#But this is a broader draft of the major politics when the REAL meat of this story is in the minutia.

[bonefall]

For Riverstar’s Heir, do you have any idea where you want to land themeatically? Because from my reading of the possible themeatic directions, with the whole story being about this crisis of politics and succession, it feels like the character who “should” become the next leader of RiverClan narratively should be the Most ruthless/aggressive/willing to resort to dishonorable methods of dealing with rivals (reinforcing RiverClan’s entry into/building up of the early Clans’ emerging systems of battle society)

The alternative “most interesting” option I can imagine would be one that is least likely/least aggressive/some otherwise sort of underdog candidate (maybe not even technically “legal” depending on what qualifications there are for heirship?), but I’m not sure exactly what themes that would play into, other than maybe how the pursuit of power can change someone?

That said, your themeatic instincts are strong enough that I can see you having a strong idea for a “middle-of-the-pack” candidate winning out over the others just as much, so— I am genuinely curious what your thoughts are for where you Want this crisis of succession to end, narratively, even if you don’t have an exact cat picked yet.

Good ask because I'd not been clear about the theme yet, I think. What Riverstar's Heir is trying to get at, at the heart of the issue, is that this is a bloodbath caused by naiive optimism and greed.

The commandments to establish borders and prevent killing are nice, but not enough. You can't just have a society on good will, not when POWER is up for grabs in the scramble. It's about collapse, and how innocent, well-meaning people get caught up in the devastation. Not JUST the troublemakers.

Riverstar was an EXCELLENT king, beloved and wise, but if you don't prepare a proper successor, everything you worked hard to build might crumble to ruin.

Something unique is lost in this shuffle. It's no longer the River Kingdom, and the Wind Coalition also becomes WindClan at this point. For better, and for worse, they both lose a bit of what made them special. Redscar's choice at the end also solidifies the early political power of Clerics, which is eventually broken many generations later with Larkwing's Strike.

So, fragment time,

At LEAST three "heirs" end up getting killed.

So, because these ones are gonna die, I have Three Heir "Slots" that I'm committed to and just need to fill;

The Eldest, Riverstar's oldest living biological child.

The Chosen, Riverstar's adopted heir, a rather meek prince easily pressured into backing off his rightful claim. This one is likely going to be the BB! version of Mossfire.

The Firstblood, directly descended from Riverstar's FIRSTborn child. This one is likely going to be the BB! version of Jumpfoot.

I also have two tentative slots.

The Accomplished... who is a blood relative of Riverstar, but more of a "puppet" for WindCo. Someone they're intentionally propping up hoping for power.

The Diplomat, from WindClan, who is a lot like WindCo's puppet but this one is more subtle about it. Poetic. Happy to purr and remind the world of the wonderful, deep ties that had existed between King Riverstar and Thunderstar.

And, LASTLY, there's The Deputy. The most qualified choice, who served Riverstar, but was no relative.

It feels right that the Deputy is the one who is chosen in the end... hm.

Anyway

After a smaller conflict near the start of the story, either The Eldest or The Firstblood seems to be the favorite to win... but decides to wait for the morning to set out for the Moonstone and take their lives.

In this time period, without selecting a successor, this heir is assassinated.

In fact it might be VERY fun if this heir, being so much like King Riverstar himself, decided to throw a pre-emptive celebration.

Meat! Merriment! MURDER!!!

Having them go out via poison would be a fun way to send a character off.

This is going to be why the "DEPUTY BEFORE MOONHIGH" rule is established, but it's also what kicks off the bloodier parts of the plot.

Thinking about it... a cleric and/or the deputy should probably tell this heir, "Hey, buddy, you should really get going" and they're ignored.

With Eldest Heir gone, the small conflict from earlier becomes an LARGE conflict.

And, like they did back in DOTC, families start to rally together. Especially Eldest's offspring, who think they're just as entitled to the Throne as The Firstblood/Jumpfoot

King Riverstar used to encourage cats to enter the River Kingdom freely. The borders were essentially open, and everyone was allowed in, as long as they were willing to cross the river.

(maybe I'll even have him pull down the tree from Riverstar's Home intentionally, happy to accept other cats into his Kingdom. Then he defends it from Skystar, specifically, but refuses to destroy what he built.)

This had allowed River Kingdom to grow large and powerful, but it also meant everyone in River Kingdom had connections to the other Clans.

Which meant there were cats supporting OTHER bids to the Throne, like the one from WindCo and the one from ThunderClan.

Smelling a way to grab power, Duststar supports his favorite heir, and Whitestar of ThunderClan also begins to stick his nose in.

Each Heir tries to run the River Kingdom, and things start to get hostile. If there's more than just the three heirs, even more of them start to get openly attacked, chased out, killed, until there's only The Chosen and The Firstblood left.

Somewhere around here, River Kingdom is invaded. Probably by the leader of SkyClan at the time, claiming that they don't even NEED an heir to take what these cats clearly don't deserve.

And that's when the internal conflict becomes a FULL-BLOWN WAR between four Clans.

In those days, the camp was at Sunningrocks, right in the middle of the river.

ThunderClan jumps in to help its "Ally" against SkyClan, just like historical precedent, but they have NO IDEA who they're fighting against, because the whole Kingdom is divided. It's not as simple as it was in DOTC anymore.

WindCo came to support its favorite heir, but its cats don't obey Duststar's orders when it comes down to fighting their own friends and family, meaning they're functionally fighting EVERYONE and losing a TON of cats

SkyClan is getting pummeled because EVERY group is pissed at them as well as each other, getting a painful awakening that they are NOT being run by Skystar the War God anymore and they're no longer the biggest, baddest bananas in the bunch

(shadowclan is watching all of this and eating popcorn. moisturized. in their lane. unbothered.)

The climax here, between The Chosen and The Firstblood, is a battle that matches the chapter from COTC. They launch at each other, in a battle to the death.

The first Sunningrocks Battle.

They both wear "crowns" on their head, one custom made for Mossfire's short-furred head, and traditional, braided into Jumpfoot's long, lush fur.

As they claw, bite, and tumble, they plunge into the river.

Fighting and hissing, they try to pull apart to rise up for air-- and can't.

They're STUCK

The crowns became tangled in their skirmish, and neither one can work with the other to bring them both to shore, against the current.

Both heirs, the last with a proper claim to the throne, drown together in the river.

At the end of the bloodbath, the tone is very somber. The rules were meant to prevent The First Battle from ever happening again... but The Second Battle had just taken place.

The body count wasn't AS high as the First Battle, but it was still a bloody loss. Every Clan lost warriors. Even ShadowClan, who hadn't even been IN the conflict, checked its ranks to find that powerful warriors had run off to go fight with their Kin.

Now they could be buried with them, too.

And now, there was no proper heir. If any descendants were still kicking around, they were refusing to take a throne that so many cats had died for. Jumpfoot and Mossfire never emerged from the River, their bodies, and their legendary crowns, were never found.

At first I'd been considering Redscar being swapped to become a RiverClan Cleric, but now I'm thinking it actually makes sense he's still from ShadowClan. ShadowClan was the ONLY neutral group-- it's reasonable for the clans to turn and request their partiality.

So, Redscar peruses the options, having followed the situation from afar.

His choice, in the end, was The Deputy. The most experienced advisor who knew Riverstar, and probably tried to stay at his adopted daughter's side as well. The closest thing they'd had to a leader all along.

(Thought: Maybe this character will be the POV. Make it like a bit of a fake-out title, you THINK Riverstar's heir is Mossfire. But it's actually been this one all along.)

He creates his famous false sign, and from there, the five groups discussed how they could prevent this from ever happening again.

They create the Law of the Deputy, commanding that ALL Clans have a single Deputy who will inherit the Clan after the leader passes away, ending dynasties in WindCo and River Kingdom and centralizing power in the other 3.

With the massive losses that WindCo and River Kingdom experienced, they also restructure, forced to accept a lot of help from ThunderClan and ShadowClan.

The borders began to close up, leading to the sentiment that would lead to Commandment 4, the Law of Loyalty, in just one more generation.

#better bones au #BB!DOTC #Riverstar's Heir #I feel like I need to add in more 'human' moments #But it's also a very broad overview type thing #Having the Deputy be the POV will help immensely I think once I get into the details #Since she'll be thinking about how to keep the Kingdom together. How to feed people. How badly it's all crumbling #And how distracting the violence all is #But this is a broader draft of the major politics when the REAL meat of this story is in the minutia. #(Ottoman Empire ass drama in the background) ``no time for that goku. its fall. the salmon r coming.`` #Unsure if this is Flowerstem or Maplewhisker.... #The Eldest would make sense as Mothpelt #Again: COTC my beloved

[biofunmy]

Tainted Pork, Ill Consumers and an Investigation Thwarted

It was 7 a.m. on Independence Day when a doctor told Rose and Roger Porter Jr. that their daughter could die within hours. For nearly a week, Mikayla, 10, had suffered intensifying bouts of fever, diarrhea and stabbing stomach pains.

That morning, the Porters rushed her to a clinic where a doctor called for a helicopter to airlift her to a major medical center.

The gravity of the girl’s illness was remarkable given its commonplace source. She had gotten food poisoning at a pig roast from meat her parents had bought at a local butcher in McKenna, Wash., and spit-roasted, as recommended, for 13 hours.

Mikayla was one of nearly 200 people reported ill in the summer of 2015 in Washington State from tainted pork — victims of the fastest-growing salmonella variant in the United States, a strain that is particularly dangerous because it is resistant to antibiotics.

What followed was an exhaustive detective hunt by public health authorities that was crippled by weak, loophole-ridden laws and regulations — and ultimately blocked by farm owners who would not let investigators onto their property and by their politically powerful allies in the pork industry.

The surge in drug-resistant infections is one of the world’s most ominous health threats, and public health authorities say one of the biggest causes is farmers who dose millions of pigs, cows and chickens with antibiotics to keep them healthy — sometimes in crowded conditions before slaughter.

[Read our other stories in our series on drug resistance, Deadly Germs, Lost Cures.)

Overuse of the drugs has allowed germs to develop defenses to survive. Drug-resistant infections in animals are spreading to people, jeopardizing the effectiveness of drugs that have provided quick cures for a vast range of ailments and helped lengthen human lives over much of the past century.

But public health investigators at times have been unable to obtain even the most basic information about practices on farms. Livestock industry executives sit on federal Agriculture Department advisory committees, pour money into political campaigns and have had a seat at the table in drafting regulations for the industry, helping to ensure that access to farms is generally at the owners’ discretion.

Dr. Parthapratim Basu, a former chief veterinarian of the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said the pork industry regularly thwarted access to information on antibiotic use.

“When it comes to power, no one dares to stand up to the pork industry,” he said, “not even the U.S. government.”

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]

A reconstruction of the Washington outbreak provides a rare look into how these forces play out. The New York Times reviewed government documents, medical records and emails of scientists and public health officials, as well as conducted interviews with victims, investigators, industry executives and others involved.

Those industry officials argued in documents and interviews that farmers needed protection against regulators and scientists who could unfairly harm their business by blaming it for a food-poisoning outbreak when the science was complex and salmonella endemic in livestock. The tension mirrors a broader distrust in agriculture and other business about the intention of federal regulators and other government overseers.

“Have you ever heard of the phrase, ‘I’m from the government, I’m here to help you’ — and you know they’re going to screw you?” said David J. Hofer, the secretary-treasurer of the Midway Hutterite Colony, a religious community that runs a hog farm in Conrad, Mont. Mr. Hofer said he was one of the farmers who objected to the farm inspections during the outbreak.

“They might have public health in mind, but they don’t care if in the process they break you.”

In the end, Mikayla Porter survived, but the threat of the infection that nearly killed her continues — not least because investigators still lack access to essential data.

A Danger Grows

There are 2,500 different types of salmonella. The one that infected Mikayla is called 4,5,12:i-minus. It first showed up in the late 1980s in Portugal, and then in Spain, Thailand, Taiwan, Switzerland and Italy. In the United States, infections it causes have risen 35 percent over the past decade, while the overall rate of salmonella infections has stayed constant.

The strain typically resists four major antibiotics: ampicillin, streptomycin, sulfisoxazole and tetracycline.

“We can see resistance is really increasing,” said Dr. Robert V. Tauxe, director of the division of food-borne, waterborne and environmental diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This particularly virulent strain of salmonella is just one of a growing number of drug-resistant germs that put farm families, and meat eaters generally, at risk.

A study in Iowa found that workers on pig farms were six times more likely to carry multidrug-resistant staph infections, notably MRSA. A study in North Carolina found that children of pig workers were twice as likely to carry MRSA than children whose parents didn’t work in a swine operation.

Those germs can also wind up on pork sold to consumers. An analysis of government data by the Environmental Working Group, a research organization, found that 71 percent of pork chops at supermarkets in the United States carried resistant bacteria, second only to ground turkey, at 79 percent.

Like many outbreaks of resistant infections, the salmonella variant that sickened Mikayla is usually so widely dispersed that the C.D.C. has had a hard time tracking it.

But in the Washington outbreak, the infection was new to the region, and tests revealed the bug had the same genetic profile in patients, creating ideal conditions for scientific detective work.

“This was our real opportunity,” said Allison Brown, a C.D.C. epidemiologist. “Everything lined up.”

A Celebration Turns Dire

The Porter family had invited friends and neighbors to the pig roast to celebrate a major life change: In three days, they would be moving to Costa Rica.

But the day after the roast, Mikayla felt sick, and by 4:30 a.m. the following morning, she had diarrhea so severe that her parents took her to the emergency room.

There, a doctor said she had a stomach bug, assuring them it would pass and approving her to travel. Her parents also felt sick, but not as seriously, and they flew to Costa Rica as planned.

After arriving, Mikayla got much worse, excreting mucus and blood. She lay in agony on the couch, the family dogs sitting beside her protectively.

A doctor at BeachSide Clinic near Tamarindo, the town where the family had rented a house, prescribed the antibiotic azithromycin, medical records show. It did not work.

The family returned to the clinic the next day. That is when Dr. Andrea Messeguer told Mikayla’s parents their daughter could die, and helped arrange the airlift to Hospital CIMA in the capital, San José.

There, doctors determined that Mikayla had a systemic infection. She received intravenous hydration and antibiotics.

Tests came back from the national lab showing the drug-resistant salmonella strain.

Back in Washington, many others were also getting sick.

On July 19, Nicholas Guzley Jr., a police officer, ate pork at a restaurant in Seattle, and at 2 a.m. threw up in the shower. The medical ordeal that followed was so excruciating — vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding, a fever of 103.9 degrees, dehydration and multiple hospital visits — that he said it was worse than a near-death experience in 2003 when he had been hit by a truck.

“If you stack up all the pain from all the injuries, this blew it away,” he said.

On July 23, the head of Washington’s Department of Health sent out an alert, warning that 56 people had fallen ill and publicizing an investigation into the outbreak by the state’s health and agriculture agencies, coordinating with the C.D.C. The Washington State epidemiologist, Dr. Scott Lindquist, took the lead.

On July 27, a restaurant had its permit suspended for food safety violations, including failure to keep its food hot enough. Multiple restaurants were identified as possible sources of tainted pork, along with several pig roasts.

Dr. Lindquist and his team discovered that many of the infected roast pigs had come from a slaughterhouse called Kapowsin Meats. Tests of 11 samples taken from slaughter tables, knives, hacksaws, transport trucks and other spots showed that eight were positive for the resistant strain.

At Kapowsin, the state investigators spoke to the federal official responsible for inspecting the slaughterhouse, who suggested that they look for the farms where the tainted pork had come from.

The Heart of an Outbreak

Records obtained by the state showed that many of the pigs supplied to Kapowsin originated on industrial farms in neighboring Montana.

On Aug. 13, state records noted that the investigative team — including the C.D.C. and the federal Agriculture Department — was in touch with officials in Montana to discuss gaining access to the farms.

Determining where the outbreak originated would have allowed the team to trace other possibly infected pork, recall it and advise the owners on how to change their practices.

But such investigations are extremely sensitive because the publicity can be bad for business, and because the law protects farmers in such situations. Over all, the government has little authority to collect data on farms.

“We have people in the slaughterhouses every day, all day long,” said Paul Kieker, the acting food safety administrator at the Agriculture Department. “We don’t have a lot of jurisdiction on farms.”

The Food and Drug Administration is charged with collecting antibiotic use data. But farms are not required to provide it, and only do so voluntarily.

As a result, the federal government has no information about the antibiotics used on a particular farm and no way to document the role of the drugs in accelerating resistance.

“I haven’t been on a farm for years,” said Tara Smith, a professor at Kent State University and an expert on the connection between resistance and livestock. “They’ve closed their doors to research and sampling.”

Investigators Are Turned Away

Dr. Lindquist, the epidemiologist leading the investigation of the Washington outbreak, pleaded with Montana’s health agency to help him gain access to the farms that had supplied the Kapowsin slaughterhouse.

In a memo to state officials, he told them that such infections were increasing rapidly and that “on-farm investigations will help us better understand the ecology of salmonella” and “prevent future human illnesses.”

Days later, he received a phone call from Dr. Liz Wagstrom, the chief veterinarian for the National Pork Producers Council, a group that lobbies on behalf of the livestock industry. Its campaign donations to congressional candidates have more than doubled in the past decade, to $2 million in 2018, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Dr. Wagstrom sought to find out what Dr. Lindquist had learned in his investigation and what he was saying to the media, he said, recalling the conversation. He said she was worried the pig farms might be unfairly tarnished, arguing that salmonella was common on farms, so an investigation wouldn’t prove anything, even if the infection was detected.

In an interview, Dr. Wagstrom said she was concerned that farm visit wouldn’t yield valuable information. “What would you learn that could positively impact public health?”

The industry soon became more involved. Officials from the National Pork Board joined regular crisis conference calls during the investigation, along with numerous state and federal health and agriculture officials.

The board is a group of pork industry executives whose members are elected by the industry and then appointed by the secretary of agriculture, cementing a tight bond between business and government.

Dr. Lindquist initially welcomed the executives’ presence, given their expertise, though he did not know who had initially invited them.

Rules With Big Loopholes

That same year, F.D.A. guidelines went into effect that were supposed to enable the tracking of antibiotics on farms. They required farms to obtain prescriptions from veterinarians to dispense antibiotics, and only to animals sick or at risk of illness. The guidelines said that farms must stop using antibiotics as “growth promoters.”

But the rules have loopholes, which were highlighted a year earlier when officials from the F.D.A., C.D.C., the Agriculture Department and the Pew Charitable Trusts met at the University of Tennessee. The group heard from Thomas Van Boeckel, an expert in statistical modeling and antibiotic resistance who was then at Princeton.

Dr. Van Boeckel told the group that he could build maps showing changing levels of antibiotic use on farms and compare them with changing levels of resistance.

To do so, he said, he needed data sets by region or, better yet, by farm.

“I was told there was a single data point per year, literally,” he said.

That data point: Around 33 million pounds of medically important antibiotics, a 26 percent increase from 2009, were sold in the United States for farm use. The figure, collected from sales data by the F.D.A., was the sum total of the information they were able to provide him.

Dr. Van Boeckel told the group that without more specific information, he couldn’t do any real measurement.

“They said: Yeah, that’s going to be challenging.”

As the end of August neared, Mikayla Porter had stabilized, but in Washington State, the salmonella caseload continued to grow.

On Aug. 26, Kapowsin agreed to cease operations, in cooperation with the state. The next day, there was a recall of 523,380 pounds of its pork products.

At the same time, the Montana Pork Producers Council wrote to the Washington health agency, saying it was “clear that there is little to no value in conducting on-farm investigations,” and that investigators should focus on slaughterhouses.

Anne Miller, the council’s executive director, said she did not appreciate that the researchers were coming at a time of crisis. “The trick to getting good information is get research before you get to that situation,” she said. “Why hadn’t this been done prior?”

She spoke to pork producers in the state, and some expressed concern about being unfairly blamed for the outbreak, worried that government officials seeking information on their farms could unfairly tarnish their image and business.

Mr. Hofer, of the farm in Conrad, said in a phone interview that he objected strongly to the investigation.

“I was animated about that,” he said. “Let’s say they found something — it probably would have screwed up some other markets we had.”

Mr. Hofer said his farm provided pigs to Kapowsin but did not know if the sales had overlapped with the outbreak. He said it was clear to him that the slaughterhouse was to blame. “There was salmonella all over that plant.”

On Aug. 28, the National Pork Producers Council sent Washington State a follow-up letter concurring with Ms. Miller.

“I know that you do not want any inadvertent negative consequences to farms as a result of this proposed on-farm sampling,” Dr. Wagstrom wrote in the letter.

Ms. Miller and others in the industry said farms could provide voluntary information on antibiotic use, but they have taken a hard line on government access because of fears that individual farms would be singled out for a complex problem with multiple causes.

The position stuns some scientists.

“So let’s not do anything to give anyone a bad reputation, including any bad behavior?” asked Dr. James Johnson, a professor at the University in Minnesota and an expert in resistant infections. “The people who stand to benefit from having everyone remain ignorant are the ones who protest the loudest.”

That September, Dr. Lindquist still hoped his team would get the go-ahead to take samples from the five farms thought to have been possible sources for the outbreak, but it never came.

“I don’t know even to this day why this got stymied,” he said.

He said he did not know that Ms. Miller, the head of the Montana Pork Council, had contacted the farms and been told they would not permit a visit from researchers.

The farms officially declined, through her, to comment for this story.

By Sept. 22, the case load had hit 178 known infections, with 29 people hospitalized, but the outbreak was petering out. The investigation ended, Dr. Lindquist said, “with a whimper.”

“During the outbreak, I heard from restaurants, patients, the slaughterhouse, the U.S.D.A., F.D.A., the Department of Agriculture in Washington and Montana, the health department in Montana and the health department in Washington State,” Dr. Lindquist said. “I did not hear from the farms.”

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