifying nightmare.

Afterwards, his body no doubt casually was tossed into the trash and burned. Since low-life scumbags like White and Ganahl do not have a scintilla of respect for the living, it is beyond the pale to believe that they would exhibit any regard for the deceased.

Likewise, White, Ganahl, and everyone else who kills off animals because they allegedly do not want to see them suffer are barefaced liars. In reality, they simply are too selfish and cheap to care for them once they become either sick or elderly. (See Cat Defender posts of March 12, 2009 and October 27, 2008 entitled, respectively, "Too Cheap and Lazy to Care for Him During His Final Days, Betty Currie Has Socks Killed Off and His Corpse Burned" and "Loved and Admired All Over the World, Feline Heroine Scarlett Is Killed Off by Her Owners after She Becomes Ill.")

Rather than allowing Marvin to languish in that parking lot, anyone who truly cared about cats would have made certain that he received the food, shelter, and veterinary care that he so richly deserved and needed. Above all, they would have found him a loving home if for no other reason than to have placed him beyond the reach of Ganahl and White.

That is precisely what he needed, not a jab of sodium pentobarbital. Sixteen is not all that old for a cat and Marvin very well could have lived another ten years or longer if he had received the food, veterinary care, and security that he needed.

Instead, he received something entirely different from Ganahl and White. "Murmurings of love on his lips, and murder in his damn black heart," is how John D. MacDonald in his novel Cinnamon Skin characterized what the victims of serial killer Evan Lawrence received from him and Marvin certainly did not fare any better at the hands of Ganahl and White.

To make matters worse, Ganahl has invoked her Buddhist faith in a burlesque attempt to justify her betrayal and murder of Marvin. She does not make any effort, however, to reconcile her heretical views with her sect's prohibition against both killing and telling lies.

Although he does not profess to be an exponent of any particular religious creed, White nevertheless invokes that old superstition about the immortality of the soul in order to justify not only killing Marvin but countless other animals as well.

"Whatever it is that animates is beyond my ability to understand, but without the religious package that goes along with the word I am comfortable calling that thing a soul," he wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in the article cited supra. "I am convinced that soul is in more of us than just our own species. And I am quite sure it is too big a thing to disappear at the end of what we think of as life."

Leaving aside for now that in the De rerum natura, Lucretius offers up at least two dozen arguments in favor of the mortality of the soul, White's mumbo jumbo is one of the oldest and most successful con games ever invented. In short, he and others like him invoke that old pie in the sky legend in order to absolve themselves of not only all moral responsibility here on earth but to justify the commission of the most heinous crimes imaginable.

Long before there was Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, and numerous other salvation hustlers there was Billy Sunday and here is, in part, what Carl Sandburg had to say about him in his 1915 poem, "To Billy Sunday":

"You, Billy Sunday, put a smut on every human blossom that comes within reach of your rotten breath belching out hell-fire and hiccuping about this man who lived a clean life in Galilee...

"I like a man that's got guts and can pull off a great original performance, but you -- hell, you're only a bughouse peddler of second-hand gospel -- you're only shoving out a phony imitation of the goods this Jesus guy told us ought to be free as air and sunlight..."

"You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it up all right with them by giving them mansions in skies after they're dead and the worms have eaten 'em.

"You tell a $6 a week department store girls all they need is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of age, and you tell him to look to Jesus on the cross and he'll be all right.

"You tell poor people they don't need any more money on pay day and even if it's fierce to be out of a job, Jesus'll fix that all right, all right -- all they gotta do is take Jesus the way you say.

"I'm telling you this Jesus guy wouldn't stand for the stuff you're handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers and corporation lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus wouldn't play their game. He didn't sit in with the big thieves.

"I don't want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.

"I won't take my religion from a man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes a memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar..."

Correspondingly, Ganahl and White are the absolute last individuals that any legitimate animal rights movement either needs or wants. Jack Kevorkian spent eight years behind bars for helping one-hundred-thirty individuals to end their lives and Ganahl and White most assuredly do not deserve anything less for robbing Marvin of his life without his consent.

The same applies in spades to veterinarians who line their pockets by killing cats, dogs, and other animals. (See Cat Defender post of July 28, 2011 entitled "Tammy and Maddy Are Forced to Pay the Ultimate Price after Their Owner and an Incompetent Veterinarian Elect to Play Russian Roulette with Their Lives.")

Elderly, sick, and injured cats need topnotch veterinary care, compassion, and a secure environment. When their time comes, they should be allowed to die natural and unhurried deaths; no human intervention is either needed or warranted.

Sadly, for Marvin there will not be any more summers or autumns but that is not the case as far as Mocha and the cats who live behind the Odwalla food company at nearby 120 Stone Pine Road are concerned. It therefore is paramount that neither Ganahl nor White get their murderous hands on any of them.

It would be comforting to believe that there is at least one kindhearted individual in Half Moon Bay with a healthy respect for life who would intervene on behalf of these cats and thus thwart Ganahl's and White's evil intentions but given the fact that her column has not attracted so much as one negative comment that does not seem likely. Nevertheless, unless someone steps up and puts a stop to their machinations the lives of these cats are destined to end every bit as abruptly, unjustly, and prematurely as Marvin's.

Mocha's days and nights already must be especially trying now that Marvin is gone. It no doubt would come as a great shock to Ganahl and White that cats have individual personalities and feelings just like every other living creature and suffer deeply whenever a loved one is taken from them.

One-hundred-sixty kilometers to the west in Modesto, another senior cat named Olivia has been living for the past twelve years in a parking lot that separates the Stanislaus County Men's Jail from the Stanislaus County Superior Court. (See photo of her above.)

Although she enjoys the patronage of Stanislaus County District Attorney Birgit Fladager and others within Modesto's legal establishment, there is not any guarantee that they will not sell her down the river to the knackers one day just as Ganahl and White did with Marvin. Like Mocha and countless other homeless cats, she needs the kind of protection that only someone committed to the sanctity of feline life can provide. (See Cat Defender post of January 29, 2011 entitled "After Scrimping By in a Polluted Parking Lot for Eleven Years, Olivia Is Ready for a Loving and Permanent Home.")

Photos: Half Moon Bay Review (Marvin and Ganahl), San Francisco Chronicle (White), and Debbie Nada of The Modesto Bee (Olivia).