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| Nash Van Drake Was a Casualty of a New Cold War |
"The cat did it again...Supposedly he (really no one knows what day) was brought to the Porton Down lab and then...drugged. Why drugged? The answer is the cat was 'stressed,' since he was 'not noticed' in the search. Is that what the United Kingdom does with pets? Is that normal practice?"
-- Maria Zakharova of the Russian Foreign Service
Whenever that diabolical monster known as man chooses to indulge himself in his insatiable greed, his unquenchable thirst for blood, and his never-ending will to dominate, which consumes most of his time and energies, it is always cats, other animals, and Mother Earth that are forced to bear the brunt of his evildoing. Unlike civilian casualties, who nowadays are lumped together underneath the belittling rubric of collateral damage, they are denied even that grudging tidbit of recognition; rather, they are relegated to the ranks of the uncounted and unmourned whose lives and habitats count for absolutely nothing.
With that being the case, it is not the least bit surprising that the English authorities have killed off Sergei and Yulia Skripal's long-haired black Persian, Nash Van Drake, and their two unidentified guinea pigs. Whereas the near fatal poisoning of the double agent and his daughter with the nerve agent novichok in Salisbury, one-hundred-forty-two kilometers south of London in Wiltshire, on March 4th has attracted worldwide interest and condemnation, it is in keeping with the
Zeitgeist that the killings of Nash and the guinea pigs have gone largely unnoticed outside of England and Russia. Even what little information that has leaked out of the former has been elliptical, contradictory, nonsensical and, in some respects, patently untruthful.
Nonetheless, as best the story can be pieced together from the slipshod reporting of the government's lackeys on Fleet Street, the Skripals lived in a brick compound that they shared with Nash and another unidentified cat that they reportedly adopted from a local shelter. In at least one press report, Nash is referred to as Masyanya, which is the name of a female protagonist in a popular web-based Russian cartoon series.
It therefore could be that the second cat is a female who bears that moniker in that it would be odd for the Skripals to have bestowed a girl's name upon a tomcat. That is strictly conjecture, however.
They also owned a black dog and the aforementioned pair of guinea pigs.
(See the Daily Mail, April 5, 2018, "Russian Spy's Cat Was Secretly Put Down: Vets Killed 'Distressed' Black Persian and Found Two Guinea Pigs Dead at Sergei Skripal's Home after Poison Attack.")
The dog allegedly was later found at an undisclosed location outside the compound but nothing has been divulged about the second cat. Even if they initially were able to have survived the horrifying events of March 4th and their immediate aftermath, that does not mean that they are still alive today.
After the Skripals were discovered unconscious on a park bench and rushed to Salisbury District Hospital their compound was sealed by the authorities and declared to be off limits to the public. It never has been definitively stated one way or the other if the authorities initially were aware of the presence of Nash and the other animals.
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| Nash and Yulia Skripal |
Even if they were in the dark, the Skripals' longtime veterinarian, fifty-six-year-old Howard Taylor of The Vets at 123 Exeter Street, quickly remedied that situation. "We
(sic) phoned the police on day one to offer to help if they needed it," he averred to
The Sun on March 17th.
(See "Russian Spy Sergei Skripal's Pet Cat and Guinea Pigs Are Taken Away for Tests.") "I thought it unlikely the police would have gone to the house and not done anything."
That certainly turned out to have been true enough in that what they did was to seize them and transport them to the Ministry of Defense's ultra-secretive Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in the village of Porton, eleven kilometers north of Salisbury, where they were promptly killed and their corpses burned to ashes. Although it surely must have known almost immediately of that tragic
dénouement, it was not until April 5th that
The Sun finally got around to cluing in the reading public as to what had transpired.
(See "Russian Spy Sergei Skripal's Cat Is the First Fatality after Nerve Agent Attack in Salisbury.")
In an amateurish attempt designed to justify their commission of such appalling atrocities, the English elites and their stooges on Fleet Street have presented two contradictory explanations. For instance in its April 5th report,
The Sun claims that Nash was "very unwell" and "severely malnourished."
A day later on April 6th,
The Independent chimed in by declaring that he was "in a distressed state" and in "so much pain that a vet decided to put it
(sic) down." The paper further alleges that the guinea pigs died of dehydration.
(See "Russia Implies United Kingdom Destroyed Poisoned Spy Sergei Skripal's Cat and Guinea Pigs to 'Remove Important Witnesses'.")
Knowing the timeline of events would be helpful in unraveling this conundrum but even without that vital piece of information neither scenario put forward by either the government or Fleet Street stands up to even cursory scrutiny. Still, for whatever it is worth,
The Sun reported on April 5th that the authorities broke into the Skripals' compound "shortly after the March 4th attack" whereupon they discovered the presence of, at least, Nash and the guinea pigs.
Yet, both contingents of professional liars would have the outside world to believe that Nash already was "severely malnourished." That does not make any sense at all given that the Skripals are dedicated cat-lovers and have money to burn.
Plus,
The Sun earlier on March 17th had reported that Nash was valued at £1,500 and that the Skripals had shelled out thousands more in order to ship him from Moscow to Salisbury. That exorbitant tally
sans doute included thousand of pounds in quarantine fees that the English ridiculously charge all foreigners who import their cats.
(See Cat Defender post of August 18, 2008 entitled "Ronaldo Escapes Death after a Retailer Coughs Up the Exorbitant Bounty That Quarantine Officials Had Placed on His Head.")
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| Nash and the Guinea Pigs |
In spite of all of that, the arrogant English elites and Fleet Street contend that the Skripals not only starved Nash to death but allowed their guinea pigs to die of thirst. Given that it is a violation of law to neglect animals, the authorities should have brought charges against the Skripals if they had truly believed that had been the case. It additionally is odd that they also would not have neglected their second cat and their dog in a similar fashion.
It is difficult to know exactly what to make of the authorities' allegation that Nash was "very unwell," "in a distressed state," and in "pain" because so little is known about novichok. As far as it has been disclosed, however, in this particular case only a small amount of it was found on the doorknob of the Skripals' front portal and it was in a liquid form.
"In this instance, direct contact is required for a person to (be) poisoned," a spokesman for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) told
The Independent on April 17th.
(See "Nerve Agent Used to Poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal Was Delivered in 'Liquid Form,' Says DEFRA.") "Only a small proportion of the material is transferred in each contact and the substance is diluted in each secondary or tertiary contact."
That would tend to indicate that since Nash was confined indoors he did not at any time come into direct contact with the novichok that had been smeared on the doorknob. He possibly could have inhaled a lethal amount of it as the Skripals were leaving the house but that, too, seems a bit far-fetched.
"The class of nerve agent does not produce significant vapor or gas and can only be moved between sites by direct transfer from a contaminated person or by moving a contaminated item," the spokesman for DEFRA continued to
The Independent.
Based upon the limited amount of information available, it is difficult to say with one-hundred
per cent certainty, but it nevertheless appears that the authorities' claims about Nash being "distressed" and in "pain" were nothing more than big, fat, self-serving lies. If so, they murdered him without just cause and in cold blood.
They did so simply because he, and the guinea pigs as well, had been found at the site of a nerve agent attack. Their death warrants likewise were probably initialed without the benefit of either thorough veterinary examinations or a finding of contamination. That it turn makes it highly improbable that the authorities have spared the lives of the Skripals' other cat and their black dog.
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| What Has Become of Yulia's Unidentified Dog? |
For its part, the English government has served up a proverbial feast of balderdash for the world to slobber over until it chokes. "When a vet was able to access the property, two guinea pigs had sadly died. A cat was also found in a distressed state and a decision was taken by a veterinary surgeon to euthanize the animal to alleviate its suffering," an unidentified governmental mouthpiece ballyhooed to
The Independent on April 6th. "The decision was taken in the best interests of the animal and its welfare."
If that should by any chance sound familiar it is because it is the same old malarkey that all cat killers hide behind regardless of whether they be veterinarians, shelter operators, governmental officials, or even the victims' owners.
C'est-à-dire, most cats, the young as well as the old and the healthy as well as the sickly, are better off dead as far as those rotters are concerned.
The veterinarian who killed Nash has not been publicly identified but presumably it was not Taylor. Even so, Old Taylor Thing comes away from this sorry affair smelling more like sulphur than a rose.
"He (Skripal) used The Vets for, some years and I had seen his cats and his guinea pigs," he candidly admitted to
The Sun on March 17th. In spite of that lengthy relationship, Taylor never forged any moral or professional bonds with the doomed animals in that there is not so much as a scintilla of evidence in the public record to even suggest that he interceded on their behalves.
Au contraire, he ratted them out to their assassins and then stood idly by and watched as they were liquidated. If, by contrast, he had given so much as a rat's ass about their welfare and inalienable right to live he would have, if necessary, gone to court in order to have saved their lives.
So far, the high-muck-a-mucks from Downing Street have gotten away scot-free with their hideous crimes but they have not succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of Maria Zakharova of the Russian Foreign Ministry. "According to the publication, the guinea pigs and the cat were cremated," she told
The Independent in the April 6th article cited
supra. "In other words destroyed, although the animals could be important evidence in the poisoning case."
From that demarcation point she went on to give the hypocritical, lying English the dressing down that they so richly deserved. "The cat did it again...Supposedly he (really no one knows what day) was brought to the Porton Down lab and then...drugged. Why drugged?" she speculated to
The Independent. "The answer is the cat was 'stressed,' since he was 'not noticed' in the search. Is that what the United Kingdom does with pets? Is that normal practice?"
The answer to both of her rhetorical questions is an emphatic yes. First of all, although they publicly claim to be big fans of the species, they actually care very little for cats and that is exhibited by the large number of them that they callously and inexcusably turn loose in the street every day to be mowed down by their equally ailurophobic fellow motorists.
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| The Skripals' Compound |
Secondly, the English's disdain for cats and other animals was most recently demonstrated in June of last year when Grenfell Tower in West London went up in flames and killed dozens of its residents. Yet to this very day neither the authorities nor Fleet Street have publicly acknowledged how many cats and other animals perished in the inferno.
(See Cat Defender post of July 3, 2017 entitled "Paucho Somehow Made It Out of Grenfell Tower Alive but the Fate of the Dozens of Cats That Resided at the High-Rise Firetrap Remains Shrouded in Secrecy.")
Thirdly, even when the English do take an active interest in the welfare of cats it usually is only in order to satisfy their own narrow, self-interest and that
petit fait is nowhere more readily observable than in the exploitative behavior of the politicians who reside and work on Downing Street. For instance, it certainly did not take Tony and Cherie Blair long to give the boot to Humphrey.
(See Cat Defender post of April 6, 2006 entitled "Humphrey, the Cat from 10 Downing Street Who Once 'Read' His Own Obituary, Passes Away at Age Eighteen.")
Sybil, who was owned by Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, was quickly given the bum's rush by the cat-hating Gordon Brown only to die tragically a short time later in exile. (
See Cat Defender posts of September 19, 2007 and August 13, 2009 entitled, respectively, "After a Dreary Ten-Year Absence, Number 10 Downing Street Has a New Resident Feline and Her Name Is Sybil" and "Sybil, 10 Downing Street's Former First Feline, Dies Unexpectedly from an Undisclosed Illness.")
Larry arrived at 10 Downing Street in early 2011 but he enjoyed at best a lukewarm relationship with David Cameron.
(See Cat Defender posts of July 21, 2011, November 28, 2011, and August 1, 2016 entitled, respectively, "Larry Faces Many Challenges and Dangers in His New Rôle as 10 Downing Street's Resident Feline," "Larry Is Persevering as Best He Can Despite Being Constantly Maligned by Both Fleet Street and the Prime Minister's Duplicitous Staff," and "Unmercifully Maligned and Treated Like Dirty for So Many Years, Larry Nevertheless Manages to Stick Around Long Enough in Order to See the Last of David Cameron and His Uncaring Family.")
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne turned Freya loose to roam the dangerously congested streets of Whitehall at all hours of the night with predictably life-threatening results until he finally got rid of her for good.
(See Cat Defender posts of November 10, 2014 and November 13, 2014 entitled, respectively, "Freya, the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Resident Feline, Cheats Death Once Again When She Survives Being Mowed Down and Injured by a Motorist but Her Good Luck Cannot Last for Much Longer" and "Gutless Georgie 'Porgie' Osborne Gets Rid of Freya but in Doing So Lies About the True Reason Behind His Second Cruel Abandonment of Her.")
More recently, the Foreign Affairs Office has added Palmerston to its staff and current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, now has Gladstone.
(See Cat Defender posts of August 8, 2016 and August 17, 2016 entitled, respectively, "Palmerston Is Recruited for a Prestigious Post in Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service but Then Disgracefully Relegated to Makeshift Living Quarters Out in the Cold" and "Gladstone Joins Larry and Palmerston as Whitehall's Latest Resident Feline but the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Welsh Terrier, Rex, Is Waiting in the Wings to Put an End to All of Them.")
Shortly thereafter, Evie and her son, Ossie, joined the staff of the Cabinet Office at 70 Whitehall Street.
(See The Telegraph, December 9, 2016, "New Cats Evie and Ossie Join Westminster Moggies as Cabinet Office Mousers" and The Sun, December 9, 2016, "Meow-ing Street Number 10 Brings in Two New Cats, Evie and Ossie, to Help Catch Mice in the Cabinet Office.")
As was the case with Taylor's abandonment of Nash and the guinea pigs, the presence of no fewer than five resident felines at the heart of the English government has failed to instill any sense of either a common morality or an appreciation of their intrinsic worth in the politicians. Rather, they simply use and exploit them as convenient and inexpensive public relations' props in order to make themselves appear to be something other than the miserable rotters and moral degenerates that they are in reality.
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| Yulia and Sergei Skripal Lived High on the Hog |
That is not merely a pedestrian prejudice but rather it is an opinion that is shared by former MI6 spy and current bestselling novelist, John le Carré. Here, for instance, is what his fictional spymaster George Smiley had to say about the entire lot of them in
The Secret Pilgrim:
"The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth. No one will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skillfully, or find it harder to confess that he's been a damned fool. No one acts braver when he's frightened stiff or happier when he's miserable. And nobody will flatter you better when he hates you than an extrovert Englishman or woman."
With the Skripals hardly being in any condition to complain about what was done to Nash and their guinea pigs, that task has fallen by default to none other than PETA. "These deaths are another tragedy of this horrific situation, and this time, the British authorities are evidently to blame," the organization's Elisa Allen gingerly ventured to
The Independent on April 6th.
(See "'United Kingdom Authorities to Blame' for 'Tragic' Death of Sergei Skripal's Pets in Sealed Home, PETA Says.") "No one should have left these animals sealed inside the house any more than they would have done children -- clearly, they should have been rescued."
The organization accordingly is demanding action. PETA is "calling for an investigation to be carried out in order to determine how this was allowed to happen and (to) ensure that procedures are put in place to prevent any such loss of lives -- which were valued by the Skripals and the animals themselves -- from ever happening again," she concluded.
To say that those sentiments are more than a tad ironic would be to grossly understate the case. For example, PETA not only kills practically every cat that it gets its blood-drenched hands on but it insists over and over again that the lives of all homeless cats do not have any value whatsoever.
Much more to the point, it surely would have killed Nash and the Skripals' other animals if it had gotten to them ahead of the goons from Downing Street.
(See Cat Defender posts of January 29, 2007, February 9, 2007, October 7, 2011, and August 24, 2017 entitled, respectively, "PETA's Long History of Killing Cats and Dogs Is Finally Exposed in a North Carolina Courtroom," "Verdict in PETA Trial: Littering Is a Crime but Not the Mass Slaughter of Innocent Cats and Dogs," "PETA Traps and Kills a Cat and Then Shamelessly Goes Online in Order to Brag about its Criminal and Foul Deed," and "The Brutal Murders of a Trio of Atlantic City's Boardwalk Cats Provide an Occasion for the Local Rag and PETA to Whoop It Up and to Break Open the Champagne.")
The Independent's solicitation of PETA's hypocritical two cents' worth does demonstrate, however, that the capitalist media not only sucks up to those in power but also to phony-baloney animal rights groups as well. As it knows only too well, Ingrid E. Newkirk and her minions never have done anything even remotely positive for cats and they certainly do not speak for them and their supporters in any shape, form, or fashion.
The only thing constructive that can be said for the organization is that it has demonstrated the gumption to take the English establishment to task over the killings of Nash and the guinea pigs and that is considerably more than can be said for any other animal rights group located in
Angleterre. It is even conceivable that the Skripals' second cat was adopted from Cats Protection's branch in Salisbury but yet that organization has not had anything to say about either her or the killing of Nash.
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| The Skripals Had a Busy Day on March 4th |
Yulia was released from the hospital several weeks ago and is said to be convalescing at an undisclosed location somewhere in England. Her father remains hospitalized but he is said to be in stable condition.
Besides the Skripals' house, Zizzi, an Italian restaurant at 1/3 Castle Street, Bishops Mill Pub at 7 The Maltings, the entire Maltings shopping center, the residence of detective sergeant Nick Bailey, two sites near the Bourne Hill Police Station, a pair of ambulance stations, and a car compound are still designated as possibly being contaminated with novichok. No arrests have been made in this case and that task has been made all the more difficult by the Russians' demolition of a factory in Shikhany, nine-hundred-sixty-five kilometers south of Moscow, which is believed to have manufactured the novichok that was used in order to poison the Skripals.
(See the Express, April 29, 2018, "Russia Destroys Novichok Nerve Center Ahead of Salisbury Poison Spy Probe.")
Despite the English's reprehensible killing of Nash and the guinea pigs, there does not appear to be much doubt that the Russians were behind the attack upon the Skripals. There is "no alternative explanation about who was responsible -- only Russia has the means, motive and record," an official from the Foreign Office on Downing Street declared to
The Independent in the April 17th article cited
supra.
By past record, that official was referring to the murder of defector Alexander Litvinenko in the Bloomsbury section of London back in 2006 by a pair of Russian spies. In his case, however, it was not novichok but rather a cup of radioactive tea that was his undoing.
With establishments such as Claridge's in Mayfair commanding as much as £60 for a spot of tea with a finger sandwich thrown in for good measure, that is another good reason to refrain from doing any cupping while in London. If the Russians do not poison a person to death, the exorbitant prices are sure to do the trick.
Then there is the matter of the simply outrageously lengthy and expensive quarantine requirements that the authorities impose upon visiting cats to consider when contemplating a trip to England. Taken altogether, however, being stripped of one's cat and not being able to afford the price of a cup of tea combine to make the island nation an unappealing tourist destination.
The superficial conclusion to be drawn from the events of March 4th and their aftermath is that the Russians do not have any regard for human life whereas their English counterparts are equally depraved when it comes to the lives of cats and other animals. Such an assessment is far too charitable, however, in that neither of the belligerents actually has very much regard for the sanctity of life period.
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| Nash Van Drake's Cathouse Is Now Vacant and Destined to Remain So |
For example, although the Russians may not have intended for any harm to have come to Nash and the guinea pigs, by smearing novichok on the Skripals' front door they set in motion a chain of events that led precisely to that
dénouement. Even worse, their alleged supplying of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus with chemical weapons has unquestionably led to the horrific deaths of untold numbers of cats and other animals as well as the contamination of the environment.
In its quest to conquer the world, England historically never has demonstrated much regard for human rights. Rather, its empire builders have systematically subjugated, exploited, and annihilated nation after nation.
In doing so, the filth that it has expelled from its shores have committed some of the most diabolical crimes on record against cats and other animals in places such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the south Atlantic.
(See Cat Defender post of November 18, 2016 entitled "A Clever Devil at the University of Adelaide Boasts That He Has Discovered the Achilles' Heel of Cats with His Invention of Robotic Grooming Traps as the Thoroughly Evil Australians' All-Out War Against the Species Enters Its Final Stages.")
In the final accounting, however, the crimes that man commits against the animals and the environment are far more egregious than those that he perpetrates against his fellows. That is principally the case because most men are capable, at least to some extent, of not only anticipating but also of defending themselves against the aggressions of their fellows but that is hardly the case with the animals and Mother Earth.
Consequently, if that were not the case, it perhaps would be
à propos to conclude that the English and Russians richly deserve each other and to leave the matter at that;
a bon chat, bon rat and may the most ruthless one of them prevail. Other considerations, however, preclude such ambivalence, even if in the end they are destined not to make one whit of difference.
As far as Nash's faceless and nameless executioners are concerned, there is not so much as a prayer in Hell that any of them ever will be publicly identified, let alone arrested, prosecuted, and punished. Abusing and killing cats never has been taken even halfway seriously anywhere and least of all by the English and their ignoble progeny.
With that being the sad reality, there is little left to do other than to mourn the killing of such a handsome cat. He had his whole life ahead of him and so much to look forward to as well as to give to this world.
Almost as heartbreaking, all that the Skripals have been left with are, to quote songwriter Jim Croce, their photographs and memories. In keeping with their uncharitable character, the cutthroat English did not leave them with even so much as a tiny speck of him to memorialize and bury.
Photos: The Mirror (Nash), Facebook (Nash and Yulia, Nash and the guinea pigs, and Sergei and Yulia drinking), The Sun (Yulia's dog, the Skripals' compound, itinerary, and Nash in his cathouse).
