Wordless Wednesday: A Very Handsome Cat!
Who’s a handsome little guy? Buddy is!
Tag: Photography
Wordy Wednesday: Critically Endangered Orangutan Babies
The palm oil and logging industries have killed so many orangutan mothers, there are now more than a dozen major orangutan orphanages in Borneo and Sumatra. The pressure on orangutans, with whom we share 97% of our DNA, shows no signs of abating.
Orangutans are critically endangered, and the biggest threat to their continued existence comes from the agricultural sector, which has razed 55 percent of the species’ habitat in recent decades.
Logging companies clearing irreplaceable, old-growth jungle to claim more land for palm oil plantations have no compunction when it comes to flattening jungles despite the presence of orangutans hiding in the trees. The loggers often shoot the large apes on sight, leaving terrified, traumatized babies still clinging to their dead mothers, or taking them to sell as pets.
Of those left to die, the lucky babies are rescued before they starve and are brought to one of the many orangutan orphanages in Borneo and Sumatra, where they attend “school” to learn how to do everything from climb to forage. It takes at least eight years to teach them how to survive on their own, which is about the time it takes orangutan mothers to do the same job in the wild.
The unlucky babies end up as local pets, sold off to entertainment troupes or shipped off to places like Dubai, where wealthy clients will pay a premium for them.
So what is palm oil, and why are countries in Asia bulldozing ancient jungles and forests to clear room and make more plantations?
Per the WWF:
“Palm oil has been and continues to be a major driver of deforestation of some of the world’s most biodiverse forests, destroying the habitat of already endangered species like the Orangutan, pygmy elephant and Sumatran rhino. This forest loss coupled with conversion of carbon rich peat soils are throwing out millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. There also remains some exploitation of workers and child labour. These are serious issues that the whole palm oil sector needs to step up to address because it doesn’t have to be this way.
…
Palm oil is in nearly everything – it’s in close to 50% of the packaged products we find in supermarkets, everything from pizza, doughnuts and chocolate, to deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste and lipstick.”
Palm oil is in constant demand, and it’s an easy to grow, incredibly efficient crop. Indonesia and Malaysia, the only two countries in the world where orangutans exist, produce 85 percent of the world’s palm oil.
We share 97 percent of our DNA with orangutans, making the species our second-closest cousins from a genetic standpoint. Some studies claim orangutans are our closest relatives based on our phenotypical similarities.
Want to read more and learn how to help?
Here are some links to get you started. PITB is a big fan of the Jakarta Animal Aid Network, which successfully pushed Jakarta’s municipal government to ban the incredibly cruel “topeng monyet” monkey street shows:
World Wildlife Fund: Orangutans
Jakarta Animal Aid Network
Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation
The Orangutan Project
Rainforest Trust
Petition Aims To Make NYC Bodega Cats Official, Help Pay For Their Vet Care
The plan would allow bodega owners to certify their cats, eliminate city fines for keeping them, and help find homes for working felines if their stores shut down
Cats have been a fixture in New York City’s bodegas for decades, but technically they’re illegal.
The fact that they’re so widespread, and owners of the small groceries/delis don’t try to hide them, underscores the absurdity of the situation. The fine for keeping a cat in a bodega in New York is $200 for the first offense, capping out at $300, but the fine for a rodent infestation starts at $300 and can rise to as much as $2,000 for repeat offenses. That’s in addition to the cost of bringing in pest control to get rid of the rats, which can easily add hundreds or more to an expensive problem.
So given the option between a maximum $300 fine with a clean, rodent-free shop, and potentially crippling fines — plus infestation — for rodents, thousands of bodega owners opt for the former. It’s a no-brainer.
The cats are also favorites of customers, and bodega owners don’t hesitate to talk to media when their cats go missing, nor do they turn down Dan Rimada, who runs the extremely popular @bodegacatsofnewyork Instagram page.
Now Rimada is the man behind a petition that seeks to eliminate fines for the store-dwelling felines, establish a voluntary shop cat certification, and help bodega owners get veterinary care for their little helpers.
Rimada proposes soliciting seed money from city government as well as deep-pocketed donors in the pet food industry — “think Purina, Chewy, PetCo” — to establish a veterinary care fund for the city’s working cats.
“Through years of hands-on experience, I’ve witnessed both the charm of well-cared-for bodega cats and the harsh reality of neglect when standards aren’t met,” Rimada wrote in the petition, which has almost 5,000 signatures as of Feb. 28. “In conversations with rescue organizations and experts in public policy, business, and technology, we’ve designed a realistic, community-driven solution.”
The fund would help cover the costs of care, with additional “micro-loans” available for emergencies.
Rimada envisions it as a triple win for the shop owners, rescuers who will be compensated for their time, and most importantly, the cats. If city leaders are willing to engage, Rimada says he hopes to conduct a year-long pilot program to see what works and what would need tweaks, with input from rescuers, veterinarians and the people who care for the cats.
The petition and resulting plan was inspired by cases like that of Kobe, a Hell’s Kitchen bodega cat who almost died of a urinary infection when the owners of the bodega balked at paying veterinary bills.
WaPo’s Guide To Taking Better Photos Of Your Cat, PLUS: Snopes Weighs In On Cats And Bubonic Plague
A historian casts doubt on tales of widespread cat purging, tracing the origin of the claims to a novel published in the 1990s.
The Washington Post has a new guide for taking better photos of cats and dogs with some solid advice for people using smartphones as well as more traditional cameras.
The article is in front of the paywall so you don’t need a subscription to view it, and it emphasizes a few major points I’ve often written about when people ask me how I’ve been able to get certain shots of Bud:
- Always let your cat get used to the camera, whether she sniffs it, head butts it or just wants to see it up close. Let her check it out and lose interest and then it becomes just another thing, allowing you to begin capturing more candid-style photos.
- Bribe ’em: Your cat’s a model and deserves compensation. A few treats will keep him hanging around and happy as you snap away.
- Pay attention to the lighting, especially if you’re shooting a black cat or a kitty with a darker coat pattern. Unless you’re going for a silhouette or a sunrise behind your furry friend, keep your cat facing to the right or left of the primary light source so you’re getting light and shadow to put those feline features in relief. It’s also worth taking a close look at how professional photographers shoot melanistic jaguars and leopards, carefully using light to highlight their features. In the right conditions their rosettes are still visible, they’re just slightly different shades of black. While house cats don’t have rosettes, the same attention to light and detail can help pick out the contours of their beautiful coats.
Did People Really Slaughter Cats During The Plague?
It’s often claimed that Europeans murdered felines en masse during the waves of Black Plague that devastated Europe during the Dark Ages, visiting countless cruelties on cats while inadvertently amplifying the spread by nearly wiping out disease-carrying rodents’ most effective predators.
In a new post that closely examines documents and evidence from burial sites of the era, Snopes concludes there was much less cat-killing than claimed, and the claims of widespread purging at the hands of pandemic-weary zealots have their roots in a 90s novel, which was then circulated on the web as fact.
Sites where as many as 79 sets of cat bones from the era were found show clear signs that the animals were slaughtered for their fur, and a singular slaughter in 1730s Paris often cited as proof is not only a few centuries off but was also motivated by class hatred, not fears of the plague.
While the papal bull Vox In Rama was real, and a famously zealous inquisitor really did make the preposterous claim that Satanists had a ritual that involved literally kissing the asses of black cats, the pope never called on anyone to kill felines and there’s no evidence that people took it upon themselves to do so. There was plenty of other unbelievable superstitious idiocy that led to the deaths of animals at the time, including the practice of putting animals on trial for alleged crimes, but Europeans weren’t rampaging through towns and killing cats.
Snopes quotes Welsh historian Mike Dash, who says the modern claims of widespread cat-killing are “almost certainly a modern internet-based fabrication.”
‘Why I Took 50,000 Pictures Of My Cats Pooping’
One software engineer went to incredible lengths to monitor her cat’s bathroom habits.
When Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence, posed the heady question “Can machines think?”, he inspired generations of computer scientists, philosophers, physicists and regular people to imagine the emergence of silicon-based consciousness, with humanity taking the godlike step of creating a new form of life.
And when science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote his seminal 1968 novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” — the story that would eventually become Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Bladerunner — he wondered what makes us human, and whether an artificial being could possess a soul.
It’s safe to say neither of those techno-prophets were thinking of fledgling AI algorithms, representing the first small steps toward true machine-substrate intelligence, announcing themselves and their usefulness to the world by helping us watch felis catus take a shit.
And yet that’s what the inventors of the LuluPet litter box designed an AI to do, and it’s what software engineer and Youtuber Estefannie did for her cat, Teddy, who’s got a bit of a plastic-eating problem.
“The veterinarian couldn’t tell me how much plastic he ate, and it would cost me over $3,000 [to find out]. So I didn’t do it,” Estefannie explains in a new video. “Instead, the vet gave me the option of watching him go to the bathroom. If he poops and there’s no plastic in his intestines, then he won’t die, and he might actually love me back.”
Estefannie casually described how she wrote a python script, set up a camera and motion sensor, and rigged it to take photos of Teddy doing his business. But, she explained, there was “a tiny problem”: Luna the Cat, aka her cat’s cat.
“This is Luna, this is technically not my cat, this is Teddy-Bear’s cat, and she uses the same litter box as Teddy,” she explained.
For that, she’d need more than a script. She’d have to build a machine learning algorithm to gorge itself on data, cataloguing tens of thousands of photos of Teddy and Luna along with sensory information from the litter box itself, to learn to reliably determine which cat was using the loo.
So Estefannie decided it was a good opportunity to “completely remodel” Teddy’s “bathroom,” including a compartment that would hide the bespoke system monitoring his bowel movements. The system includes sensors, cameras and lights to capture still images of Teddy dropping deuces in infrared, and a live thermal imaging feed of the little guy doing his business. (Teddy’s luxurious new bedroom turned out to be too dark for conventional cameras, thus the pivot to infrared.)
From there, Estefannie manually calculated how long Teddy’s number ones and twos took, and cross-referenced that information with photo timestamps to help determine the exact nature of Teddy’s calls of nature.
When all the data is collected, Estefannie’s custom scripts sends it to an external server, which analyzes the images from each of Teddy’s bathroom visits and renders a verdict on what he’s doing in there.
Finally, Estefannie gets an alert on her smartphone when one of the cats steps into the litterbox, allowing her the option of watching a live feed and, uh, logging all the particulars. The software determines if a number two was successful, and keeps detailed records so Teddy’s human servant can see aberrations over time.
“So now I definitely know when Teddy-Bear is not pooping and needs to go to the hospital,” she said.
I am not making this up.
For her part, Estefannie says she’s not worried about a technological singularity scenario in which angry or insulted machines, newly conscious, exact revenge on humans who made them do unsavory tasks.
“Did I make an AI whose only purpose in life is to watch my cats poop?” Estefannie asked, barely keeping a straight face. “Mmmhmm. Will it come after me when the machines rise? No! Ewww!”
Pain In The Bud 