Tag: litter boxes in schools

The Swiss Have A Unique Way Of Stealing Cats: By Feeding Them! PLUS: More Fun Claims About Litter Boxes In Schools

In Switzerland you can be charged with a crime and face significant fines for feeding other people’s cats. Meanwhile. the “kids identifying as cats” culture war rumors are back and as inane as ever.

The Swiss seem to take cat theft pretty seriously, to the point where they’re perfectly willing to drag people to court for feeding other people’s cats.

That’s what happened to a 68-year-old woman in Zurich who is accused of being so nice to Leo, a neighbor’s cat, that the little guy decided her house was now his house.

According to local media reports, a Zurich prosecutor wants to fine her 3,600CHF (Swiss francs), which is $4,370 in ‘Merican greenbacks! That’s a lot of money for giving a cat some Temps and cans of tuna.

To be fair, Leo’s original family isn’t happy, especially because they specifically asked the woman to stop feeding their cat. She can’t claim she accidentally adopted him, since she let him into her apartment and even installed a cat flap for him, according to Swiss media reports.

“Cases like this are increasingly ending up in court because the rightful owners report the “feeders”. Under Swiss law, cats are “other people’s property” and systematic feeding and giving a home to another person’s cat is considered unlawful appropriation.

But if a neighbour’s cats are only fed occasionally, this is not a punishable offence in Switzerland.”

There’s really not enough information to form an opinion about this particular case. Was Leo mistreated or not getting enough to eat? Did his new human have designs on him from the beginning? Did she just think she was doing the right thing?

“Gimme the nomnoms, human!” Credit: Wikimedia Commons

As for me, this is another good reason to keep Bud inside. If I let him roam the halls of the building unsupervised, he’d probably start a bidding war between me and neighbors in two or three other apartments, making it clear that whoever supplies him with the most delicious and most frequent snacks will enjoy the great honor of serving him.

Kids identifying as cats: the fake controversy that won’t die

Just a quick recap, for anyone who hasn’t been keeping up on this uniquely American culture war spectacle: Politicians of a certain stripe really like rumors about kids identifying as cats, so much so that they’ve confidently asserted it’s happening all over America, telling anecdotes about it while on the campaign trail during the 2020, 2022, and 2024 political cycles.

That encompasses two presidential elections and a midterm year, but it’s not relegated to federal cycles. State-level pols love to talk about it too.

It’s a culture war dog whistle, and politicians from both parties love stuff like this because it gets everyone all riled up, which means no one’s talking about all the grift, insider trading and other fun activities our “leaders” involve themselves in.

The thing is, to date not a single one of the claims has been backed up by proof. I know this because I’ve investigated every one of them, and invariably they turn out to be rumors. I’ve gotten emails and comments telling me I’m a fool for debunking the claims, and I’ve literally begged people to give me a real example of cat-identifying kids dropping deuces in litter boxes, but again, all the claims collapse under minimal scrutiny.

Every time a politician has told a story about allegedly cat-identifying kids and litter boxes in schools, it follows the same pattern: they insist it’s true, double down on the claim, try to change the goalposts, and finally, they grudgingly admit they can’t point to a single example.

In a week or two, we go from righteous condemnation and fury to “Well, my wife’s best friend teaches sixth grade, and she said she heard from a teacher in another district that kids were meowing in class.”

Furries outside a convention, not a school. Credit: Furscience

Texas state Rep. Stan Gerdes is in the righteous condemnation stage after introducing the Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying In Education Act, aka the FURRIES Act.

Gerdes wants to ban meowing, hissing, barking, litter boxes, leashes and animal costumes from school grounds and events, but in his wisdom he’s excluded school mascots and Halloween costumes.

He is, however, fast approaching the “my cousin’s best friend’s co-worker said” stage, after he couldn’t point to a single cat- or furry-related incident when pressed during a committee meeting on May 1. He eventually named a school district, saying he’d gotten a “extremely concerning” and verified account of an incident there, only for the district to issue a statement saying it didn’t happen.

Gerdes did call to ask if there were litter boxes in the school, the district said, and when he was told there was not, he insisted a manual check of all school bathrooms, which also came up empty. Let’s see how long he sticks to his story before he finally admits he has no proof.

The ‘Litter Boxes In Schools’ Lie Just Won’t Die

Montana’s top education official is the latest government official to claim kids who “identify as cats” are relieving themselves in litter boxes at school.

Our esteemed nation’s infantile culture wars were front and center in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, and dozens of candidates — including prospective governors, senators, congressmen and people eyeing local offices — humiliated themselves by promising to end the alleged scourge of public schools providing litter boxes so students who “identify as cats” can comfortably shit in a manner befitting their adopted species during school hours.

As we’ve pointed out before, the litter boxes in schools thing is an urban legend, a hoax or a malicious lie depending on your perspective. It’s also an exercise in unfairly dragging cats into our petty ideological arguments, and the poor little guys can’t seem to claw their way out.

People like podcaster Joe Rogan, congresswoman Lauren Boebert and her sister from another mister, Marjorie Taylor-Green, are among the most prominent public figures to fall for the hoax and do their part in spreading it. Even the Australians got in on the panic.

We looked into the claims at the time, and none of them turned out to have any merit. In most cases, the claims were based on third- and fourth-hand accounts: “My neighbor’s sister works in the Washington Free School District, she says another teacher told her they were putting litter boxes in the middle school!” and that sort of thing.

The other claims evaporated when the people making them were asked to provide specifics. Rogan managed to check both boxes when he finally admitted he couldn’t confirm his story.

‘I have a friend and my friend’s wife is a school teacher,” Rogan said on his podcast. “And she told him that there was discussions in the school that the mother wanted to put a litter box in a school.”

The claims died down after midterms, but they’re back again with the top education official in Montana claiming cat-identified children all over her state are pooping in litter boxes with the blessing of their teachers and principals.

“Let’s talk about boys in girls bathrooms and that safety issue,” said Elsie Arntzen, superintendent of public instruction in Montana, in an Aug. 15 interview with Montana Public Radio. “Let’s talk about those litter boxes that some schools are putting out for children who want to view themselves as some sort of an animal. Is this where public education should be? I say no.”

Arntzen
Arntzen, who has congressional ambitions, hasn’t been able to produce evidence of her claims. Credit: Montana state government

When asked to provide details, Arntzen doubled down, claiming she had evidence that schools in her states were equipping bathrooms with litter boxes. When Montana Free Press looked into the claim and Arntzen’s own office couldn’t produce anything to substantiate it, Arntzen through a spokesperson claimed that, actually, the office has complaints from parents “all over the state,” which they claim qualifies as the aforementioned evidence. In a development that surprised no one, Arntzen’s office couldn’t produce those complaints either and reluctantly admitted it had not fielded calls or emails from concerned parents.

Which means Arntzen, who is eyeing a congressional seat in her state, based her claim entirely on hearsay, just like all the others.

It’d be nice if this is the last we hear of the urban legend, but with 2024 around the corner and the culture war more intense and irritating than ever, chances are this is only a preview of many similar claims to come.

FurryGate: Rogan, Boebert, Greene Drag Cats Into Politics With Claims Of Litter Boxes In Schools

The “kids identifying as cats” claims are popping up everywhere ahead of midterm elections. Why are we dragging cats into our culture wars?

The physicist Michio Kaku was a guest on a radio show and was answering a question about possible intelligent life visiting Earth when Joe Rogan interrupted him.

“The three pyramids are aligned with Orion’s belt,” Rogan said. “Do your research, man. Look it up.”

Rogan, who was into 9/11 truther conspiracies at the time, went on to explain how the Egyptians couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids on their own, and that aliens helped them align the positions of the giant structures to correspond to important celestial features.

Here was Kaku, one of the brightest minds in human history, co-founder of string field theory, a man whose textbooks are required reading for PhD-level physics students, getting talked over and “educated” by a pothead who rose to fame hosting a game show in which he forced contestants to eat cockroaches.

I thought of that cringey interaction this week after reading about Rogan insisting school districts are accommodating kids who identify as cats by replacing toilets with litter boxes in school bathrooms.

Rogan’s source was rock solid if you’re the type of person who thinks ancient aliens traveled thousands of lights to the Earth of deep antiquity to teach human beings how to stack stones on top of each other: Rogan’s friend’s wife, who works at the school district, insisted the litter box story is true.

Like previous claims of school administrators gone mad in service to alleged furries, Rogan’s claim was intentionally nebulous and unverifiable. He didn’t name the school, the district or the teacher. We have to take his word for it.

If you like that sort of thing, I have good news for you! Rogan’s in great company.

Marjorie Taylor Greene — the congresswoman who once claimed “Jewish space lasers” were responsible for California wildfires, the shining testament to US education standards who warned “the Gazpacho police” will imprison patriotic Americans, the genteel stateswoman who said scientists are creating fake meat in “Peach tree dishes” to “zap” Americans — has also warned of the apparently widespread practice of furry school children shitting in litter boxes.

Not to be outdone, Rep. Lauren Boebert has co-signed the cat conspiracy, telling donors that evil cat-loving people are hell bent on destroying wholesome American values by unleashing cat-identified children on an innocent and unsuspecting public.

Say it enough and it becomes true

The claims have been repeated so many times that they’ve spread to school board meetings and state legislatures across the country, perpetuated by gerontocratic leaders who think The Onion is a real news source. Two current gubernatorial candidates, in Colorado and Minnesota, have also repeated the claim.

“Schools are not disclosing that they are allowing children who identify as snakes, cats, whatever, they’re providing litter boxes for the [student] cats,” a Tennessee state representative said during a hearing in September. “And obviously it’s very disruptive to the learning process. If a child has that much of a self-identity issue they probably need a different environment, and it’s creating a lot of anxiety, a lot of confusion with the children who are boys and girls.”

“But Big Buddy,” you might be thinking, “I thought you said PITB was apolitical and you’re a moderate?”

It is, and I am.

I dislike all ideology equally because it invites people to abdicate their responsibility to think for themselves. I believe our two-party system and the divisiveness it fuels could be the ruin of our great nation, particularly at a time when polls show up to half the US population expects to fight in an ideologically-driven civil war. I worry that we are doing precisely what our enemies want by feuding amongst ourselves. Indeed, we know for a fact that “troll farms” in countries like Russia and China exist to sow the seeds of division and crank up poisonous political rhetoric online.

But I’m also against pure, abject, mind-boggling, depressing, Idiocracy-style stupidity and the idea that anything is true if someone says it is. Neither party has a monopoly on this kind of thing.

In particular, I’m not a fan of injecting cats into the American culture wars. (Although it’s not just cats at this point. A Texas school district was forced to deny rumors that administrators were allowing “furries” to eat out of dog bowls in school cafeterias.)

We already fail these innocent creatures in myriad ways, from allowing declawing and doing little to improve weak animal welfare laws, to tolerating the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable for people to shoot cats with arrows, BBs and real firearms as some grotesque form of entertainment.

Now people want to use cats as the rope in a perverse game of cultural tug-of-war, which could further degrade their status and lead to more proxy violence against them.

Cats are vulnerable, and are already targets of hate

Violent criminals, including the perpetrators of the recent mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, often get their start by killing cats before “graduating” to humans.

Cats are also frequent victims of redirected anger, with studies showing they’re abused and killed in domestic violence situations because they’re viewed as extensions of the feminine, or simply because killing them causes emotional distress to the people who care for them.

Of domestic violence victims who have pets, more than 70 percent of their abusers also took their rage out on the victims’ pets.

Politics have pervaded and infected so many things, cats and dogs are now staked to territory on either side of the political fault lines.

So how long will it be before an Alex Jones type claims the government is using cats to spy on Americans? The best conspiracy theories always have a nugget of truth to them, after all, and in the 1960s the CIA tried — and failed, spectacularly — to use cats implanted with transmitters to spy on Soviet officials.

How long before a Boebert or a Greene tells a crowd that it’s their patriotic duty to shoot “liberal cats” on sight? How long before Tucker Carlson follows up one of his thrilling UFO/crop circle/cow mutilation investigative specials with a breathless exclusive about America-hating cats?

“Why do so many cats want to see America burn? Why do cats like to line their litter boxes with the American flag? Does the government allow cats to vote? Hey, I’m just asking questions!”

If you think that’s outlandish, I’d point out that we’ve been there, done that.

Tucker Swanson Carlson has already claimed that “decadent rich people” who “detest the country” like to plot America’s downfall from cat cafes. Those evil America-haters stroke cats and sip lattes while “working through the night to destroy” our great nation, Carlson told his viewers. I’m not making this up.

Europeans almost extirpated domestic cats in the middle ages when people were convinced they carried the Black Plague, and cats had even bigger targets on their backs after the Inquisition’s most overzealous prosecutors insisted felines were used in Satanic rituals.

Likewise, my Google News alert for cat-related articles shows a depressing, never-ending feed of stories about people chugging beer and shooting cats with BB guns, mystery killers strangling neighborhood kitties and “hunters” who put arrows through these sentient, innocent animals who have the mental and emotional capacity of three-year-old human children.

And there’s already plenty of nonsense online about how our choice of pet reflects our political beliefs, as well as unhinged rants about the kind of people who prefer cats. There are even research studies about the intersection of politics and attitudes toward companion animals, and research shows certain people consider cats “liberal” because they don’t adhere to social hierarchies and don’t recognize authority.

Is it really a stretch to imagine some 85, deep into a case of Miller High Life, taking target practice at neighborhood cats because he sees them as evil, feminine, America-hating animals? Are we sure it doesn’t happen already?

Politics really does ruin everything.