Re-Queening, Cloning, and Other Soul-less Science

The quote for today is "Science rushing in where Animals fear to tread" or something along those lines. Just because humans can do something via our "advanced" technology does not mean we should. Cue cloning Black Footed Ferret from the 1988 remains of a highly genetically diversified female, aka, Willa via IVF into a domesticated BFF. It feels void of Energy because it lacks soul path or the "why Earth" purpose. The same goes for re-Queening a hive, i.e., murder of a resident Queen because you think she's making your apiary duties difficult. Repeat after me: Science rushes in where Animals fear to tread.

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/chock-a-block.html

https://www.fws.gov/press-release/2024-04/innovative-cloning-advancements-black-footed-ferret-conservation

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-cloned-ferret-has-given-birth-for-the-first-time-in-history-marking-a-win-for-her-endangered-species-180985411/

https://www.psu.edu/news/agricultural-sciences/story/honey-bees-may-inherit-altruistic-behavior-their-mothers

Transcript

I'm Lizanne Flynn. I'm a master healer who holds space for any Earthling as they reunite body and soul. I am a bridge for relationships between all species so that 

the heart bond becomes stronger, deeper, and more loving. I serve in the roles of animal communicator, medium, and medical intuitive, and I use the tools of shamanic journeying and soul retrieval 

to support all Earthlings in their recovery from past trauma. I'm certified as a canine massage therapist and Reiki Master Teacher. This is the Animals' iView podcast.

It seems that the holi-daze are upon us with all of their glories and all of their sorrows. Here in the US - and perhaps abroad - social media is chock-a-block full of rips and tears of groups being torn asunder due to political beliefs and/or perception of moral clarity, as in who has it and who doesn't. FYI the phrase- chock-a-block - originates from nautical terminology, referring to blocks (pulleys) being stacked closely together. “Chock, a sort of wedge used to confine a cask or other weighty body… when the ship is in motion. A block and tackle is a pulley system used on sailing ships to hoist the sails. It might be expected that ‘chock-a-block‘ is the result of wedging a block fixed with a chock. That doesn’t appear to be the case. The phrase describes what occurs when the system is raised to its fullest extent – when there is no more rope free and the blocks jam tightly together." Chock-a-block also spawned an abbreviated version in the 20th century – chocka (or chocker). This is WWII UK military slang meaning ‘fed-up or disgruntled’ “Chocker, this is the sailor’s way of saying he is fed up or browned off.” I'll have to mention this to my Navy veteran son to see if it's still used today, although likely not. And who's to say that these rips and tears in one's familial group aren't due to present situations and that perhaps the fabric of the family was already made of fabric that was washed too often so that it's threadbare? Or that the stains on the fabric were not taken care of immediately so that despite repeated and perhaps unnecessary washings, the stain still shows present tense. I think I'll take my advice when writing about today's podcast topic and aim for neutrality while at the same time addressing violations of my boundaries that are necessary to do, perhaps like a Queen Bee does in her hive, and that all Animals do every moment of their lives.

The intersection of re-Queening a hive and the cloning of Black Footed Ferret may seem odd at the very least. Just for fun, I'ma gonna add in the term 'pet Octopus' because at least from the Animals' eye view they all match in the soul-less territory. And honestly, with the two at either end - the re-Queening of a hive and having an Octopus for a pet I would have expected to a certain extent. The one in the middle - the cloning of Black Footed Ferret I would not have put them in the mix and the Energy as I feel it is definitely 'off' and sometimes I'll use the term 'void of Energy' which is pretty much the same. It's how my body tells me what Energy is present, if any. When an Animal's transition is imminent I will feel a void of Energy at some point in the near future. It's as if a light has been turned off and there is no more Energy contained - or will be leaving - a physical form that's currently very present in their energetic fingerprint. I may have said before that your Energetic field holds the full essence of you and does the same for the other 8.7 million Animal species on Earth and their individual members so that it is individual to you like your fingerprint is. How I feel is situation-dependent such as a guardian grappling with an Animal who is in active transition vs an Animal who still has some arbitrary time left on their life path. The endpoint will be the same for both, it's just a matter of time. I've felt the void when Animals who are missing have already transitioned and not surprisingly, usually at the claws or paws of another predator, which is something they may have chosen for themselves. Especially if they are in their window of transition and their guardian is struggling with the decision on whether or not to euthanize; keep in mind, it's the ultimate act of compassion and mercy we can give to them. The bottom line is that this void of Energy feeling is quite different than a non-void of Energy which I'm sure clears it up nicely for you all, right? I knew immediately when the Animals joined me in labeling these human actions as soul-less that we'd hit the mark.

Let me start by giving you a bit of history about the Black-Footed Ferret. All of the currently living BFFs are descendants of the last seven living BFFs in the wild. This species holds a unique Ecosystem Role: It is a key predator in its habitat, helping to control populations of prairie dogs and other small mammals. They are also a Biodiversity Indicator: Their presence indicates a healthy prairie ecosystem, as they rely on specific habitats and prey. Since they are already endangered this limited genetic pool if you will also doesn't do them any favors as it's the diversity among any species that builds strong and durable successive generations. I mean, we humans know that from our slightly mad kings and queens stories. The cloning article link in the podcast notes came out first from the US Fish and Wildlife Service in April of this year. 3 female Ferrets were cloned from another female Ferret whose remains were stored in 1988 at the San Diego Zoo. Cloning makes a new plant or animal by copying the genes of an existing animal. To clone these three ferrets, the Fish and Wildlife Service worked with zoo and conservation organizations and ViaGen Pets & Equine, a Texas business that clones horses for $85,000 and pet dogs for $50,000 and we already know Barbra Streisand cloned her first Dog after its transition. The unique thing about the San Diego BFF is that her genes held 3 times as much diversity as those found in current BFFs that came from only 7 ancestors. So to science it made sense to make 3 more BFFs from those genes as the more diversity, the more resilience against disease. And I gotta tell you - even just saying those words - science made 3 more BFFs - gives me the same kind of oockety feeling and that's a word you won't find in the dictionary. It's my made-up word from icky and a slight - eww - but without the whole eww sound. Just an ooo sound. So Elizabeth Ann, Noreen, and Antonia were cloned from Willa's genes, the bad-ass BFF who managed to not be born from the other 7 remaining ancestral BFFs. We might could call her the 8th wonder of the BFF world. The technique involved injecting Willa’s genetic material into the egg of a domesticated ferret, which then became a surrogate mother. The domestic ferret birthed Elizabeth Ann, the first cloned ferret in the world, but Elizabeth Ann was unable to reproduce although she is healthy and living her life in a zoo which is all she's known. Once Antonia reached maturity she mated with another BFF and this past June, she birthed three offspring in a first for conservation. Though one of them died, the surviving female and male have been meeting their expected developmental milestones. No word yet on our gal Noreen and whether she's also been mated yet kits in the oven. 

At the end of the article I read, I asked myself and the Animals since they're always along for the ride, 'Well, what about Soul'? Where does that come in or does it during the cloning process? The response from the Animals to that void of Energy was a bit of fear and nervousness because like science and religion they don't have cloning in their DNA if you will - they wanted me to put it exactly that way, as a bit of a joke. And I can't say that I disagree. When I think about Antonia and scan for her energetic fingerprint, it's there and it also feels a bit void of Energy. It's not exactly AI or robotic because it's alive yet its presence on Earth isn't exactly comfortable either. Other BFFs poke their heads out of their dens and are sniffing the air because they also feel this very very different fingerprint that looks, acts, and behaves like a BFF, yet she/they don't at the same time. So is the question - is cloning or as we've talked about before - reverse extinction - compatible with life on Earth in all ways? So that soul path matches up with a brief life path for experimenting and experiencing. Will it be that way for Antonia and her offspring? Do they have souls or is this like an AI Frankenstein experiment that will eventually run amok because let's face it, we don't do preservation at all really? How are we doing at conservation, really? Will it be possible for these offspring and their offspring etc. to be released into the wild to successfully broaden and deepen the species we call BFF, in reality, we might call them BMF as in black masked Ferret because that's what they look like. 

Another intervention less from science and more from the patriarchy without science, Re-Queening a hive is also like a human soul-less intervention which is done often when a resident Queen dies or maybe two Queens are born in one hive or when a swarm of Bees occurs and they need a new Queen. It is also done when human perception of the Queen's offspring is that they're aggressive or as one Instagram poster - a man, which will become important in just a minute - decides that his Queen has "angry genes that she's passed on to her offspring". Which then causes in his mind the offspring to become aggressive and fly about and swarm and attack and sting. So this man, an apiarist with about 240,000 followers blithely posted that he "killed a Queen because she was causing her offspring to become aggressive" which in turn, of course, made his apiary duties difficult. We all must have calm hives doncha know because humans are all in charge. I reached out to my resident apiarist and didn't hear back from her in time for this podcast so I took it upon myself to look up what makes the offspring in a hive angry and/or aggressive. Turns out it's not such a surprise - it is the numerous Drone males with whom the Queen mates at the beginning of each season. True altruism is rare behavior in animals, but a new study by Penn State researchers has found that honey bees display this trait. Additionally, they found that an evolutionary battle of genetics may determine the parent they inherit it from.

For the study, published in the journal Molecular Ecology, the researchers examined the genetics behind “retinue” behavior in worker honey bees, who are always female. After the worker bees are exposed to the queen bee’s pheromone, they deactivate their ovaries, help spread the pheromone to the other worker bees, and tend to the queen and the eggs she produces. This behavior is considered altruistic because it ultimately benefits the ability of the queen to produce offspring, while the worker bee remains sterile. For honey bees, the queen is typically the mother of all, or nearly all, the bees in the hive. The researchers found that the genes that make worker bees more receptive to this pheromone — and therefore more likely to display the retinue behavior — can be passed down from either the mother or father bees. However, the genes only result in altruistic behavior when they are passed down from the mother. So it would seem that there are no angry or misbehaving Queens and perhaps there are more angry and misbehaving Drones, male Bees, whose sole purpose is to mate with a Queen Bee and then they die or are killed off by the female worker Bees should they try to enter the hive itself. Talk about the revenge of The Handmaid's Tale come to life! When I read about this re-Queening, an unnecessary murder of likely one of the most sentient beings on Earth, I was shocked that it was talked about so easily. Moreover, the people who were commenting only knew half of the story and were still commenting about "bad genes" coming from the Queen because they so willingly accepted this destruction of the leader of the hive because far be it from humans and definitely male humans to think that they're doing something wrong in their beekeeping. How does the hive go on after that when their Mother of All is suddenly gone? How do their souls feel about their life's work and the baby Bees nestled comfortably in their cells who wake up suddenly to find their Mother has been replaced? 

Finally, we come to another social media video I watched about an Octopus named Lucy whose owner - and I'm using that word deliberately - claims she is his pet. This guy has YouTube video views in the millions and I had to go back quite a ways in their feed to find when Lucy was adopted by him. He freely mentions in several videos that Lucy is mad at me for being gone so long as a way to explain her behavior of clinging tightly to him and squirting him with water. She's currently in a smallish aquarium by herself - and in the latest video he briefly references that as Lucy has been with him for about a year, her lifespan dictates that she may be leaving him soon, which is true. Captive Octopus live for maybe 1-2 years depending on the maintenance of their health by their owners. By definition, an owner is someone who owns an object or a thing and has control over that object or thing. In some EU countries and elsewhere Animals are considered sentient beings. In other countries and in the US, they are considered property. I'm fairly certain that Lucy and the other Fish he has in his tanks come from captive breeders and he posted a video where he and his family were going to visit a Seahorse farm where they might come home with one or two. He may very well say if questioned that people are learning about Octopus from him and that he's giving Lucy a good home - "Look and see - she's healthy! I gave her a good home from the breeder". He might even add that he's aiding conservation efforts as some of his supporters say by preferring to believe that he's rescued them. My reply would be - "from where has he rescued them - the Ocean? You mean the place that is their and their ancestors' only known home? While not the same void of Energy from cloning and/or re-Queening a hive, the Animals and I can't help but wonder about the quality of Lucy's life and her amazingly quirky and unique design of Octopus left at home alone in a tank for umpteen hours a day. Where's the soul in that? As much as we seek to preserve life on Earth in all forms, its balance and partnership with Soul, life's extraordinary animating spark, must also be preserved as well and brought forward as part of the unified duality and partnership that flows so effortlessly around the Earth. We've only ourselves to blame if we don't. 

And at least, that's how the Animals see it.

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