news – Pain In The Bud

Caturday Links And Open Comments: That Study About Cats = Happiness, The ‘Carrie’ Remake, And More!

Open comments, open links! Plus, we talk about cat-friendly hotels, the recent report on contaminants in cat food, Mike Flanagan’s latest Stephen King adaptation, and more!

We’re gonna try something new this week and dedicate “Caturday” to links, off-topic discussions and anything you’d like to post about.

It’s a good opportunity to touch on stories that we didn’t get a chance to go in-depth on, talk about and recommend entertainment, and follow up on stories in the news.

If there’s anything we’ve missed, something you’d like to point out, or you just want to write about what a dashing and meowgnificent feline Bud is, you can do that here too. (And don’t forget to talk about your own cats!)

The Clean Label report on contaminants in cat food

Five cans of cat food displayed on a white countertop, each with a different texture and color of the food inside. — Mmmm, slop!

Thanks to Candi A. for keeping us in the loop and posting the link to her friend’s assessment of the concerning findings about heavy metals, pesticides and other nasty stuff found in cat food.

In case you missed it, here’s the link Candi shared.

I have only been able to read it once and have not yet read the full report, so I’m going to refrain from adding anything yet. I need to see all the details and whether the brands I usually buy are included. I expect they will be, as Clean Label chose samples from the 100 most popular cat food brands sold in the US. (For our friends outside the states, there could be useful information as well. The big brands are corporate conglomerates with international reach, so brands sold in the US are likely sold under different names or slightly different packaging elsewhere.)

Of course I’m not an expert on feline nutrition either, so we should all decide what’s best for our cats based on what we know about them and the information we gain from reports and analysis.

I hope to revisit this in an in-depth post, hopefully with some input from veterinarians and experts on feline health.

Contractor work and staying at a pet friendly hotel

I won’t be able to use my bathroom overnight while a contractor puts in new floors, sink, etc., and my friend who feeds Bud while I’m away will have me, but not him. (I wonder why? It couldn’t have anything to do with him practicing some light mauling on her at least three times, would it?)

There’s also no way I’m gonna leave him here with an unfamiliar person, work noise and the uncertainty of not having me there to show him it’s all okay.

A cat sitting on a bed in a modern hotel room with wooden walls and a large window showing the outside view.

So it looks like I’m gonna stay at a pet-friendly hotel that I have verified as specifically cat-friendly as well. I’m going to get a disposable litter box, bring his bowls and some food, and I think he’ll be okay as long as he’s with me and I don’t leave him alone in an unfamiliar place. I’ll pick up dinner or order delivery, and I think we should be good.

But since there are plenty of cat experts here (that’s YOU!), including those of you who have dealt with this situation, I figured it’s a good idea to ask if there’s anything I haven’t considered or if you have advice for helping things go smoothly.

I think we have a good secure attachment thing going on. The earthquake about 18 months ago verified that — we woke up to the building shaking, Bud was sleeping on me, and he popped up his head to look at me like “Are we good here, Big Bud, or should I start running around screaming?”

I was actually proud of him for that, and for taking my word for it that everything was fine. Once he got reassurance from me, he relaxed and went back to sleep.

So I think that as long as I’m there with him, my fearless tiger companion will be okay.

Cats = happiness?

So, about that study: a research team looked at happiness indicators in 93 countries, as well as rates of cat ownership, toxoplasma gondii infection rates and other factors.

A happy cat sticking out its tongue with closed eyes, sitting against a blue background.

They found that having a cat or cats is linked to higher self-reported satisfaction with life.

It’s pretty wide-ranging, and the researchers themselves caution against drawing any hard conclusions from the data. However, they did note a few interesting points, including:

Toxoplasma gondii infection is higher in countries with fewer cats. This tracks with earlier studies that show even though t. gondii is heavily associated with cats in the popular imagination, felines are actually not the primary transmission vector. Other factors, like rodent infestations, as well as the quality of waste and sanitary infrastructure, are much more closely related to exposure and infection in people
The total number of estimated cats in a country is not associated with higher happiness levels, but the number of “owned” cats is. In other words, the link between cats and happiness seems to hinge on our personal relationships with cats, and not merely their presence. Countries overrun by strays, for example, do not have the same correlation
Speaking of correlation, that’s as far as this goes. The researchers note the data they have cannot prove causality. In other words, countries that have higher levels of cat adoption and ownership may be wealthier in general, and wealth — at least enough to free people from true poverty — is correlated with happiness. It could be that people who have more money are more likely to spend disposable income on little buddies. It does not mean you have to be wealthy by societal definitions, and it helps to remember how fortunate most of us in the first world are compared to the true poverty of the “global south”

Overall, the study’s authors conclude we need follow-up research to firmly establish a potential causal link between felines and greater satisfacfion in life.

A woman in a striped robe holding a glass of red wine, looking confidently at the camera. — Telegraph columnist Hannah Betts

If you’re skeptical of a causal link between cats and happiness, here’s a take from a Telegraph columnist who admittedly loves the slobbering subservience of dogs and detests the fact that feline affection must be earned. In fact, she questions whether feline affection actually exists.

Fair warning, she has an uncharitable view of our beloved house tigers and retrograde views on what their behaviors mean, but sometimes it’s helpful to understand why certain people don’t like our perfect little angels who can absolutely do no wrong. And yes, that’s sarcasm. I love Bud in spite of the fact that he can be a jerk at times, and maybe even a bit because of it, but it would be madness to claim cats don’t feel affection toward their bonded humans.

Influencers

Speaking of Jenner-Kardashians, I’m not sure if I missed this at the time or decided if it wasn’t worth getting upset over, but while I was just searching for Betts’ column to add the link, I found this story from seven months ago about widespread disgust with Khloe Kardashian for having her cats declawed.

A person dressed in a gray cat costume with cat ears and whiskers, holding a gray cat in her arms.

That the Kardashians are a family concerned with little else besides fame and money is not news, but I am planning on posting about the effect of celebrities and influencers on pet trends in the near future, and whether it’s declawing, purchasing “exotic” wildlife like monkeys as pets or keeping entire menageries of neglected, miserable animals, like it or not there are a lot of people who think it’s okay to do things because the walking examples of botched plastic surgery they idolize have made the behavior popular.

Animals are the ones who suffer, and groups dedicated to their welfare fight uphill battles trying to correct misinformation/combat harmful trends spread by influencers. There’s gotta be a better way, including holding social media platforms accountable when they elect to ignore animal welfare concerns. A video does not have to involve direct violence inflicted on an animal for it to qualify as animal abuse, and it’s crucial people understand that.

One disturbing example is a Youtube video uploaded by a young woman who adopted an adorable baby macaque, then proceeded to mentally torture the poor animal. One video involved her repeatedly offering a bottle of milk to the baby only to yank it away at the last second, laughing as if her actions were pure comedic genius. The baby became so traumatized, she stopped eating. That IS animal abuse, even if some minimally-trained, ignorant moderator employed by Youtube does not agree. Social media operators are not the ultimate arbiters of morality, animal welfare, criminality, political speech or anything else, even when they’ve appointed themselves to those roles.

These are the same people who invite teenagers and pre-teens onto their platforms, employ psychologists to help them keep the kids hooked and doomscrolling all day, provide them with filters that do little besides undermine their self confidence, provide platforms that are practically custom-made to enable anonymous bullying, then absolve themselves of responsibility when the inevitable happens. They are the last people we should trust with deciding what is acceptable or moral.

Mike Flanagan’s ‘Carrie’

A young woman with long dark hair and dirt smudges on her face is aiming a bow and arrow with a determined expression. — Amber Midthunder, a Native American actress, played a Comanche healer named Naru who wants to follow in her brother’s footsteps as a hunter in 2022’s “Prey.”

Which finally brings us to the brand new adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, streaming now on Amazon.

I’m only a few episodes in so I can’t offer any major conclusions, but so far it seems to be everything we’ve come to expect from a Flanagan project — thoughtful, respectful of the source material while also giving it a modern makeover, and operating on a strong foundation of writing and acting.

It has a lot to say about bullying and the modern technologies that turbo charge the cruelty kids are capable of. Adults are hopelessly outgunned on the tech front, which makes foundational parenting more crucial than ever.

I’m especially happy to see Amber Midthunder in a major role after her exceptional performance in 2022’s Prey, and I’m really hoping we’ll see more of Cassandra Naud, who showed up briefly in one scene so far with a hint of more to come.

A woman smiling with a bruise on her left cheek, set against a purple background. — Cassandra Naud

Naud was awesome as the legitimately terrifying antagonist in Influencer and its sequel, Influencers, and she’s unmistakable thanks to the birthmark that dominates the right side of her face. She’s a fantastic actress and astonishingly beautiful, and in interviews she talks about her childhood decision not to have the birthmark removed because of potential complications. She came to see it as an advantage because it renders her unforgettable, but I think her work speaks itself these days.

Carrie was released this week, with all eight episodes available to stream at your pace. Frequent Flanagan collaborators Samantha Sloyan, Michael Trucco, Rahul Kohli, and Ruth Codd have returned, while Flanagan’s next project is an Exorcist sequel due early next year.

Thoughts? Questions? Links? Stories about your cats? Flattering notes about what a dapper furred fellow the Budster is? Leave ’em in the comments!

He Got Virginia’s Harshest-Ever Animal Abuse Penalty. It’s NOT Enough

Some people should not be allowed back into society, for the protection of people and animals.

Rodney Travis Jr. will spend the next 15 years in prison.

The 27-year-old Virginia man has received the harshest animal abuse penalty in his state’s history for what prosecutors called “acts of unspeakable evil”: Travis “adopted” dozens of cats from shelters, then checked into hotel rooms and tortured them for an online audience, who paid him for his acts of savagery.

I’m not going to get into exactly what he did. I’ve read about similar cases and I’m still haunted by the horrific things people do to cats for the sick bastards who get some sort of grotesque thrill from the suffering of animals.

What I will say is that 15 years is not enough.

This man needs to be permanently removed from society. I don’t believe the death penalty is consistent with a general respect for life, and it would be the easy way out.

Travis should sit in a prison cell for the rest of his life and think about what he did to animals, innocent creatures who feel pain just as much as we do.

Collage of various cats in different poses and settings, showcasing their distinct features and expressions. — Some of Travis’ victims.

He should remain segregated from human society for the rest of his life, because a person who is capable of planning such acts of barbarity, who used multiple identities to fool shelters and rescues, who taunted suspicious rescuers and inflicted so much pain and suffering, is emphatically not a person who can be released back into society.

Travis was caught thanks to the efforts of an entire network of animal lovers who helped track him down, and by a concerned hotel employee, who informed police when Travis checked into a hotel at 2 a.m. and departed about seven hours later, leaving blood and cat fur behind.

In addition to brutally torturing cats, Travis admitted to making $400,000 by posing as a good guy, uploading images of the injured cats online, and accepting donations he said were for veterinary care. He also claimed some of the cats had been diagnosed with cancer, opening Instagram accounts for each cat and relying on the sympathy of well-intentioned animal lovers.

In addition to proving how intentional and calculating Travis was in his crimes, this should be a reminder to everyone that our charitable dollars are best spent on reputable organizations that are registered as non-profits and have Form 990s filed with the IRS in good standing, with the documentation available on public sites like GuideStar. Too many bad actors, including people who operate rage-bait sites that post animal abuse cases and solicit money for things like running petitions, vacuum up cash from people they deceive.

Do not let him out

Statistics on recidivism, particularly for the kind of crimes Travis committed, do not bode well for anyone unlucky to encounter Travis when he is released – human or animal.

Animal life has intrinsic value, and that’s reason enough to keep Travis imprisoned, but we also know people who harm animals are very likely to move on to human victims as well. The evidence is overwhelming.

People who harm animals are five times as likely to harm humans compared to non-violent criminals. Forty three percent of school shooters had animal abuse incidents in their past. School shooters in Uvalde, Parkland and Buffalo, the authors of some of the worst school massacres in American history, all had records of animal abuse and abuse involving cats specifically.

Of those school shooters with histories of killing and torturing animals, some 90 percent committed “up close and personal” mutilation, bludgeoning, burning or strangling of their non-human victims.

Psychological studies of animal abusers show faulty brain wiring that results in a lack of empathy, extreme callousness, histories of anti-social behavior and lack of impulse control.

Anyone who tortures or kills beautiful, innocent animals should face the same punishments society inflicts on people who torture or kill humans. Credit: Mayara Caroline Mombelli/Pexels

These are not people we should be allowing back into society, no matter how many misguided people argue that their victims are “just” cats, dogs and other animals. Every sign points to recidivism, yet somehow we act as if it’s a ludicrous idea to sentence people to long prison terms for animal abuse crimes.

Equally important is the fact that our politicians, who never met a special interest they wouldn’t take money from, have utterly failed to meaningfully update animal abuse laws or make penalties commensurate with the brutality of the crimes in question.

We accept endemic corruption, naked self-interest and the destruction of our country because we think politician A or B is some crucial vote in ultimately meaningless culture war nonsense, then act as if we’ve been given mana from heaven when one or two deign to listen to the handful of overworked, under-funded animal welfare organizations with vague promises that maybe, at some nebulous time in the future, they might allow a committee hearing on an animal abuse problem that has existed for decades.

That needs to stop. Our “public servants” need to be held accountable at the polls for their inaction.

Travis tortured 26 cats that we know of. Only four survived. He posted the videos to Youtube, Instagram and TikTok, platforms that collectively have an abysmal record of responding to animal abuse reports and seem to have a policy of doing absolutely nothing until law enforcement or an animal rights charity with national reach comes calling.

We, and most especially the animals, deserve better than this.

25 Years Later, The 9/11 Attacks Still Feel Surreal

I saw the survivors disembark the train, dead-eyed and covered in dust and debris.

It was a few minutes before 9 am and my roommate was shaking me awake. I wasn’t due in the office until 3 pm, but my roommate told me the public editor had called, said there was a terrorist attack, and asked me to come in ASAP.

When you get a call like that from the public editor instead of the city desk or someone else in the direct news loop, you know the newsroom is in chaos. And it was, worse than I’d ever seen it in my short time there.

At the time I was a glorified newspaper intern and as the low man on the totem pole, I got the crappiest assignment. My editors sent me to wait until the subways and trains started up again, so I spent almost the entire day stuck on a platform with a group of people, listening to their panicked chatter and participating in it myself.

I will never forget when a guy came running onto the platform out of breath and shouted “They hit the Pentagon! They hit the f—ing Pentagon!”

There was a low murmur of disbelief among the people on the platform, with one or two loudly expressing skepticism. The Pentagon? Surely that cannot be possible.

Reality was smashing against the aura of invincibility Americans had enjoyed for half a century. We were not prepared for it.

Aerial view of the Pentagon Building on Sept. 11, 2001. Credit: US Navy

Smartphones wouldn’t be invented for another seven years and the phone lines were overloaded that day, so all you’d get when trying to dial was a busy signal on repeat. Combined with the utter confusion at ground zero and news anchors who could do little more than speculate for most of the day, rumors were flying and we didn’t know what to believe.

I remember someone else announcing that there were hundreds of passenger jets still in the air, the government did not know how many had been compromised, and we should prepare ourselves for waves of hijacked planes smashing into skyscrapers, bridges and, God forbid, nuclear reactors like Indian Point just north of the city.

At the same time, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani gave a sober assessment that potentially “tens of thousands” of people could have been killed, because no one knew how many people made it out of the towers.

Another indelible memory: an enraged woman pacing the length of the platform, screaming that “this bulls–t” had interfered with her plans for the day. She was shaking with anger, grumbling to herself with occasionally louder outbursts, and apparently she believed the heliocentric model had been replaced with one that placed her in the center of our solar system and the universe itself.

Finally the first train arrived in the afternoon, and a crush of zombies stumbled out covered in the pulverized concrete, silica, steel dust, asbestos and human remains that blasted through Manhattan in two powerful kinetic waves as the towers collapsed.

They were dead-eyed and in shock as they clutched their briefcases, Blackberries and messenger bags.

I spoke to one man whose office had a direct view of the towers. He sobbed as he told me his story. His building was evacuated shortly before the first tower collapsed and he’d been caught in the blast, caking his suit, his face and hair in the toxic mix of debris.

Others were almost mute with shock or a mix of relief and survivor’s guilt. Most were commuters who worked within a block or two of the World Trade Center. Others had appointments that day, including a woman who survived because she was a few minutes late to a meeting on one of the upper floors.

Another woman shook with emotion and horror as she described watching desperate people jumping out of the skyscrapers to escape the flames inside.

I gathered as many quotes and details as I could, returned to the newsroom and made my small contribution to the events of the day. I wasn’t a first responder, I wasn’t digging people out of the rubble, I didn’t cook meals for the firefighters or guide bewildered survivors away from ground zero.

I told the stories of a handful of people who directly lived through the attack, and I hope I told them well.

Gen Z Kids Think The Cat In The Hat Is Stalking Them In Real Life

Viral videos show figures dressed as the Dr. Seuss character terrorizing unsuspecting people in mostly quiet suburban settings.

There’s a new freak-out among the terminally online, mostly relegated to Gen Z and people who spend significant amounts of time on TikTok – they think a Dr. Seuss character made flesh is popping up in the suburbs of the UK and Ireland to stalk and scare the pants off people.

Videos featuring the iconic children’s story character have gone viral on the platform in the last week or two, each of them showing similar scenes: it’s night, usually in some safe-looking suburb, and a person wearing a full size Cat In The Hat costume pops out of the bushes or from behind a car to terrify unsuspecting passersby.

Others show the costumed creeps simply standing in driveways or in the middle of the street and silently observing people in their homes.

The alleged perps favor a more sinister look than the traditionally friendly-looking creation of Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel in 1957. These cats in hats wear a disturbing grin or a sneer, and some videos depict the costumed weirdos leaping onto cars with feline athleticism or stalking the people they encounter.

While the footage looks real enough that it initially fooled UK media as well as kids, police in several jurisdictions have looked into the reports and concluded the videos are AI generated, likely with Chinese-made tools like Wan and Skywork.

OpenAI, one of the leading AI companies in the US, shut down its Sora AI video generator earlier this year amid widespread criticism and abuse of the tool.

While Sora had guardrails preventing users from generating certain kinds of content or violating intellectual property (you could not, for example, generate a video of a laughing Mickey Mouse gunning down a crowd of people with an Uzi), many of the Chinese-made video generation tools do not place restrictions on videos.

Some western companies have tried to compete in that space, including TripleTaco, which runs quite possibly the creepiest ads touting “AI that never says ‘no.'”

In any case, the panic over the Cat In The Hat mirrors a similar freak-out in India earlier this year when social media was flooded with realistic videos showing tigers and leopards mauling people having their morning tea outdoors or snatching them from moving trains.

The Cat In The Hat videos haven’t really caught on in the US, possibly because it stretches credulity to believe trigger-happy ‘Mericans wouldn’t just shoot weirdos stalking through our neighborhoods.

Regardless, it’s a good reminder to take everything with a grain of salt, especially anything you see on social media.

Pet Cats Lead To ‘More Mental Health Problems’ For Kids, Authors Of New Study Claim

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.”

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.

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.

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.