California – Pain In The Bud

Another Amazon Driver Steals A Cat, This Time In California

Junie the cat is a friendly tabby who was taken by an Amazon driver delivering a package to her family’s home in Bakersfield.

First, please allow me to apologize for the light blogging this week. Allergies are absolutely killing me right now and apparently pollen counts are about as high as they get locally, according to weather sites.

I don’t usually get it this bad, but holy crap! I’m stuffed up, my eyes are watering and my head is pounding. Is it possible that one type of allergy can override another? If so, maybe I should grab Bud and take a deep huff. His reaction alone would be worth it.

“What the…what is the meaning of this, human?! Unhand me immediately, and apologize with those Friskies Natural yums that I like!”

Today we have another story about an Amazon driver taking a family’s cat after delivering a package to their home in Bakersfield, California.

The family’s home security cameras captured footage of the driver approaching the friendly cat named Junie on May 14 and driving off with her.

Amazon won’t name the driver and will only say that the company is cooperating with police, according to NBC affiliate KGET in Bakersfield.

So far Junie hasn’t been returned and Junie’s family has no answers.

I realize that Amazon is a massive company and that millions of deliveries go off without a hitch, but still. There are dozens of incidents involving drivers stealing cats that we know of, many more that preceded our efforts to track the ongoing problem, and the company has a reputation for being unhelpful in assisting customers when their drivers take off with pets. At what point does someone say “Hey guys, don’t steal cats and dogs from our customers”?

Likewise with the lack of protocols to deal with these situations and the company’s slow responses in situations where it’s critical to act as quickly as possible.

Local police are investigating while Junie’s family pleads for the return of their cat. As with several other families who have been in this position, they say they just want her back and won’t ask questions if she’s returned.

“They could just drop her off in the driveway, she knows what to do,” said Brenda Wilson, Junie’s caretaker. “She’ll come straight to the garage, get inside the house.”

PS – Please excuse this test: The Cat Guy is a no good, lousy, rotten content thief! (Wink wink!)

Update, 5:27 pm: I wanted to see if The Cat Guy was manually reposting my content or automatically scraping it. I’ve now confirmed the latter. There are few options for dealing with this, but we’ll see.

No Matter What The Kardashians Say, Please Don’t Declaw Your Cat

A Kardashian admitted she had her cats declawed, but wouldn’t take responsibility. People who are thinking of adopting should know declawing is mutilation and makes cats miserable.

Khloe Kardashian says she regrets having her cats declawed, admitting on her podcast this week that the kitties are “miserable” since she had them mutilated.

But she stopped short of taking responsibility, electing to blame an unnamed party for allegedly telling her it was okay to have her cats’ toes amputated at the first knuckle.

“I was really misadvised about getting my cats declawed. I’ve never owned cats before. I didn’t even know that was a thing. I feel really, really terrible that I did go in this direction,” Kardashian said.

Look, I get it. Learning stuff is, like, hard. If only someone would invent a worldwide network, an “internet” if you will, where one might access the entire sum of human knowledge with but a few keystrokes!

In the absence of such a miraculous technology, how are we to know that chopping off a cat’s toes will cause them a lifetime of pain and discomfort?

Sarcasm aside, I’m not interested in going on at length about the Kardashians or litigating this decision online. Plenty of people are doing that. There’s really no point.

What I am concerned about is the unfortunate fact that the Kardashians have influence.

Because Kardashian isn’t taking responsibility, and she brought up her decision to declaw her cats in the context of her feelings and her regret, she is not effectively communicating why declawing is wrong, nor what it does to cats.

If you don’t know what it is, you should know declawing is mutilation. It is the amputation of your cat’s toes at the first knuckle.

It permanently changes a cat’s gait, leading to early onset arthritis. It makes simple tasks like walking and using the litter box painful.

It causes psychological problems because claws are a cat’s first and primary defense. Without them, cats feel vulnerable. That can manifest in several different ways, leading them to become fearful, or to become quick to bite because they have no other options.

Khloe Kardashian was previously caught “face tuning” her cats, meaning she applied filters to them to make them look different.

Declawing is cruel, barbaric and has no place in a civilized society. It is illegal in most of the world, and US states are finally joining civilization with laws banning the procedure. Kardashian lives in California, where it is banned, so presumably she had it done before the ban or despite it. If it’s the latter, the chances of her facing legal consequences are slim to none.

If you’re worried about protecting furniture, there are much better options, but you should also know cats have normal behaviors that don’t always align with the concept of a perfectly-kept house. Your cat will test boundaries, throw up when she’s had too much food too fast, knock things over, get into places you never thought he’d get into, cough up hairballs and more.

You will be surprised. Things will be broken.

But that’s part of the feline appeal: they’re curious, playful animals, and you have to earn their trust. Once you do, they’ll be your pals for life — and you don’t want to betray that trust by making life miserable for them.

You Can’t Neuter Your Ex, But You Can Donate To A Shelter To ‘Fix’ A Stray Named After Him

Or if your sense of humor tends toward the scatological, you can donate to put your ex’s name on a litter box.

Like other nonprofits, animal shelters face steep competition when it comes to scoring charitable donations, so the more a shelter can stand out, the better.

For some that means stories about their rescues and pets-in-waiting going viral. For others, it means finding clever ways to use occasions like Valentine’s Day to raise money.

One of the latest fads involves making a donation to pay for spay/neuter surgery for a street or shelter cat — and having the cat named after your ex. As one shelter puts it, “because some things shouldn’t breed.”

Poor Scram has no idea he’s a stand-in for a despised ex.

If the idea of castrating an ex seems a little morbid to you, you’ve still got options.

For just $5, Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Nine Lives Shelter will write your ex’s name on a litter box.

“Our foster cats and kittens will handle the rest by doing what they do best,” the shelter’s staff wrote on Facebook.

A search turns up similar Valentine’s Day themed fundraisers in New York City, Oklahoma, Detroit, Washington, Alabama, Tampa, Des Moines, northern California, and dozens of other cities, regions and states.

Of course, there’s another option for people who prefer a more positive take: donating out of love for cats in general, because despite the encouraging drop in animal euthanasia over the past two decades — the result of relentless campaigns to get pets and street cats spayed/neutered — a few hundred thousand cats are put down every year. Every time a cat is fixed, that number drops, and existing cats have a better chance of finding forever homes.

A Week After An Amazon Driver Stole A Woman’s Cat, Neither The Company Nor Police Have Any Answers

Amazon says it has identified the driver who stole a California woman’s cat and is working with local police, but they still haven’t recovered the beloved pet.

You’d think it would be relatively trivial to reunite a woman with her cat after an Amazon delivery driver stole the kitty on Dec. 11.

After all, the victim’s own Amazon Ring camera system captured video of the driver walking away with Piper the cat after dropping off a package. Amazon knows precisely who the driver is, where he lives and how to contact him, because he’s a contractor for the company.

And it’s difficult to imagine how it would stretch the resources of the Lakewood (California) Sheriff’s Department to send a deputy out to arrest the guy and retrieve the cat.

The driver picks Piper up by the scruff of her neck, which could cause serious injury in an adult cat.

This wasn’t a high stakes heist by pros with a plan to disappear.

It was a local delivery driver who made an impulsive decision to steal a cat from a customer.

Do the police really think the man is hiding out in a local motel with the shades down and the cat tied to a chair, cutting out letters from a magazine for a ransome note?

Getting Piper back matters very much to Diane Huff Medina and her children, who miss the chatty Siamese mix.

It doesn’t matter at all to the police or to Amazon, which finally issued a statement calling the theft a “horrible act” and saying it was cooperating with police.

“The Amazon Flex delivery partner in question is no longer eligible to deliver to our customers,” an Amazon spokesman said.

That doesn’t help Diane Huff-Medina get Piper back, nor does it help her reassure her children that the feline, who has been with the family for six years, will be returned unharmed.

“Every day they ask, ‘Is she back yet?’ It’s hard to tell them,”Huff-Medina told local media this week.

In our last post, we noted that in cases where people were reunited with their pets, they did not wait for Amazon or the police to act. Neither has the same sense of urgency as an animal’s own family, and unfortunately police are often reluctant to devote time or manpower to these cases because pets are considered property. When the most severe potential charge is petty larceny — which takes into account a cat or dog’s monetary value, but not its emotional value — stolen pets are considered minor crimes.

Huff-Medina has done well to shame Amazon and local police by going to the media and getting Piper’s story out there. We hope she gets good news soon.

Header image via Wikimedia Commons

Once Again, Amazon Has No Answers After A Delivery Driver Steals A Pet

Amazon has not been helpful when its drivers have stolen pets from customers, treating the incidents as customer service issues.

A woman in California is in a panic after her cat went missing and her home security cameras showed an Amazon driver carrying the kitty away.

Diane Huff-Medina’s footage shows a driver bending down to pet her cat, Piper, during a delivery this weekend. After delivering the package, the Ring camera footage shows, the driver grabbed Piper on the way out, put her in his vehicle and drove off.

“I thought he was just petting her for a second, but yeah … I had to rewatch it a couple of times because it is hard to see, it’s dark, and he doesn’t carry her very nicely,” Huff-Medina told LA’s KABC. “I see her little tail and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Piper the cat. Credit: Diane Huff-Medina

Unfortunately incidents like this seem to happen regularly, and Amazon continues to fall woefully short when it comes to handling them and helping reunited their customers with their pets.

In an incident from last year when one of the company’s drivers stole Feefee, a cat belonging to the Ishak family of Everett, Washington, Amazon’s customer service representatives told the family the company could not force the woman to return the cat, and refused to give the woman’s address or even her general neighborhood to the family so they could search for Feefee.

In a similar incident from August, an Amazon driver stole Murphy, a cat belonging to Kathy Souza from Massachusetts. While Souza thankfully was reunited with Murphy, Amazon was not helpful, she said.

“I spoke with someone at Amazon who asked, ‘Is the cat worth more or less than $200?’” Souza wrote incredulously on Facebook while Murphy was still missing.

This time, an Amazon rep told Huff-Medina they’d identified the driver, but couldn’t get in touch with him.

It’s amazing that after all these incidents, Amazon still treats the theft of cats and dogs by their delivery drivers as a customer service issue, and seems to have no standard protocol for working with law enforcement to get the animals returned.

Indeed, there’s one common thread to all the stories that end happily — in those cases the victims did everything they could to find their pets and did not wait for Amazon or local police to take the thefts seriously.

In the Ishak family’s case, they spent several days posting flyers, talking to local media and driving around in a widening circle to look for the car they’d seen on their doorbell camera. That’s ultimately how they found Feefee: instead of surrendering the scared feline as she told Amazon she would, the driver simply dumped Feefee outside her own building. The Ishaks found Feefee scared and hungry, hiding in the bushes outside the driver’s apartment complex, but otherwise unharmed.

In Souza’s case, her relentless efforts to make noise and draw attention to the driver and Amazon ultimately prompted the driver to return Murphy.

So we’re hoping Huff-Medina takes a similar route, because unfortunately these cases are not a priority for the corporate behemoth, nor for local police, as most state laws consider pets property, and stealing a pet is considered a small time crime. Let’s hope there’s good news soon.