THE McELROY ZOO: Meet Bessie, the beautiful girl who’s still scared

By David McElroy · July 24, 2011

Bessie has lived her entire life in fear.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely correct, but she’s at least lived her life just on the edge of fear. She can go from relaxed and happy to tense and terrified in a split second. She’s not just scared of people who might try to hurt her. She’s even scared of the one person in the world who’s fed her and taken care of her for two and a half years — me.

I wrote about Bessie’s sister, Molly, last week. You can read that story if you’d like, because most of it applied to Bessie, too.

Bessie was one of two kittens who appeared outside my door with their mother about two and a half years ago. They wouldn’t let me touch them or even get near them. I still have no idea where they came from. They were beautiful — as you can see in the picture that’s with last week’s story — but they clearly had a lot of fear in them.

The mother cat disappeared one day and I’ll never know what happened to her. It created a real dilemma for me. I certainly didn’t want or need two more cats — and these didn’t seem terribly adoptable — but I couldn’t just leave them outside alone.

You know from last week’s story that I wasn’t able to find homes for them, simply because they were too scared of people. (The top photo on this story is when she was still a kitten.) Most people just aren’t going to put up with a pet who runs almost every time a human approaches, because most people are much more interested in what they can get from the animal than in providing a home. I understand — and I’m not going to judge them — but that’s not the way I feel about it.

She’s still terrified, for the most part. It’s especially bad when there’s something going on that she doesn’t understand. For instance, in the picture above on the right, she was having to go to the vet because of swelling on her lip. (You can sort of see a pink swollen area in the picture.) She has a look of terror in her eyes, not just a normal fear, but an absolute terror that something terrible is going to happen.

I have no idea whether she simply inherited all of this fear from her mother or if terrible things happened around her as a kitten. She might have seen experienced her mother dying. I’ll never know. She was named Bessie in honor of my grandfather’s sister. My Great Aunt Bessie had more natural fear in her than any woman I’ve ever known. She was a wonderful woman, but she couldn’t shake being afraid of the world. She was a natural to lend her name to this new Bessie.

She’s very happy today, living with her sister, Molly, and her three nieces — Charlotte, Emily and Anne. During the day, they also spend time with Thomas, William and Dagny. As long as the humans stay away, this scared girl is happy.

There’s one odd exception to her fear. I have no idea why this happens, but it’s amazing when it does. Every now and then, she apparently feels a need to be touched and rubbed. It’s no more than a few times a year — and it’s only when she decides she’s ready.

She will come close to me, but then run who I reach out my hand. Then she’ll do it again, this time lying on her side and exposing her tummy. When I reach for her, she panics and runs. This can continue over a period of a day or two. Then, finally, she gives in.

She’ll let me touch her and scratch her side and tummy. She’ stretch and roll her body on the bed and purr. Every now and then when this happens, she’ll even let me pick her up and hold her while I scratch her tummy. When it’s going on, she purrs loudly and makes little sounds of pleasure.

Then — as suddenly as it started — it’s over. She’s finished with trusting me for awhile. She withdraws, pulls away. It’s frustrating, because I like to be able to make her happy and purr. But I don’t let it bother me too much, because I know she’ll be back in her own time. Even though she’s scared — and even though she wouldn’t want to admit it, if cats could “admit” things — she needs me. It’s not just for food.

She needs love and attention. She just needs it on a schedule that most people wouldn’t put up with. I’m happy that she trusts me at least that much.

Editor’s note: If you enjoyed meeting Bessie, you might enjoy previous stories and pictures aboutMolly, Oliver, Munchkin, Sam, Maggie, Henry, Lucy, Amelia, Charlotte and Emily.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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