I’m eating my cereal and staring out the kitchen window when M arrives at the bird bath, now filled with seed for feathered friends not gone south.

M is Marnie, a cute and friendly pine martin who regularly stops by to check the bird feeders and to sniff out any snacks spilled at the compose bin.

Usually, I am pleased to see her. She is an endearing critter with silky fur – mostly brownish black, but grey-tan on a face featuring soft dark eyes that give her a loveable look.

 I’m not so pleased to see her today. She has arrived as I am reading some alarming news.

The morning newspapers are reporting that the H5N1 virus – commonly called a bird flu – is galloping out of control. It is killing millions of chickens worldwide, and now is infecting more and more wild birds, especially waterfowl and shorebirds.

The virus led to the deaths of 52 million birds in the United States last year. 

More alarming is the news that a mutant H5N1 strain is infecting mink, which continue to be raised by the millions on fur farms. 

Mink are excellent virus mixing vessels. They harbour both human and avian viruses and can produce mutant strains transmissible to humans. They carried the COVID-19 virus and are believed to have generated two new Covid variants that spread to humans.

Mink belong to the weasel family and so does my pine marten friend Marnie. So, there is concern that if H5N1 goes unchecked in mink farms it could spread to similar animals like pine marten and other mammals such as we humans.

H5N1 has been around for two or three decades but rarely is found in humans. That’s a good thing because the virus is deadly. There have been fewer that 900 human cases worldwide in the past 20 years, but 53 percent of those have been fatal.

Medical researchers are worried that H5N1 strains produced by mink will spread like wildfire through wild birds, small mammals and into human populations. They warn of an H5N1 pandemic that could take tens of millions of human lives.

One way to help curtail H5N1 spread is to stop fur farming. Animal rights groups say more than 100 million animals a year are raised and killed for their fur. Most are mink and fox. They cite abuse as one reason for ending fur farming.

Mink are crowded into small cages until they are ready to be killed through gassing or electrocution. Some are fed food containing poultry, which can contain avian flu viruses.

Their skins are used to make coats. winter boots and mittens that keep people warm. Mink fur is dense with thousands of hairs per square centimeter, making it one of the densest and softest furs available.

The fur also is used to decorate purses, hats and even keychains.

However, pressure from animal rights groups, plus more evidence of zoonotic diseases have been hitting fur farming hard. Production of fur in the European Union fell from 38 million animal skins in 2018 to about 11 million in 2021. 

Technology has given us alternatives to animal fur, and more people are accepting them. Revenue from the global faux fur market was estimated at 24.7 billion dollars U.S. last year. It is forecast to grow at 4.8 per cent annually, reaching $28.4 million by 2025.

Roughly two dozen countries now have banned fur farming. Fears over new virus strains coming from fur farms are expected to lead to more bans.

Canada still has fur farming but it is a business in steep decline. In 2011 there were 347 Canadian fur farming operations. Last year the number had dwindled to 97.

Meanwhile, the chances of avian influenza appearing in backyard bird baths or feeders is considered low. The federal government, however, recommends precautions such as removing feeders that are open to poultry or waterfowl.

Also, feeders should be cleaned every two weeks and disinfected with a solution of one part household bleach to nine parts water. They should be rinsed well and thoroughly dried before being reused.

Regular cleaning and disinfecting hopefully will keep all our feathered visitors, and  Marnie the pine marten, H5N1 free. 

We’re all scanning the dark clouds of COVID-19 for a silver lining – a silvery puff to float us above the anguish of this nightmare disease and the madness it has brought.

I’ve found mine. It’s called ‘hitting mung.’ Sounds crazy but no crazier than the craziness devouring our world.

Mung are beans that Taoists used as a natural medicine. They would fill a sock with mung and use it as a club to beat tendons and muscles in their legs and arms. They believed this helped to repair injured parts and strengthen others.

South Koreans have given hitting mung a different twist. To them it is a slang expression meaning to reach a state of total blankness. Zoning out completely and rising above the mad world of COVID.

The Japanese also have been studying the art of zoning out and promote sitting in a forest as good medicine. They call it shinrin-yoku, which means taking in the forest atmosphere or forest bathing.

Hitting mung has become so popular in South Korea that there are places where you pay to sit and do nothing. You pay to sit on a chair or blanket and stare over a pond. Or into a forest, or a campfire. No talking, no music, no cellphones, no noise, period. Just staring.

If the weather turns nasty, hitting mung can be achieved in a movie theatre. ‘Flight,’ a film simulating a 40-minute airplane ride through the clouds is available in theatres across the country. It is advertised as a chance to “take a brief rest through the fluffy clouds.”

A ticket to sit and pretend you are flying through the clouds costs roughly $10 Canadian.

‘Flight’ is a sequel to ‘Fire Mung,’ which is 31 minutes of footage of a flaming campfire.

Hitting mung sounded like a great escape, so I took it up seriously. I am known to be a bit frugal, however, so I’m not paying for my hitting mung sessions. I simply walk into the woods behind our place, sit, stare and do nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The forest is the best place to hit your mung. I thought about staring into a campfire, or out onto the lake, but decided that would just bring back bad memories of last summer’s wildfires, and the recent floods out West.

Trees make it easier to blank out your bad thoughts and anxieties because they are totally open-minded and relaxed. They live together happily, not discriminating because of species, size or colour.

The mighty oaks don’t look down on their weak and pulpy poplar neighbours. The gorgeous green balsams don’t snigger at the tamaracks turning yellow just before Christmas when people are paying big bucks for evergreens.

Trees are well rooted so they don’t run about hysterically like we humans. Sure, they may sway and moan when things get really windy but overall, they are calm and quiet creatures. 

They remind me of mothers. They are nurturers, providing shelter and food to insects, birds and small animals. They don’t get the respect they deserve sometimes but they don’t complain.

The common sense and mothering aspects of trees is seen occasionally in human populations. One example is the calm and caring approach taken toward the pandemic by women. 

During the early days of COVID-19 women leaders like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Finland’s Sanna Marin, and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen certainly outperformed macho male poster boys Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Meanwhile, hitting mung is believed to be good for your body as well as your mind. Research indicates that chemicals released by forest plants boost human immune systems.

Family and friends don’t understand my enthusiasm for hitting mung. They can’t fathom how just staring and doing nothing for 45 minutes or an hour is healthy.

So, I don’t tell anyone when I go into the forest to hit my mung. I just sneak away quietly, perhaps carrying an axe, chainsaw or anything that makes it look like I am going out to work. 

I know that if I told them what I was really going to do, someone would suggest that time spent hitting mung could be spent more beneficially hitting the woodpile. Or the snow shovel.

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Canada is a much lesser country than it used to be.

COVID-19 has done that. We Canadians have allowed COVID-19 to reduce our country to a third-world type player barely able to look after itself.

We have stood by and watched the politicians fumble and stumble through the greatest medical crisis of modern times. They decided to play a compromise game with the virus and they lost.

They tried negotiating a deal that would see the fewest number of Canadians sickened and killed by the virus with the least amount of harm to the economy. We stood by and watched.

Viruses don’t negotiate. They need to be killed before they get into the game.

To be fair to the politicians, they had an unenviable task. An unenviable task made impossible by a hyper-partisan political climate that puts election, power and re-election above all else.

They allowed politics into a place it should never be – a widespread medical emergency.

Job one of our elected representatives in a national medical emergency is to pull people together to understand what has to be done, accept what has to be done and join the effort to get it done. To pull the general public on side, politicians need to have their trust.

The public gives its trust to those who show strong knowledge and command of the problem that needs fixing. Neither Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, nor Ontario Premier Doug Ford, showed any strong knowledge of the COVID-19 virus and its pandemic potential.

In the 14 months since the pandemic was declared, neither man has done one thing to stop COVID-19’s spread. Trudeau has done nothing but tell us about the millions of vaccine doses he has ordered. Ford has done nothing but tell us what a poor job Trudeau has done in getting vaccines distributed.

The fact that Canadian politicians were so unprepared for this national emergency is inexcusable because Canada had a wealth of virus knowledge gathered during the SARS pandemic of 2003. The SARS outbreak was small compared to COVID-19, sickening a known 8,000 people worldwide, killing close to 800. However, it left us important lessons on how to prepare for and battle the much-predicted next killer virus outbreak.

Canadians and their politicians choose to forget, or simply ignore, the lessons of SARS.

The Ontario SARS Commission, appointed to investigate the outbreak and make recommendations for the future, found that the most important lesson of SARS was about the precautionary principle.

Here’s what the commission wrote in its final report:

“Perhaps the most important lesson of SARS is the importance of the precautionary principle. SARS demonstrated over and over the importance of the principle that we cannot wait for scientific certainty before we take reasonable steps to reduce risk. This principle should be adopted as a guiding principle throughout Ontario’s health, public health and worker safety systems.

“If we do not learn this and other lessons of SARS . . . we will pay a terrible price in the face of future outbreaks of virulent disease, whether in the form of foreseen outbreaks like flu pandemics or unforeseen ones, as SARS was.”

This was not the first time that Canadians and their politicians had heard this. The same warning was issued by the Krever Commission into Canada’s tainted blood supply in the early 1990s.

The message was clear: when public health is seriously threatened, do not wait for all the evidence before taking action. Hitting fast and hard with stringent lockdowns and other unpopular tools would have lessened the virus’ spread.

Following the precautionary principle more than one year ago would have been unpopular. Businesses would have been shut down, jobs lost. There would have been pain, but we probably would not have suffered the way we are suffering now with one million-plus cases, 24,000 deaths and a completely shattered economy.

Yes, we are a lesser country now and we will continue to be until we begin to choose leaders who have the knowledge and strength needed to build the trust needed to bring us all together in solving our problems. Leaders for whom re-election is a lesser goal than getting done what needs to be done.

 Bad information vomited across social media is so prevalent that it’s even showing up in U.S. presidential addresses.

Newly-sworn President Joe Biden’s inaugural speech last week contained a bad piece of social media junk. Early in the speech he referred to the “once-in-a-century virus” stalking the country. He, of course, was talking about the Covid-19 pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of people across North America, millions around the world.

There is no such thing as a “once-in-a-century” virus or pandemic. It’s nonsense perpetrated on Facebook and other platforms about pandemics occurring every 100 years – 1720 plague, 1820 cholera, 1920 Spanish Flu, 1920 Covid-19.

It’s petty of me to criticize Biden for referring to “once-in-a-century”. We all know what he meant: comparison between two horrid pandemics 100 years apart – the 1918 Spanish Flu and Covid-19 in 2020.

But there is more at issue here. The 100-year references perpetrate beliefs that these killer pandemics are rare. Many expect that once Covid-19 goes away, it will be many decades before we see another.

Pandemics no longer are rare. Thinking that way sets us up for another disaster of weak leadership and unpreparedness like the one we are suffering through.

There have been half a dozen pandemics in the last century – Spanish Flu 1918-20, Asian flu 1956-58, Hong Kong flu 1968, HIV-AIDS 2005-2012, SARS 2003, Swine Flu 2009. Plus, dozens of serious epidemics.

(Pandemics are epidemics that spread across many countries or continents. Epidemics are serious disease outbreaks that affect large numbers of people in a community or a region).

There are plenty of warnings that more pandemics are on the way. There were numerous warnings that the current pandemic was coming.

The Ontario SARS report gave warnings and recommendations roughly 15 years ago. The book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic gave the warnings in 2012.

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates warned of it in 2015. Various research studies warned of it over the past few years.

Political leaders around the world shrugged and ignored the warnings, then responded with Milquetoast actions when they saw it had arrived.

Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who has trouble finding his hairbrush in the morning, bounced about like a ping pong ball in his responses to Covid. The result has been disaster; British cases closing in on four million, with close to 100,000 dead.

Little needs to be said about our neighbour to the south, a world-leading nation reduced to a garbage dump fire. Its former president, now known as Trumpinocchio, or Igor Trumpinov, simply ignored it, or called it fake news.

The Canadian response has consisted mainly of the prime minister daily standing in front of a microphone telling us the federal government has ordered tens of millions of Covid vaccine doses.

Canada ranks No. 1 in the world in amounts of vaccine doses ordered, but is far behind other countries in the number of doses administered.

Canada’s situation will get worse. Pfizer-BioNTech, currently the main supplier of Covid vaccine, has cut Canadian deliveries by 50 per cent for the next month or so. At the start of this week fewer than 90,000 of 38 million Canadians had been fully vaccinated and many of us will not feel the needle until summer or fall or perhaps even next year.

What has happened, and continues to happen, is a disaster caused by unprepared, unfocussed leadership. There’s little we can do about it now, except to wait for our turn to be vaccinated while following the advice of our medical experts.

We need to turn our attention to being properly prepared for the otic pandemic. We all need to become better informed about deadly viruses, what causes them and encouraging intelligent pandemic planning and stockpiling of equipment and supplies.

Most of all we need to ensure that medical experts are front and centre during the next pandemic while politicians are kept in the background, where they cannot muddle the communication so vital in serious disease outbreaks.

When this is all over don’t push it to the rear of your thoughts, because the next zoonotic outbreak is out there waiting to be spilled into the human population by some bat, monkey or other animal host.

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Welcome to October, a nice month with a reputation for pre-winter fun gatherings, fall beauty and okay weather.

This October is different. Octoberfests are out. Crowded Thanksgiving dinners are not recommended. Hallowe’en is looking to be the night of the empty streets, and that’s really scary.

The second Covid-19 wave has arrived, carrying in its wake the fears and social restrictions that we experienced during the initial outbreak of late last winter and early spring.

New cases are rising throughout much of the world. Ontario had two record-breaking days of new cases last week and Quebec’s new cases increased steadily, reaching more than 1,000 in 24 hours late last week.

October never has been a good news month for health. Temperature swings bring on colds and flu season. Ailments like sinusitis and arthritis are more prominent. Allergies increase misery as they take their last desperate gasps before winter.

Also, the American Heart Association says there are complications for those with heart problems as our bodies work to adapt to lower temperatures, icy rains and cold winds.

Add to that a Columbia University study of New York city health records showing that people born in October have increased disease risk.

One of the deadliest disease months in history was October 1918, the year of the Spanish flu pandemic. In the United States roughly 200,000 people died of the flu in the 31 days of October.

All dark news indeed. Plus, the expectation that Covid cases and deaths, and all the madness that comes with them, will increase even more before October ends.

But let’s not focus on the darkness. Remember that old saying: It is always darkest before the dawn.

There are glimmers of light. Every single day the medical community learns more about this virus - how to lessen its spread, how to treat it and how to make it less deadly.

Last week scientists studying Covid cases in India reported that eight per cent of people carrying the virus were responsible for 60 per cent of all new infections. On the flip side, 71 per cent of people with Covid-19 did not spread it to anyone else.

That is encouraging news because our chances of encountering it are less than first feared, if we follow the advice delivered regularly by the medical community: Avoid people, keep your distance from those you can’t avoid, do not meet in enclosed places or tight groups and wear a mask.

After eight months of this everyone is exhausted. Exhausted from worry. Exhausted from working to maintain some necessary normalcy without creating more opportunities for the virus to spread and further damage our lives.

Exhausted from thinking about what can be done to help the front-line workers, put at risk every day, and the business owners and others suffering disastrous income losses.

No matter the exhaustion, remember that dawn will crack the darkness, providing the light needed to illuminate the lessons we need to follow for rebuilding better lives.

A key lesson is to shut up and listen. Listen to the medical experts who deal in scientific facts and know that injecting politics into a life crisis is really bad medicine. Ignore the politicians, who need to talk less and spend their time designing non-partisan policies helpful to everyone.

Especially ignore the social media goonies and the unintelligentia who say their rights are more important than a nation’s health.

Ignore also the United States, which no longer has anything positive to offer about building a strong, better society for the future. It is a country of self-serving individuals, while Canada is a society of communities looking out for others.

While waiting for the darkness to recede completely we can enjoy thinking about all the good things that will return when the light appears and the darkness is gone. Like the joy of walking up to someone, asking them how they are and giving them a hug.

This October will bring not only some gloom and unhappiness, but expectations of good things to come. The October winds and rains now taking down those beautiful leaves of autumn also are blowing away the craziness of the Covid-19 pandemic, and all the madness of the year 2020.

Read From Shaman’s Rock: www.mindentimes.ca/columns

Cottage country facing change?

The annual lull after the storm of summer visitors to cottage country doesn’t seem to have materialized as fully as in past years. 

Lake access parking lots still hold plenty of vehicles. Town and village streets remain relatively busy. Post Labour Day traffic hasn’t lightened as much as might be expected. 

More people seem to be lingering this year. Perhaps it’s the weather, or maybe it’s a result of Covid-19. 

If the latter, I’m wondering whether we will see some dramatic changes in the future of cottage country. 

The Covid pandemic brought some changes with its late winter appearance. Concerned people bailed out of cities to head north and take refuge in cottages. Many were retirees, especially concerned because the virus was affecting older people more than others. 

Then businesses began closing to lessen spreading the infection, leaving some folks out of work, others forced to work from home. Many of them found themselves free to move to cottages while waiting for the virus threat to pass. 

The virus prevented people from travelling very far. In some cases, money saved from cancelled travel went into making cottages more comfortable, or had people out looking for cottages to rent or buy.

Covid aside, more people in general are yearning for an escape from modern realities and a return to nature, a simpler past and slower and safer lifestyle. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that 39 per cent of urban dwellers in the United States are thinking about moving to rural areas because of the pandemic and the increasing chaos of urban life. 

You can find more evidence of this on the Internet where the hashtag #cottagecore is driving millions of searches for old-fashioned cozy cottage lifestyles. 

Perhaps all this is temporary, just a panic-twinged reaction to the chaotic events of 2020. When Covid is controlled and memories of other chaos begin to fade, most people perhaps will settle into the life they had before 2020. 

However, if the interest in rural and cottage country living continues, and more and more people opt for it, the changes will be dramatic. There will be benefits, as well as disadvantages. 

More population means strain on services, including hospitals, policing and various utilities. More strain will require more staffing, which could bring more extensive medical care and other servicing. 

Population growth also will spur more business activity, which will require more employment. More people mean more homes, more building, more renovations and therefore more construction-related jobs. 

Larger populations also bring the problems that many urban dwellers now would like to leave behind – crowding, crime, horrendous traffic and pollution. 

Some people will favour any change. Others will be unhappy with disruption of life as they have known it. 

Whatever happens, whether it be small or huge, there will be change. It is inevitable, as we have seen in the past. 

My introduction to cottaging a long time ago was to one-room cabins built of logs hewn by hand and with spaces stuffed with moss to keep out critters and cold. Water came from pails hauled from the lake, and light came from coal oil lamps. 

That was in northwestern Ontario where cottages were (and still are) called camps.

Those very basic cottages, or camps, have evolved into mega-cottages with modern electrical or gas appliances and electronic gadgets that connect us to the outside world. 

The world evolves, and evolution naturally brings changes. We can’t avoid changes to many of the physical aspects of cottage country. But what we can protect from change is the most important and most valued part of cottage life – the cottage country state of mind. 

The cottage always has been a place to take a mental break from urban life. It’s the place where simple things like the call of a loon or the breeze rustling tree branches remind us that nature is our most precious asset. 

Nature is our greatest teacher. It reminds us who we really are and what our place really is in the greater scheme of things. It is constantly showing us what is right and what is wrong. 

Every teacher needs a well-equipped classroom, and nature’s classroom is cottage country. 

Love and laughter will return

It’s at this time of year that we celebrate the prominent battles, victories and end of the Second World War in 1945. Last Thursday was the 75^th anniversary of VE Day, Victory in Europe Day, ending that war against Nazi Germany.

While we celebrate apart this year, we are fighting another world war - the COVID-19 disease that has infected roughly four million people globally, killing close to 300,000. Those figures will be much higher when all is said and done.

Few of us were alive or old enough to remember what war in the 1940s was like. All we have are the recorded history and some personal remembrances from the dwindling number of those who lived it.

However, my feeling is that the fight back then was more unified, more focussed, more determined and less partisan than the Covid war today. Everyone seemed to work together to get through the Second World War; end the fighting and killing and get the world back to normal.

I don’t have that feeling about this pandemic. There are no powerfully uniting cultural symbols for fighting the enemy – no Rosie the Riveter, no soaring Churchillian oratory, no Vera Lynn, the “Forces’ Sweetheart”, singing to comfort the troops.

What we do have is the shocking partisan chaos in the U.S. and in Britain the bravado incompetence of Boris Johnson, who came close to being a dead victim of the coronavirus pandemic.

And, in Canada we have the bland Justin Trudeau on TV daily announcing a new financial handout to groups suffering financially by the pandemic. The financial assistance obviously is needed, but would be nice if accompanied by some stirring thoughts on how we’ll work together to beat this plague.

Something like Winston Churchill’s speech to the British House of Commons after taking over the government from the weak-kneed Neville Chamberlain:

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

So far it has not been our finest hour. Shortages of Personal Protective Equipment for medical personnel and other frontline workers, plus other shortages and unpreparedness that might have been avoided by paying attention to the recommendations made by the SARS Commission 15 years ago.

Then there are the nursing home deaths. The National Institute on Aging said last week that 82 per cent of Canada’s COVID-19 deaths have been in long-term settings. That is not just a national disgrace; it is a sign of corruption in our society.

I’m not saying that Canada’s response to the pandemic has been bad. We’ve done relatively well, but it certainly has not been our finest hour.

Meanwhile, over in Britain the spirit of Vera Lynn is alive and encouraging citizens to carry on the fight. Not only is the spirit alive, so is the lady herself. She is 103 and lives in the East Sussex village of Ditchling, roughly 85 kilometres south of London.

She issued a statement for the 75^th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, noting people will celebrate while being apart because of the Covid pandemic. However, while people would be apart, they should not lose hope.

"I hope that VE Day will remind us all that hope remains even in the most difficult of times and that simple acts of bravery and sacrifice still define our nation as the National Health Service works so hard to care for us.”

"Most of all, I hope today serves as a reminder that however hard things get, we will meet again."

That was a reference to her famous Second World War song, We Will Meet Again, which struck a positive, emotional chord with soldiers, families and sweethearts.

Just as popular was her White Cliffs of Dover song, the 1942 war anthem promising better times to come. Its message is worth repeating in these days of anxiety about whether our world ever will be the same again.

There'll be bluebirds over

The white cliffs of DoverTomorrow, just you wait and seeThere'll be love and laughterAnd peace ever afterTomorrow, when the world is free

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