Cats were poisoned, shot with a handgun and killed with blow darts in separate incidents this week.
It’s been a while since we touched on the topic of thinly-veiled cat hatred masquerading as academic rigor in studies blaming cats for killing improbable numbers of birds and small mammals in countries like the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Unfortunately those “studies,” which have little relationship with reality, have serious consequences. In places like New Zealand, it’s the widespread government-sanctioned slaughter of felines and the rise of vigilantism by creepy people who clearly enjoy killing cats.
Now that sort of thing is happening with greater frequency in the US.
In Brooklyn someone poisoned a group of at least seven community cats. A man who cares for the colony of strays found the felines dead under his deck, where they usually sleep. The cats were all bleeding from nose and mouth, and authorities believe someone put rat poison in their food.
Lab tests and necropsy results are pending. St. Vincent Feline Rescue and state Sen. Steve Chan, a former police officer, are offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the identification and arrest of the person or people responsible. Cats from two other nearby colonies have gone missing and authorities believe they may have met the same fate.
The deaths have taken a toll on Albert Vincent Berto, a Brooklyn man who has been caring for and feeding the strays for years.
“ It gave me purpose. It gave me something to get up in the morning for,” he told The Gothamist. “ I’m just bewildered. I’m just, I feel lost. I’m so lost right now.”
Credit: Pexels
Meanwhile a man in West Palm Beach, Fl., has been shooting cats.
A local rescue managed to get footage of the man during his latest attack. The video shows the man riding up to the exterior of a closed flea market at night and taking shots at cats with a hand gun.
A cat named Zoe survived a gunshot wound, but the bullet shattered a front leg, which had to be amputated.
Staff at a local rescue stressed that the flea market shooting isn’t the first of its kind. They believe the same person may be responsible for shooting other cats in the West Palm Beach area.
“This is not an isolated incident from what we know,” Gabby Gluck of Furry Friends told WPBF, a local ABC affiliate. “This is just the incident that we have footage of.”
Furry Friends has announced a $5,000 reward for anyone who can help police identify the man in the video footage. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office is handling the investigation.
Those weren’t the only similar incidents this week. In Tennessee, three people were arrested after killing several cats and severely injuring a kitten with blow darts. In Hawaii, two men face murder and assault charges after allegedly attacking a man and his sister, who were feeding stray cats in Maui. Alfred Kailihiwa, 71, who was well known as a caretaker of local strays, was rushed to the hospital after the attack but died of his injuries a short time later. And in Rochester, NY, a local shelter’s outdoor cat homes were smashed by cat-hating vandals the week prior, and not for the first time.
The Buddies attempt to record audio commentary, but Little Buddy the Cat is mesmerized by White Castle’s sliders.
Big Buddy: Hello and thank you for joining us as we watch one of our favorite movies, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. I’m Big Buddy.
Little Buddy: And I’m the more handsome Buddy.
BB: This one’s a classic stoner comedy, a Cheech and Chong for the 2000s about roommates who get really high one night, venture out in search of White Castle burgers and end up on an adventure. It’s really that simple.
LB: And delicious.
BB: Yes. Now Harold is the straight-laced one and already his co-workers are dumping their unfinished tasks on him as they head out of the office on Friday.
LB: Seriously uncool.
Harold’s work colleagues dump their unfinished reports on Harold.
BB: Indeed. I love this scene where Harold calls Kumar, his roommate, to tell Kumar he will not be home until late and won’t be able to partake in their Friday night ritual. Kumar’s in a job interview for a resident’s position at a hospital and he stops the interview to take the call.
LB: The guy interviewing him can’t believe it. Is this within bounds of human etiquette during job interviews, servant?
BB: It is not. Neither is mentioning getting high later or grabbing a photo of the interviewer’s daughter off his desk and lusting after her, as Kumar is doing right now.
Harold is tongue-tied while in the elevator with the beautiful Maria.
LB: Well it didn’t take much to convince Harold to ditch the work and come home. Now he’s in an elevator with a human female, riding it up to his floor. Why doesn’t he talk to the human female?
BB: He’s scared.
LB: Preposterous! I would be like “Hi, I’m Buddy, I’m a very handsome and meowscular cat.” But only if she was also a cat.
BB: Sure, sure. Okay, so Harold’s home and Kumar is getting out the…
LB: Catnip! Wow! That’s a lot of catnip!
BB: Uh…
LB: That looks like really good catnip, dude!
BB: Sure, yeah. Catnip.
Kumar and Harold enjoy premium catnip.
LB: But why are they putting it in that contraption and…smoking it?
BB: That’s the way humans, uh, enjoy catnip.
LB: I swear, you are the weirdest species. Why can’t you just roll around in it and eat it like I do, like a civilized creature?
BB: Because we are uncivilized, obviously.
LB: You said it. They both look like they’re zombies. Zombies who laugh a lot.
The catnip has taken effect.
BB: That is essentially what they are thanks to the catnip. It has that effect on humans. And look! A White Castle commercial!
LB: Oh my God! Those juicy burgers!
[Harold and Kumar have a similar reaction on screen, mesmerized by the delicious White Castle burgers in the commercial.]
LB: Look at them! They’re perfect. They’re small, juicy, delicious burgers. Perfect for a cat!
[Little Buddy flings himself at the TV and tries to lick the screen.]
BB: Calm down, dude.
LB: I can’t. I need those burgers! Where are they, servant? Where is the nearest White Castle?
BB: In Yonkers.
LB: Let’s go! Get your keys! But first, the catnip.
BB: I’m not going to Yonkers now.
LB: Yes you are. We are. Retrieve the catnip for me, get your keys and put your shoes on.
BB: No.
LB: That is an order, servant!
BB: You’re missing the movie, little dude. See? Harold and Kumar are leaving their apartment to embark upon their adventure.
LB: As are we. Don’t make me make you cooperate.
[20 minutes later after incessant, brutal, maximally annoying screeching.]
BB: Fine! Okay? You win, just stop! Stop, please! Man, I have a headache now. What are you staring at me like that for?
LB: Hoist me up. I’m going to ride on your shoulder.
BB: I can carry you to the car.
LB: That would be undignified, whereas if I ride on your shoulder, there will be little doubt as to who’s in charge.
BB: Ugh. Fine, let’s get this over with.
LB: I can almost taste the burgers already! I want cheese on mine. And bacon. Hold the onions. Oh, and servant? Instead of fries, just get me more burgers. Do you think 17 is enough or should I get 23 just to be safe? Does the website say if they still have those little chicken patty burgers? We have to talk about the sauce, a sauce strategy so to speak, before we get there. That’s important. We really must hurry, my stomach is rumbling. What’d you do with the catnip? Gimme gimme…
The little one was in a bad way, but she’s since recovered and is growing into a strong, healthy cat with a doting human dad.
Maybe there’s something to the idea that people who claim they don’t like cats just haven’t met the right cat.
In this video a man named Sam shares the story of how he rescued and adopted his kitten, Scythe. The gray kitten had been abandoned or somehow separated from her mother at just four weeks old and was in a bad way.
At first Sam thought the little shape on the side of the road was a dark-colored rock and was shocked when it popped up and started moving toward him. It was a tiny kitten, her eyes gummed up and shut, following the sounds of his van’s engine. (External playback on the Youtube video has been disabled by the channel’s owner, but you can see Sam and Scythe in action here.)
Scythe immediately after Sam rescued her from a desert road.
Sam took her inside the van where his air conditioning was blasting and cleaned her up a bit. The next day he took her to the vet, but could tell she was suffering.
“She was just looking up at me, so small and scared,” he said. “I hated feeling so helpless, knowing I couldn’t do anything to make her feel better.”
Despite the hardship she’d suffered, Scythe warmed up to Sam quickly.
“I remember the first time she felt love,” he said of her reaction when he began gently petting her. “It felt like the most healing thing for her was knowing people cared about her.”
Scythe warms to Sam.
He felt her tugging at his heartstrings, but there were two big problems: he’s allergic to cats, and his job requires him to hit the road for days at a time, often parking in places where the van bakes in the sun.
“I wasn’t thinking about keeping her at first. I had some friends saying ‘Oh, we’ll take her.’ But we had so much fun together, I ended up being like, I can’t give this cat away.”
Sam decided he’d compromise and bring Scythe home, where his parents care for her during his work trips. When he returns, the little cat is overjoyed and can’t wait to play with him.
“I already knew from a few days in that our bond was so strong, and we both began to feel it much more as we traveled together,” he said. “I never thought I’d be a cat dad, but now I can’t believe I ever hesitated to keep her.”
How sweet! It reminds me of me and the Budster, except with a lot less cat-slapping-human action and more gratitude. That’s okay, though. I love my feline overlord too. This is further proof that all it takes it one special cat to convert nonbelievers to the feline side.
Is your cat a Six Dinner Sid spending an increasing amount of time with neighbors?
Your neighbors probably aren’t giving your cats flowers or serenading them with Marvin Gaye songs, and hopefully they’re not giving them chocolates, but they may be cat seducers anyway.
The term dates back at least a few years and it describes neighbors who lure pet cats into their homes, ply them with food, even buy them beds and collars, all in an attempt to gain effective “ownership” of the felines in question without having to worry about vet bills or declare to landlords that they have a cat.
Reports of cat seduction are rife with anecdotes about seducers ignoring polite requests from the owners not to feed their cats and even questioning whether the original caretaker is meeting their needs. Some distressed people report their cats are gone for days at a time and rarely return home as the seducers ignore healthy feeding limits and do everything they can to keep the felines in their homes.
Naturally, cat seduction is primarily a problem in the UK. While the culture around feline companions is changing across the Atlantic as people opt for measures like catios and harness training, the majority of British caretakers still believe their little buddies need outdoor time to remain stimulated and happy.
As readers of PITB know, Buddy is an indoor-only cat, and definitely not because he’s frightened of going outside. The problem is, he’s so meowscular, ripped and yuge that neighbors who might spot him crossing a yard at night or padding powerfully down the sidewalk are likely to freak out and call authorities to report a large cat, possibly a jaguar or tiger, is loose in the neighborhood.
So obviously I have to keep him inside not for his safety, but for the safety and sanity of our neighbors. We’re considerate like that here at Casa de Buddy.
A woman named Amy told The Guardian her cat was gone so often, she put a tracker on his collar to find out where he was spending his time. That’s when she realized he was in a neighbor’s house “constantly.” The neighbor, who says she can’t adopt a cat of her own because she travels frequently, was not cooperative when Amy asked her to stop feeding her pal.
“Cats are cats – they have no concept of human boundaries,” Amy told the newspaper. “She’s literally enticing him away.”
A sign warning admirers not to feed Buddy, who has been known to solicit snacks from the balcony by meowing to passersby.
Alison Ward, who also spoke to The Guardian, said her cat Scooby started coming home “reeking of marijuana” and well-fed “but quite deranged.”
Ward figured out Scooby was being enticed into the home of a group of roommates, all men in their 20s, who had renamed the little guy, purchased food bowls for him and even got him a collar.
“They said they thought he was their cat,” she said.
Online resources dedicated to cat seduction warn of telltale signs. If you’ve restricted your cat’s diet on a veterinarian’s instructions, for example, and the cat is not losing weight or even gaining it, that’s a clear sign the little one is a Six Dinner Sid, bouncing between home and at least one other neighbor’s house. Other signs include constantly “lost” collars, inexplicable grooming, disinterest in the cat’s usual food, and returning home with unfamiliar scents attached to them.
On a subreddit for UK users, several people shared anecdotes about cat seduction.
“My mum’s two cats started disappearing for a day or two here and there. She figured they were shacking up at a neighbours house occasionally which didn’t bother her too much,” a user wrote. “Then one day they both just completely disappeared. Months later she found out who it was that had been sheltering them during those missing periods, and they also happened to have moved away right around the time that the cats disappeared.”
Others worried about their affectionate and sociable cats, and there was a general consensus that social media, particularly posts and memes about the “cat distribution system,” can lead to people believing it’s okay “to take any friendly cat home with them because it ‘chose’ them.”
So ripped!
Of course there’s a simple solution: don’t allow your cat to roam outside unattended.
While some argued that people should keep their cats indoors to keep them safe from dangers like getting hit by cars, as well as to prevent them from killing birds, others rejected the idea. Some even blame US cat lovers for normalizing the practice of keeping cats indoors.
“Oh, you don’t agree with the American way of doing things, well you’re just wrong,” one user wrote. “They’ll rant about the dangers of coyotes etc to cats, while refusing to accept that’s not an issue here. Friends in the US were genuinely shocked when I explained that rabies was eliminated here a long time ago.”
Not all pets are created equal, but not all studies are either.
A new study claims we’ve gotten it wrong all these years, that pet cats and dogs aren’t good for young children, while kids who grow up with pet fish, turtles and hamsters learn empathy and develop better mental balance.
The authors of the study claim cats are “the only common pet linked to more mental health problems in children.”
Furthermore, the authors claim, pets like turtles, fish and hamsters are “linked to” positive mental health in children, while data shows dogs have no effect.
To understand what we’re dealing with here, we’ve got to break down “study,” “linked to” and “data” in relation to the report by researchers at the University of Valencia in Spain.
“Study” here means a meta-analysis of data collected by the INMA Project, a collaboration of universities, biomedical institutes and medical conglomerates in Spain. INMA is primarily concerned with researching the impact of environmental pollutants on early childhood development.
The INMA data was not collected specifically for this new study dealing with pets.
Secondly, while INMA did “track” some 1,900 participants from birth through six or seven years old, the “data” itself primarily consists of subjective reports by the parents of the children along with “environmental measurements and clinical tests.”
Credit: isaac mijangos/Pexels
It’s not clear if the original data collection effort had anything to do with the presence of pets in the homes, or if that was just one of many data points gathered in a larger assessment. For example, the INMA questionnaires may have simply asked if the families have pets and what kind of pets they have without any further elaboration or information about whether, or how often, the children interact with the pets. There can be enormous variation in that area alone.
Then there’s “linked to,” a very specific choice of words by the authors. They’re using “linked to” instead of “caused by” because the data they have – if you can appropriately use the word data to describe the results of self-reported questionnaires based on subjective feelings – cannot distinguish between correlation and causation and really says nothing at all except certain animals were present in the homes of young children.
In all, 8.7 percent of the children lived in homes with a cat, which works out to a sample size of 165, all from Spain.
So we’re already on really shaky ground here. I don’t think there’s any real scientific value in information that comes from questionnaires distributed to parents, and certainly not when it comes to topics like mental health and behavioral problems.
The definition of bad behavior varies widely between parents in different families and even mothers and fathers in the same family. Was there a baseline? Did the participants receive instructions on how to describe their assessments so they’d at least roughly resemble uniform reports? Were there other commonalities among the children who lived in homes with cats? We don’t know the answers to these questions.
Credit: David Brown/Pexels
What we do know is that, putting all other concerns aside, the report claims that 165 children live in homes that have cats, or had cats at one time, and some of them have varying degrees of behavioral problems.
That the conclusions are vaporous becomes even more obvious when the authors go on to speculate, with no data, why children who live with, or previously lived with, cats are allegedly more likely to suffer behavioral issues.
They repeat common misconceptions about felines being aloof, claiming the nature of cats “limits emotional bonding” compared to other companion animals.
“Having fish, turtles and hamsters on a constant basis does seem to protect children from mental health problems,” the authors concluded, although again the reasons are pure guesswork.
I’m not sure how anyone can say feline behavior “limits emotional bonding,” then in the very next paragraph claim fish and turtles, animals with which there can be very little or no real interaction, “protect” kids from mental health issues. Not even “help protect,” but full on “protect.”
The authors also point to a common boogeyman, toxoplasma gondii. The parasite can be transmitted to humans dozens and potentially hundreds of different ways, including contaminated water and undercooked meat, but cats are blamed because they’re easily infected by it and can pass it to humans.
To be clear, toxoplasma gondii does not figure anywhere in the data and the researchers did not test the children for infection.
Credit: Cristian Loayza/Pexels
But the bit that sets off the most alarm bells in my mind is the claim that dogs have no impact on the mental health of children.
That should have immediately prompted the research team to go back and figure out where their analysis went funky.
There are so many studies linking cats and dogs, and especially dogs, to tangible improvements in mental health and mood that anyone who claims the opposite has a lot of work ahead of them to demonstrate why their findings are accurate and the abundance of studies that concluded the opposite are flawed. (Dogs are better studied than cats because they’re easier to control, so the abundance of studies on dogs shouldn’t be confused for a stronger impact on human health.)
Whenever I write something like this, I always worry I’m contributing to the anti-science positions of some people who view the entirety of science with suspicion.
Science is nothing more than a formal process for learning about the natural world. It doesn’t have an agenda. It’s important for us to separate our qualms with the methods and standards of particular studies from the idea of science itself. A study may be flawed, but the scientific method remains the best, most time-honored way to expand human knowledge we’ve managed to come up with.
There are also major differences between “soft” sciences like psychology and hard sciences like physics and chemistry. The latter are primarily black and white, true or untrue, while the former deal with uncountable shades in between. It’s hard to quantify human feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
I’m sure the researchers involved in this project mean well, but unless we begin to see other studies placing fish, turtles and hamsters atop the pet hierarchy for their impact on mental health, I think we can file it as an anomaly and move on.
Pain In The Bud 