The petition says “an exceptional teacher” has been “unjustly accused.” The petition’s creator blamed “snowflakes” for sharing the video of the incident with police, who arrested the teacher on Aug. 25.
A new petition claims Texas high school teacher Emily Marie Benner has been “unfairly accused” of abusing a cat and demands Benner’s school district reinstate her as a teacher immediately, “no questions asked.”
The petition’s creator blames “soft, slow-minded” “snowflakes” for allegedly manufacturing outrage, claims Benner could sue police for arresting her, and demands authorities drop charges against her.
Benner was arrested on Aug. 25 after police and school administrators were provided with a video showing the 25-year-old teacher allegedly abusing a cat two days earlier. In the video, which was shot in a classroom at Westwood High School of Palestine, Texas, Benner tells her students to hold the screaming feline down as she staples shut an incision on the cat’s abdomen, according to police, who also said the cat was not given anesthesia.
Benner was teaching an animal science class but is not a veterinarian and isn’t licensed to practice veterinary surgery. It’s not clear how she obtained the cat, nor have authorities said who made the initial incision on the cat’s abdomen. Police said the feline is recovering in the care of a veterinarian.
According to the petition, Benner is “a dedicated agricultural teacher in Westwood” who “has been unjustly accused of animal cruelty.”
“Her charge not only questions her professional integrity but also jeopardizes her role as an influential educator in our community. As people who appreciate her significant contributions to education in Palestine, TX, USA, we understand how detrimental this baseless accusation is to our local education system. Considering she has been an exceptional teacher, we call for the immediate dismissal of these charges and the reinstatement of Emily Marie Benner in her role, no questions asked.”
A still image from Benner’s high school classroom on Aug. 23 shows students holding down the thrashing, screaming feline while Benner staples its abdomen.
While Westwood School District Superintendent Wade Stanford said the “procedure amounted to animal cruelty” and promised to take “immediate and decisive action to address this issue” in a letter to parents of Westwood High School students, he did not say Benner was suspended or comment on her current status.
Benner’s arrest and alleged suspension as an educator is a “grave actionable breach to a respected member of our community,” the petition claims, asking signatories to help “right this wrong.” It also claims Benner has not been afforded due process.
“It’s the Christian thing to do and the right thing to do!” one person who signed the petition commented.
The petition’s creator, Jim Hughes of Palestine, made a post in Benner’s defense on Facebook, arguing that people were “spreading hate” by criticizing Benner. The post sparked arguments among locals who said home surgical procedures on animals are common in rural communities, and others who disputed that assertion, insisting it’s cruel not to provide the professional care of a veterinarian.
“Do you think everyone has the money to take their pet to the vet?” Hughes wrote, blaming the criticism on “snowflakes” who live in a “soft, slow-minded world.”
Arguing that animal owners “would be broke” if they sought veterinary help “for every incident,” Hughes said home surgery is just the way it’s done: “Every farmer I know castrates with just a pocket knife and no pain medicine.”
The outrage over the death of a pet cat may be the best barometer of Russia’s national mood as its disastrous war on Ukraine enters its third year.
For the past two years I’ve had a lurid hobby. I’ve been watching translated clips from the bizarre world of Russian state TV, where Vladimir Putin’s pet propagandists tell the Russian people what to think.
There’s ringleader Vladimir Solovyov, a guy who dresses like the admiral of a galactic fleet of military starships and is prone to wild mood swings. Depending on when you catch Solovyov he could be cackling maniacally at the prospect of nuking London or crying into his microphone as he laments the loss of his overseas bank accounts and his boss’s slipping grip on power.
There’s Margarita Simonyan, the 43-year-old head of RT (Russia Today) and rumored alcoholic who, strangely, is even-keeled compared to Star Admiral Solovyov.
Then there are the second-tier propagandists: Olga Skabeeva, the “Iron Doll of Putin TV” who matter-of-factly endorses horrific war crimes, and men like Anton Krasovsky, who famously fantasized about drowning Ukrainian children in the Tysa River, a tributary of the Danube, his desk rising three inches as he excitedly repeated “Just drown those children, drown them!” Apparently he forgot he was on television and said the quiet part out loud, forcing his boss (Simonyan) to grudgingly condemn his words.
Margarita Simonyan, left, and Vladimir Solovyov, right, are two of Russia’s most famous pro-Putin propagandists. Credit: Russian state TV
Solovyov, Simonyan and the others looked like a bunch of investors celebrating the sale of a billion-dollar company during the opening phases of the war in early 2022, giddily playing footage of Russian missiles taking out Ukrainian apartment buildings and artillery flattening hospitals.
Their rhetoric was extra-dimensional at the time: they spoke often of a glorious New World Order with Russia at its head and all of humanity united under Putin’s tiny feet, where people would undoubtedly conclude that life under Russian masters is better than any over-hyped concept of freedom.
When Russia faltered and Ukraine began stringing together victories with the help of western weapons and real-time intelligence from the US and UK, the tone of Putin’s propagandists grew bitter. Their body language mirrored their frustration. Solovyov began a tradition of threatening to nuke a different country every day, for “crimes” like acknowledging the reality of Russia’s military incompetence or calling for peace.
To date, Solovyov’s threatened to nuke the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Japan, Finland, Sweden and the US, and that’s just off the top of my head. He especially hates the British for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, but he regularly makes it clear that it’s only through Putin’s benevolence that cities like London and Paris continue to exist.
He’s also extremely fond of Tucker Carlson: he plays clips from Carlson’s show on X regularly, offered him a job after the American was fired by Fox News, and has declared him the greatest journalist in the western world.
In Putin Russia, cat feed you!
I thought of that motley crew of Putinious jackwagons this week as I read about the Russian public’s horrified response to an incident on a train.
A couple was traveling on a Russian Railways train to St. Petersburg when their beloved cat, Twix, escaped his carrier. The frightened ginger tabby just kept running until he was scooped up by a female conductor, who unceremoniously tossed him into the snow in Russia’s frigid Kirov Oblast. Temperatures regularly dip into the single digits and below zero in the winters there.
On Jan. 20, after a search joined by hundreds of people, little Twix’s body was found in the snow about a half mile from the train tracks. The feline, who was used to safety and warmth, suffered multiple animal bites and died either from his wounds or the temperature.
Twix the cat in a photo from his family that was reposted to a Russian Telegram channel.
To say Russians are furious is an understatement.
Twix’s fate has been the talk of Russian social media platforms for days. Surveillance camera footage of the conductor tossing the tabby ignited a new level of rage. As of Wednesday more than 300,000 Russians had signed a petition calling for the firing of the conductor, whose name hasn’t been released by the state-owned passenger railroad company. A second petition goes further, calling for criminal prosecution, and has 100,000 signatures in just a few days.
Public outrage about the fate of Twix just might be the first authentic sentiment to reach Russian media in years.
In an unusual move, the government acquiesced — partly — to the public’s demands and pulled the conductor from duty pending an investigation. They’ve also acknowledged that Twix’s humans had properly purchased a pass for him and were riding in a car designated for passengers with pets. In the future, they’ve vowed, conductors won’t toss animals from trains.
Russia is a famously cat-loving country. Felines comprise more than 64 percent of all pets kept by Russians, and more than half of all Russian households have pet cats. They’re considerably more popular than dogs in the nation of 143 million.
Cats are popular in Russian folklore, where traditions say the furry ones have the power to ward off evil, and they’re a much more convenient pet for the millions who live in Soviet-era apartment blocks in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Still, this feels like something more.
Russians haven’t had an easy two years thanks to Putin’s disastrous “special military operation.” They can face years in prison simply for calling for peace with Ukraine. Unless they’re part of the nation’s elite or have connections among them, men can’t leave the country because the military needs more warm bodies. The country’s economy is in shambles as the government pumps more money into the war and international sanctions have taken their toll.
A Russian tank laden with loot, including a toilet, rolls past the ruins of residential buildings in Popasna, a city in eastern Ukraine.
The government has canceled or downplayed annual military celebrations so the public won’t be reminded of the war’s costs. Russia is on pace to lose an astonishing 500,000 men in two years of combat, according to the UK’s Ministry of Defense, and Putin has tried to stem the anger of the country’s mothers by staging several meetings with actresses posing as the moms of Russia’s war dead, events which have been heavily covered by state press.
Russians can’t oppose the war they’re dying in. They can’t mourn their dead fathers, sons, brothers and husbands, not by revealing their real emotions.
Quality of life has further degraded in a country where tens of millions don’t even have indoor plumbing, which is why there have been so many clips of Russian soldiers stealing toilets, washing machines and other appliances from Ukrainian homes. The prospect of being pulled off the street, sent for two weeks’ worth of rudimentary training and deployed as cannon fodder hangs heavy over the heads of Russian men and their families, especially ethnic minorities and the poor.
But Twix? They can mourn him. They can get angry about what happened to him. The furious public sentiment regarding his death wasn’t manufactured by Solovyov and company. State TV didn’t spark the backlash, it was forced to acknowledge it.
I’m neither a Russophile nor an expert on that often difficult-to-understand country, but I’d bet all my rubles that those dueling petitions say more about the Russian mood than any opinion poll to come out of Russia since 2022, and definitely more than the words of anyone allowed to express an opinion on Russian TV.
The 17-year-old Anastasia has been living on the grounds of the Rector’s Palace in Dubrovnik her entire life.
Anastasia is still living the palace life.
The community cat found herself in the middle of an uproar after staff at the Rector’s Palace, a historic site in Dubrovnik, Croatia, kicked her off the palace grounds which had been her home for 17 years.
In 2021 staff at the Rector’s Palace, a six-century-old structure which is now a museum, said Anastasia’s little nook, with food and water bowls on top of cardboard, was an eyesore and wanted her gone.
They took away her belongings in May, prompting local carpenter Srdjan Kera to build a beautiful wooden cat house that mimicked the color and architectural details of the palace, giving Anastasia a dwelling that would shield her from the elements as well as blend in with the historic building’s facade.
But palace staff wouldn’t accept the compromise and had the wooden home removed, sparking an outcry among Dubrovnik’s locals and tourists. A petition demanding Anastasia be allowed to stay was signed by more than 12,000 people — a figure greater than the number of people who voted for the city’s mayor, representing more than a fourth of the city’s population.
The furor died down and there hasn’t been much news since then, but Mark Thomas, editor of the English-language Dubrovnik Times, told PITB Anastasia is back at the Rector’s Palace and basking in her fame.
“She doesn’t have her fancy home that was built for her,” the U.K. expat told us, “but rather her spot on a piece of cardboard. She is well fed and seems to be more than happy and enjoying having her photo taken with tourists.”
Thomas said he’d last seen Anastasia just a few days ago in her usual stomping grounds at the palace.
It seems odd that staff at the palace wanted her gone because they found her original nook unsightly, then removed the aesthetically pleasing cat house created by Kera only to go back to the old cardboard arrangement, but we’re glad the senior kitty isn’t subjected to the stress of being forcibly moved from the only home she’s ever known.
Previously, staff at the Rector’s Palace said Anastasia didn’t need her shelter all year round, so perhaps they’ve come to a compromise and will allow it during the winter. Dubrovnik enjoys a mild Mediterranean climate, with temperatures bottoming out at about 50ºF (10ºC) in January, its coldest month, but while the city remains temperate, it experiences significantly more rain in the winter months.
The people of Dubrovnik are not happy with the leaders of a local museum, who evicted a beloved local cat from the grounds of the historic building.
UPDATE, 8/7/2022:Anastasia has been allowed back on the palace grounds, but without the custom shelter a Dubrovnik carpenter built for her. Click here to read our latest story about Anastasia’s saga.
Original text:
In a city that stood in as a filming location for King’s Landing in the hugely popular series Game of Thrones, it was only fitting that a regal cat named Anastasia would choose a palace as her home.
Anastasia chose the Rector’s Palace, a historic building in Dubrovnik, Croatia, as her royal abode, and she’s become a local fixture there for the past 17 years, a familiar feline face appreciated by locals and tourists alike.
People who run shelters in the city of 42,000 have tried to find a home for Anastasia in the past, but she always returns to the Rector’s Palace, so a group of volunteers set up a small cardboard shelter for her on the grounds.
But the snooty museum authority didn’t like the little dwelling and had it removed in May of 2021. In response a local woodworker named Srdjan Kera built a beautiful wooden cat house for Anastasia that combines elements of the palace’s gothic and baroque architecture, boasts a distressed finish that matches the five-century-old building’s facade, features a velvet bed for its resident feline princess, and even has a golden nameplate with “Anastasia” etched into the metal. (Spelled Anastazija in Croatian.)
The little cat palace blends right in under the larger palace’s arcade and even emulates the stonework patterns, but the people who run the museum authority still weren’t impressed and earlier this month ordered the eviction of Anastasia for a second time.
(Credit: Videographer Zvonimir Pandža, clip courtesy of DuList. Click through to see more photos of Anastasia, her local admirers in Dubrovnik and her beautiful cat palace by Srdjan Kera.)
“The opinion of the Dubrovnik Museums is still the same,” the museum authority’s leadership wrote. “The cat house has no place in front of the Rector’s Palace, be it a cardboard box or a stylized dwelling. We emphasize that no one has anything against the cats that stay here for many years and which until recently had no housing,”
The people of Dubrovnik aren’t having it. A petition to return Anastasia to her rightful palatial place has garnered more than 12,000 signatures, a huge number for such a small city. In addition, some 90 percent of readers said they wanted Anastasia to stay at the palace when polled by a local newspaper.
“Anastasia needs her house! Give it back,” one local wrote on Facebook. “Apparently, cultural institutions are run by people without culture.”
Kera even told the museum’s leaders that he would pay a fine if it meant Anastasia could stay, pointing out that at her age, she needs a stable, stress-free existence.
“It’s her home,” Kera said. “We’re only talking about one cat, not 70 of them.”
Anastasia in her miniature cat palace. Credit: Srdjan KeraDubrovnik is a historic city that has been inhabited for more than 1,300 years. Its Mediterranean location and walled old city made it the perfect stand-in for King’s Landing, the capital of Westeros in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Credit: KingsLandingDubrovnik.comA night view of an arcade at Rector’s Palace. Note the detail on the stone benches, which Kera emulated for Anastasia’s cat house. The interior of the palace was used as a shooting location for a scene in season two of Game of Thrones. Credit: Diego Delso/Wikimedia Commons
Pain In The Bud 