Tux the cat was found frightened, dehydrated and “covered in fleas.” It’s still not clear precisely what happened to her.
For a nightmarish 34-hour stretch, Palash Pandey thought he’d never see his cat again.
On Saturday afternoon the Austin man took a Lyft to an animal hospital in his city, got out of the car and was walking around to get his cat, Tux, out from under the passenger seat on the other side when the driver pulled away. Pandey ran after the car, yelling for the driver to stop.
“I like ran behind him, screaming like ‘wait, wait, wait,’ I banged on his windows hoping that he would notice me and just stop. But instead of that he just like, peeled off, he drove away,” Pandey told Austin NBC affiliate KXAN. “I don’t know how else you would perceive somebody who you just dropped off running behind you and banging on your windows and doors. I don’t know if there’s a charitable explanation for that.”
He sent a series of frantic messages to the driver through the Lyft app, offering to pay him to return Tux and begging for information, but didn’t hear back until several hours later when the driver texted: “she isn’t there, sorry”.
You're right. The initial response was awful. Since then, we've done a lot behind the scenes, but I know we haven't communicated enough. We're very focused on this and will keep the community up to date.
The driver said he didn’t see the carrier or the cat in the car, and said several riders he’d picked up later didn’t mention a cat either.
After Lyft’s live customer service wasn’t helpful, Pandey turned to Twitter and Reddit, explaining the situation in detail, providing information and asking people in Austin to share a missing cat flyer with Tux’s photo and information.
In the meantime Lyft’s CEO got involved, apologized for the poor initial response and devoted significant resources to the incident. The company sent alerts to all of its drivers and riders in the Austin area, notified police and dispatched its own staff to help find Tux.
Canvassing the area around the animal hospital and following tips from the public, Lyft’s team eventually tracked her down at about 1:30 a.m. Monday morning, spotting her in the rear of an office building a little more than a mile from the animal hospital. Tux was frightened and climbed a flight of stairs when the Lyft staffers approached, but they were able to wrap her in a t-shirt and get her into a carrier they’d brought with them.
Pandey was overjoyed to be reunited with Tux and thanked everyone who helped looked for her, but in an update said she was scared, “covered in fleas and dehydrated.” He said she was eating, which was a good sign, and he planned to bring her to the veterinarian on Monday.
However, the fact that Tux was found alone without her carrier, dirty and wandering near a busy road indicates someone intentionally took her, then dumped her like a hot potato after realizing thousands of people, the police and a corporate response team were looking for her.
The Lyft driver isn’t suspected of anything but perhaps poor customer service. He told his employers that he didn’t stop when Pandey began banging on his windows because he didn’t realize there was a cat in the car and thought Pandey had become belligerent for some reason.
Pandey believes the person who took Tux will be caught.
“F—ing coward saw what was coming for him and left her on the side of the road,” Pandey wrote on Reddit in an update. “There’s plenty of cameras around, he’s not going to get away with this.”
Giles the cat is recognized for the most ridiculous pet insurance claim of the year, while federal prosecutors use the new Big Cat Public Safety Act to go after alleged illegal wildlife traders.
A Texas man and his wife were arrested after allegedly selling a margay kitten and trying to sell a jaguar cub in a second deal, federal authorities said.
Rafael Gutierrez-Galvan, 29, and his wife Deyanira Garza, 28, whom prosecutors describe as “legal permanent residents,” sold the margay cub for $7,500 to an undercover agent, meeting him in the parking lot of a Texas sporting goods store on Aug. 24. On Sept. 26 Gutierrez-Galvan made plans to sell the jaguar cub to the same man, and agents arrested him and his wife en route to the meet-up, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.
Gutierrez-Galvan and Garza face federal charges under the new Big Cat Public Safety Act, which was signed into law in 2022. They can be sentenced to a maximum of five years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine if convicted.
Prosecutors did not say how the couple obtained the two wild cats or if they were working with anyone else.
The margay kitten, left, and jaguar cub recovered from a Texas couple who are accused of illegally selling them. Credit: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Texas
Jaguars are endangered and margays are threatened. Both are native to South America, although jaguars once ranged as far north as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Margays (leopardus wiedii) are small arboreal wildcats who thrive in the deep jungle, away from human interference. They’re typically smaller than domestic cats, with an average weight of six pounds, and are among the most sure-footed of all felid species.
Jaguars (panthera onca) are true big cats and the only extant big cat species native to the Americas. They’re under enormous pressure from Chinese poachers, who capture and kill them to use their body parts in traditional Chinese “medicine,” as well as local illegal wildlife poachers. Both jaguars and margays, as well as other cat species native to South America, are also endangered by habitat loss.
Header image of a margay in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, credit: Anderson Cristiano Hendgen via Wikimedia Commons
New York cat wins Hambone Award for most ridiculous pet insurance claim
The Hambone Award was started in 2009 when a family filed a pet insurance claim for their dog who got trapped in a refrigerator, suffered mild hypothermia and tried to make the best of the situation by eating an entire ham.
That inspired the Veterinary Pet Insurance Company, a subsidiary of Nationwide, to create the award and make it an annual event. The first recipient of the “honor” was Lulu, an English bulldog who ate 15 baby pacifiers, a bottle cap and part of a basketball, necessitating a trip to the veterinarian and an insurance claim.
This year the award went to Giles, a handsome black kitty who has a habit of hiding in a sofa bed and getting stuck there when one of his humans folds the bed back into the couch. His humans, Kaitlyn and Reid, always check to make sure Giles isn’t in the space beneath the bed when they fold it up, and had warned Reid’s visiting parents that the playful cat likes to hang out there, but they forgot to check and ended up smooshing Giles.
Giles poses proudly next to his Hambone Award. Credit: Nationwide
Luckily the little guy didn’t break any bones, but he did take a hit to the face pretty hard and needed stitches.
“I [had] no idea what’s going on—we got him in his carrier and ran him up the street,” Reid said. “Luckily, we have a wonderful vet hospital just around the corner from us, so we were able to take him right there. Fortunately, it wasn’t too bad. He did need some stitches … but he was the model patient, as he always is.”
Giles’ competition this year was mostly dogs, but the other feline finalist was Miko, a New Orleans cat who spotted a pair of doves nesting in a hanging plant just outside on the patio. Miko executed a Jordanesque leap and swatted at the doves, but as the birds fled one of them gave the bold cat a parting gift, pecking Miko in the face. Thankfully he wasn’t seriously injured.
For his exploits, Giles received a trophy and his humans will receive a gift card and a donation in their name to the pet charity of their choice.
A new story claims a Japanese immunologist has “created a miracle” with his treatment for cats.
The cat world is abuzz with a new report that hails the efforts of a Japanese scientist, claiming he’s “created a miracle” that can extend cat lifespans to 30 years.
The story on Bored Panda claims the drug has “astounding potential,” boasting “a level of efficacy that has exceeded all expectations and has the potential to revolutionize feline healthcare.” According to Bored Panda, we’re headed toward a gleaming future and “soon we will be able to grow old with our beloved pets and be grey together.”
“Cat Lovers Rejoice As New Medicine Will Extend Cat Lifespan To 30 Years,” the headline declares.
Okay, let’s dial it back a bit and break down what’s true and what’s not.
First and most obvious, the story oversells the treatment and if you’re counting on your cat living to 30, you’ll need to readjust your expectations.
That’s unfortunate because there’s a good story at the heart of this, and there may be real benefits to cats eventually.
Toru Miyazaki is an immunologist who discovered a protein that helps the kidneys flush out toxins. Eight years ago, he realized the protein — apoptosis inhibitor of macrophage, or AIM — doesn’t always work properly in felines, which is why so many cats are susceptible to kidney failure, especially when they reach age 10 or so.
The AIM protein, Miyazaki explained, launches from immunoglobin antibodies “like a jet fighter from an aircraft carrier,” removing waste and debris from the kidneys.
But in cats, sometimes the AIM protein — the fighter jet — is “too tightly bound” to the antibodies, meaning it doesn’t “launch” in the first place and can’t do its job of flushing out toxins.
Miyazaki was continuing his research into feline kidney failure while he was a professor at the University of Tokyo, but funding dried up in 2020 as the lion’s share of research money in immunology was directed toward addressing SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19.
When a Japanese newspaper published a story about Miyazaki having to abandon his research, donations came pouring in. Cat lovers across Japan donated an astounding $2.3 million, prompting Miyazaki to leave his post at the University of Tokyo and found a non-profit dedicated to tackling kidney disease in cats.
As of September 2023, Miyazaki’s organization is running clinical trials on his AIM therapy, and it has partnered with a Japanese pet food company on new food that is supposed to reduce the possibility of kidney disease.
There’s not enough data yet to make any definitive statement, and even if the data existed, the AIM therapy is not a cure: Miyazaki says if all goes well, kittens who are given AIM therapy injections from an early age, and eat a diet with the AIM-enhancing formula, could have their risk of developing kidney problems reduced and potentially live longer lives.
That’s a far cry from Bored Panda’s image of cat lovers dancing in the streets, joyous with news of a miracle pill that will allow Socks and Oreo to run around like kittens for three decades.
While it’s natural to be excited about the potential of AIM therapy, calling it a “miracle” that will “revolutionize feline healthcare” and allow us to grow old with our cats can give people false hope.
Even if the trials go perfectly and AIM therapy breezes through the approval process, the soonest the injection therapy could be available in Japan is 2025. The US, UK and Europe have their own regulatory agencies and clinical data requirements. That means it might help kittens born years from now, but it won’t double the lifespans of the cats we love now.
It’s also worth mentioning that not everyone is thrilled to hear Miyazaki has partnered with a pet food company that sells ultra-processed kibble. Over at bark&whiskers, Karen Shaw Becker — a veterinarian who specializes in preventative care — points out that ultra-processed dry food is thought to be a major contributor to the feline kidney problems, with the ingredients, rendering methods and lack of moisture (water) all posing health hazards to cats. Cats have low thirst drives and get most of their hydration from meat.
While Becker writes she’s watching the trials closely, like other veterinarians, she recommends cat lovers continue to feed their furry friends wet and/or fresh food with high quality ingredients, no fillers and lots of protein.
TikTok is a major security risk to the country, a danger to the people using it, and a platform that encourages animal abuse. It’s time for the US government to take action.
The cat is wide-eyed with terror, his mouth moving in protest as his human picks him up.
“Spock already hates me so why not torture him more?” reads the caption on the TikTok video as the woman spins him around to Taylor Swift’s saccharine ballad August.
In another, a man in his 40s stares into the camera, snatches his cat up in one quick motion and then cackles gleefully as he spins his cat, who squirms in his grip and meows plaintively. One woman admitted her cat “hated every second of this” as she twirled her to the Swift track.
Cats subjected to the Taylor Swift “cat spinning” trend on TikTok.
There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of these videos on TikTok, the Chinese government-controlled social media platform. Inexplicable as the trend is, it’s far from the first time people have abused and terrorized their cats for “lulz” and the approval of strangers on TikTok.
Previous trends had TikTok users picking their cats up upside-down and one-handed, then “answering” them as if they were telephones while reciting a line from the movie The Princess Diaries.
The 2021 holiday season saw the invention and propagation of a “hack” by someone who claimed that if you chase your cat around and brandish your Christmas tree like a weapon so the cat thinks you’re going to hit her with it, “it’ll be too scared to f**k with” the tree. Classy. The video of the woman terrorizing her cat piled up more than 25 million views and spawned innumerable imitators.
Then there was the “influencer” who smacked his cat around and uploaded footage of it, not by accident but because he says that’s how people properly “discipline” their pets. There are one-off abuse videos, and then there are trends that just won’t die, like the “prank” in which people frighten their cats half to death by placing cucumbers behind them while they’re eating.
TikTok is legitimately evil
More than any other platform, aided by an insidious algorithm that expertly keeps its users glued to the screen and scrolling, TikTok is a vehicle for social contagion, elevating the crass, the outrageous and the destructive as it lavishes clicks and revenue on people who behave abominably.
Just look at the case of Chloe Mitchell, the popular TikToker who nearly destroyed a non-profit animal shelter single-handedly when she threw a tantrum earlier this year. Mitchell enjoyed in excess of 50 million views on videos in which she invented wild stories painting the shelter as some sort of criminal operation run by “scammers” who, she claimed, enrich themselves by adopting out animals.
It would almost be funny for its absurdity if not for the fact that the shelter’s operations were crippled for two months as Mitchell’s followers called in death threats, review-bombed the shelter to ruin its reputation online and made its volunteers fear for their safety.
A major security risk
It baffles me why anyone would continue to use TikTok — or sign up to use it in the first place — when its operators admitted under oath that sensitive data belonging to American users is routinely accessed by the company’s headquarters in Beijing, despite many public assurances that the data was compartmentalized and available only to software engineers in TikTok’s US offices.
And if that isn’t reason enough for some people to uninstall the app, consider the fact that TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, added code that makes the app an extremely malicious piece of spyware software capable of capturing every tap or keystroke by its users.
🔥 New Post: Announcing InAppBrowser – see what JavaScript commands get injected through an in-app browser
For those who aren’t well-versed in technical matters, this means having the app on any of your devices is tantamount to handing China’s government the keys to all of your online accounts, including banking and credit, as well as all your text, email and in-app correspondence. ByteDance can read the private texts you exchange with family members, see precisely what you’re doing on sites like Facebook and Youtube, and help itself to users’ most private information.
Some people might not understand the scope of the security risk because they may not know that every organization in China is subservient and ultimately accountable to the Chinese government and the communist party. The communist government can access data from Chinese companies at any time, force them to hand over their proprietary technology and research, and compel them to cooperate with cyber attacks on US citizens and infrastructure. In fact, it’s written into Chinese law. The government has total control over every Chinese corporation and, under President Xi Jinping, has tightened its grip on every layer of society.
It’s not difficult to imagine the Chinese government using the wealth of data collected by TikTok to compromise the devices of people who work on critical US infrastructure, like the power grid or defense systems, and use that access to retrieve their employee login credentials, providing access to the systems they work on.
Imagine cyberattacks that shut down power plants in Texas and across the southern US during severe weather like the deadly heat dome the country experienced this summer. Or Chinese government-sponsored hackers crippling US banking systems, leaving Americans without access to currency for days or weeks.
Then there are the “smaller” risks that are devastating on an individual level: A hacker compromises your devices and locks photographs of deceased loved ones that are priceless to you, or threatens to blast details about your private life to everyone in your contact list if you don’t pay them $10,000 in cryptocurrency.
All that to use an app that promotes videos of people abusing their pets? No thanks. I hope the US government comes to its senses and bans the app from the US entirely before something catastrophic happens because if they don’t, it’s not a matter of if something disastrous will happen, but when.
A new paper claims cats are healthier when fed human diets, but the “study” is activism masquerading as science.
We have a science problem in this country.
Tens of millions of adults are scientifically illiterate and cannot articulate a simple definition of the scientific method.
That includes the usual suspects, the people who don’t understand the difference between anecdotes and hard data and say things like “Evolution’s just a theory” or “I don’t believe in science” as if it’s an ideology or religion. It also includes people who like to declare they’re “into science” as if it’s a band or a genre of cinema, and often post articles from sites like “I F—-ing Love Science,” which routinely mistakes natural phenomena like stars, interstellar space and the animal life for “science.”
To quote Sam Kriss’ wonderful essay on the subject: “‘Science’ comes to metonymically refer to the natural world, the object of science; it’s like describing a crime as ‘the police,’ or the ocean as ‘drinking.'”
Science is a formalized method for studying the natural world. That’s it. No more, no less. It isn’t natural phenomena itself, it isn’t something that requires faith. It’s meant to be challenged, with each piece of knowledge hard-won as the scientific community collectively chips away at the vast edifice of things we don’t understand.
The lack of scientific literacy is an indictment of the American education system, but the science and journalism communities are also big contributors. A flawed academic publishing system encourages researchers to make grandiose claims in abstracts and press releases to increase the chances their work will get positive coverage in the press. Few journalists are more scientifically literate than the general population, so they report dubious claims credulously and present individual studies as the final word on subjects instead of tentative first steps in contributing to the corpus of human knowledge.
We see this all the time with reporting on the environmental impact of felines, but it’s certainly not limited to that subject. How many times have you seen your local news anchors or newspapers tout studies saying coffee is healthy, only to report the next week that a new study says coffee isn’t healthy after all?
“Those scientists can’t make up their minds,” they’ll say with a forced chuckle before handing the broadcast over to the weatherman, oblivious to their own failure to provide context.
The effort to rebrand cats as vegans
A new “study,” given prominent play today by major news outlets like Newsweek and aggregators like Drudge, is a classic example of misleading claims given the veneer of scientific authority. The paper claims vegan cats are “healthier” than their meat-eating counterparts. The study — which is actually a survey — says no such thing, and its authors are surely aware that the way it’s been packaged for media consumption will cause confusion, but they’ve gone ahead with it anyway.
The research involved asking 1,369 cat owners to fill out surveys about their cats, the cats’ diets, and their veterinary health histories.
Of those surveyed, there were 123 reported “vegan cats” in their households (about nine percent of the total), and while the abstract and media pitches claim the surveys show vegan cats are healthier, the differences are statistically insignificant. The sample size is too small to draw any conclusions from, and the fact that the details are self-reported means the “data” is worthless: People who put their cats on vegan diets despite knowing felines are obligate carnivores have a vested interest in defending their decision. They’re not impartial, and their survey answers aren’t either. (The paper acknowledges that 91 percent of the respondents are female, and 65 percent are vegans, vegetarians or pescatarians themselves. Those are admirable choices for a human diet, but not for a cat.)
Relying on self-reported “data” also means the research team doesn’t actually know the true veterinary histories of the cats in question, nor does it know anything about the nutrient content of the vegan “cat food” given to the 123 cats who have been deprived of meat. It also cannot account for possibilities like the so-called vegan cats slipping out at night to hunt rodents.
Credit: Engin Akyurt/Pexels
That’s especially important because of “vegan cat food’s” dubious history. Evolution, the brand that popularized the concept, is owned and operated by a man named Eric Weisman, who has been prosecuted and repeatedly sanctioned for misrepresenting himself as a physician, veterinarian and scientist — and continues to misrepresent himself.
Weisman, a chiropractor by trade, racked up a long list of violations in his chosen field before his chiropractor license was pulled, then was charged and convicted criminally for, among other things, practicing veterinary medicine and regular medicine without a license. Weisman’s list of offenses include “treating” cancer patients, “treating” and misdiagnosing animals, and posing as a physician for years, including in advertisements and literature related to his pet food and fake veterinary practices.
Weisman is still calling himself a physician in violation of his plea agreement, and he’s still selling “vegan cat food.” Would anyone in their right mind weigh the claims of that man against the tens of thousands of veterinarians and pet nutritionists who are horrified at the idea of restricting cats to vegan diets?
(In case you’re tempted to think chiropractors are legitimate to begin with, you should know that chiropractor was founded by a lifelong quack who claimed its methods were taught to him by the ghost of a physician, which allegedly appeared to him during a seance. Chiropractor’s founder dodged accountability for years by claiming his practice was a “religion.” The fact that it’s now a $15 billion industry despite its origins, and decades of research that has found no benefit to the practice, illustrates how eager people are to believe just about anything.)
The consequences of bad science
Not only will the “study” and press coverage of it mislead people into believing its claims, it’s another black mark on the scientific community. Trust is hard-won, easily lost, and for better or worse the misdeeds of a few scientists reflects on the entire field.
Others will simply believe it, especially when major news outlets like Newsweek report the results without question, without acknowledging that it’s a lazy effort masquerading as science by a research team that already knew what result it wanted before handing out the surveys. (The “study” was funded by ProVeg, an NGO that promotes plant-based consumption and is involved in the development of plant-based foods.)
Lastly and most tragically, cats will suffer for it. Cats who are denied meat suffer slow and agonizing deaths, with health problems accumulating due to the lack of certain proteins until they go blind, become chronically malnourished and eventually suffer organ failure.
And for what?
Because some people believe human morals apply to cats?
Because, despite all common sense, they think they can change a species that has been dependent on meat for so long in their evolutionary history that their bodies literally cannot synthesize certain proteins and cannot extract nutrients from most plant material?
How would we like it if we were dependent on giants to feed us, and those giants decided we could and should live on a diet of marshmallows? We’d suffer horribly and we’d die, but at least we’d know why.
Cats don’t have that luxury. They depend on us to do right by them, and when we adopt them it’s our basic responsibility to keep them healthy and well-fed. Let’s not fail our little friends by pretending human ethics is applicable to a species that can’t understand it, or consent to participating in it.
Pain In The Bud 