Category: news

Newest TikTok Trend Has People Terrorizing Their Cats To Taylor Swift Songs

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.

tiktokcatstrend
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.

@mikamadii

Spock already hates me so why not torture him more #august #taylorswift #cat #augustcat #taylor #folklore #spin #fyp #trend

♬ original sound – Mikaela Bisson

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.

The company was also caught spying on journalists and is the subject of a Department of Justice investigation into its misuse of user data.

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.

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.

Or maybe your information isn’t used in any particularly dramatic way, but in the aggregate becomes part of the great data pool the Chinese government uses to build and refine the most invasive social surveillance system in human history.

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.

‘Study’ Claiming Vegan Cats Are Healthier Is A Mockery Of Science

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.

a close up shot of a cat eating
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.

Australia ‘Declares War’ On Cats, Plans To Eradicate Ferals And Strays

Australia announced the plan after a new report called cats the greatest driver of extinction in the country.

While their neighbors in New Zealand called for “woah on feeral kets” earlier this year, Australia is planning its own nationwide effort to wipe out free-roaming cats in an attempt to prevent the extinction of local wildlife.

The “war” announcement, made on Wednesday by Australia’s Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, comes on the heels of a report that calls “invasive animals” like cats the primary force behind species extinction in most of the world, including Australia. The report was released by a group of academics from 143 countries who make up the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which advises the UN and sovereign states on wildlife policy.

Plibersek singled out felines in a press conference announcing the plan.

“They played a role in Australia’s two latest extinctions … they are one of the main reasons Australia is the mammal extinction capital of the world,” she said.

In addition to targeting felines on the mainland, Plibersek said Australia’s government would attempt to completely purge Christmas and French islands of their cat populations.

I have not had the opportunity to read an advance of the report, which was just released, and it will require careful reading as well as additional research before I’d feel comfortable commenting on the claims. That said, the numbers bandied about in press accounts (which claim cats kill more than 2.6 billion animals a year in Australia) are similar to the claims we’ve heard before, so unless there’s original research here and not a rehash of the same meta-analyses frequently cited in stories about cats and their impact on biodiversity, it doesn’t change the simple fact that it’s bad policy to act without reliable data.

I’m talking about an actual effort to count the feral and stray cat population in defined areas, as the Washington, D.C. Cat Count did using trail cameras, monitors and other methods. Obviously that can’t be applied to an entire country, but it can be done in different locations and provide a baseline to work with. Without that effort, the estimates of feline impact are nothing more than guesswork by professors sitting behind desks often entire continents away from the locales in question, plugging invented numbers into formulas intended to extrapolate totals for birds, mammals, lizards and insects killed by felis catus.

While similar studies estimated the number of cats in the US at between 25 and 125 million, Australia’s federal government says there are between 1.4 and 5.6 million cats in the country. If that’s true, it means each free-roaming cat in Australia kills between 500 and 1,850+ animals a year. It’s also difficult to accept estimates of predatory impact when the corresponding estimates of total cat population are so vague.

a fluffy cat on a sidewalk
A “feeral ket.” Credit: Ferhan Akgu00fcn/Pexels

Still, as I’ve written in earlier posts, government intervention was inevitable without proactive measures. Australia’s cat lovers and caretakers would do well to voluntarily keep their pets inside, and to double their efforts to catch, spay/neuter and find homes for as many strays as they can.

If you live in Australia, you have until December to provide feedback to the federal government, and it’s probably a good idea to check with your local animal welfare groups, which are undoubtedly composing their own responses to the plan.

Two Families Battle Over A Cat, Prompting The Question: What Defines Pet ‘Ownership’?

Bob/Maui the cat was adopted by one family in 2013, went missing a few months later and was rescued by another family, who have had him for 10 years.

Bob the cat was adopted by Carol Holmes of Wichita, Kansas, in 2013.

Holmes says Bob disappeared a few months later and that was the last she saw of him.

Alex Streight, who also lived in Wichita at the time, found Bob in a bad way, malnourished and in “bad condition.”

“He was in horrible shape,” Streight told WRAL, a North Carolina TV news station. “I fed him, kept looking for [the] owner. I posted in the Wichita groups, but I never found anyone.”

Streight, who was 27 years old and pregnant at the time, said the veterinarian gave her no indication the cat belonged to anyone, and her efforts to find a potential owner were unsuccessful, so she paid for his veterinary fees, adopted him and named him Maui.

When Streight moved to North Carolina in 2015, she took Maui with her and he’s been living happily with her family ever since. In late August Maui slipped out of Streight’s North Carolina home. A neighbor picked him up and brought him to the vet, and the veterinarian realized there was a microchip. A scan showed Holmes as the cat’s owner.

a tuxedo cat on a hanging wooden bridge
Credit: Arina Krasnikova/Pexels

Now Bob/Maui is in the custody of Wake County (NC) Animal Control, whose staff don’t sound keen on returning the cat to Streight. They’ve called Wilson, who said she’d like to be reunited with Bob/Maui, and when Streight went to animal control to get her cat — returning with the veterinary records when they wouldn’t release him to her the first time — the staff called police.

“The cat is in protective custody where an investigation will begin,” Jennifer Federico, a veterinarian with the county animal control, told the station. “The cat is safe and isolated.”

Federico seems intent on making the situation more complicated than it needs to be, telling WRAL that “Microchipping proves ownership, so we have to take that into consideration, and launch a full investigation.”

Streight doesn’t see it that way. She wasn’t registered as the owner on the chip, but she’s got 10 years’ worth of veterinary records, a photograph of Maui laying on her couch the day he slipped out of her house, and photos and videos showing the tuxedo cat with her kids and other pets over the past decade.

“It’s just absurd to me that anyone would think to take someone’s pet away from the family that he’s been with for ten years,” Streight said.

We have to agree with Streight here, and it’s disturbing that animal control has not only made itself the arbiter of the cat’s fate, but has apparently decided that nominal ownership based on a microchipping from 2013 trumps the fact that Maui has been happily a part of Streight’s family for at least 95 percent of his life.

We feel for Wilson, but Streight did everything right: She looked for the cat’s family, posted about him online, cleaned him up and got him veterinary care, then adopted him when all indications were he didn’t have a home. With a decade’s worth of vet bills, photos and videos backing her up, it’s clear Maui is happy in her home, has been well cared-for, and if he could speak there’s little doubt about where he’d prefer to go.

She’s clearly bonded to the cat, and he to her: Only someone who really loves their furry friend regularly takes photos of their cat, even after 10 years. I can attest to that fact: Probably 60 or 70 percent of the photos on my phone are of Buddy, and I’d be devastated if we were separated.

What do you think? Should Bob/Maui be returned to Wilson or Streight?

tuxedo cat sitting on ground
Credit: Dima Solomin/Pexels

At Exeter Cathedral, Felines Have Feasted For Centuries Thanks To World’s Oldest Cat Door

Viking raiders, Roman ruins, an astronomical clock and a bishop who badly needed the services of a competent feline hunter: the story of the oldest known cat flap.

In 1598 Bishop Cotton arrived at his new post to find he had a serious rodent problem.

The new leader of Exeter Cathedral realized mice and rats were attracted to the animal fat used to lubricate the complex inner workings of the ancient structure’s astronomical clock, so he did what any sensible person would — he got himself a cat and had a flap installed so kitty had free reign of the church grounds and the chambers that held the hidden clockwork.

The newly-discovered details came to light thanks to the efforts of Diane Walker, the cathedral’s historian. One record shows the bishop paid a carpenter eight pence to cut a circular, cat-size hole in the heavy wooden door leading to the clockwork chamber, as well as ledgers showing the cat was officially on the church’s payroll.

“Back in the 14th and 15th Centuries we have records in the cathedral of payments of 13 pence a quarter for the cat and occasionally 26 pence a quarter for the cat,” Walker told the BBC. “We don’t know if that was double rations because they had been doing a good job or whether there were actually two cats.”

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Credit: Exeter Cathedral

I love the idea of a happy cat licking her lips and cheerfully chowing down on medieval Temptations as reward for a job well done.

The cathedral has provided steady employment for felines, who still keep the rodents at bay on the grounds more than 400 years after Bishop Cotton hired his first mouser. Cute ginger tabby Audrey, pictured above, holds down the fort these days.

Exeter Cathedral has an interesting history besides its feline employees. It owes its existence to the vikings: the church decided to build a new cathedral as the bishop’s seat because his previous post was located near river routes and was vulnerable to raids from viking invaders.

Exeter Cathedral
Credit: Exeter Cathedral

Previously the site of several Roman structures, including a public bath house, the grounds were chosen because Exeter was a prosperous, bustling city and church officials thought it had a bright future.

The cornerstone was laid in 1112 and it took almost 300 years to finish, becoming one of the finest examples of a gothic cathedral in the Norman style.