Tag: UK

animal welfare, cat adoption, cat care, cat food, news March 23, 2023

So Many People Are Abandoning Cats Due To Inflation, Shelters Have Surrender Waiting Lists

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve experienced sticker shock in the last six or seven months, especially in grocery stores.

Staples like milk and bread cost two or three times what they did pre-inflation, some retailers are taking the opportunity to arbitrarily hike prices even higher, and a perfect storm of economic uncertainty and a rampaging bird flu caused the price of eggs and poultry to skyrocket.

By late 2022, almost 50 million chickens and turkeys had been killed by avian flu or culled because of it, and almost 10 million more were lost to the virus in the first 12 weeks of 2023, according to the CDC. That breaks the record for most birds lost to avian flu, which was set in 2015 when 51 million died or were culled.

Pet food prices are up too, mirroring grocery inflation, as are veterinary costs and medicine for cats and dogs.

Inflation has squeezed so many people that shelters in the US and UK are reporting unprecedented surrenders from people who believe they can’t afford their pets anymore. In some areas it’s so bad that local shelters have waiting lists — or surrender queues, as they’re called in the UK — for people parting with their pets.

“We get between 10 and 12 surrenders per week, so we’re looking at anywhere between 30 and 50 a month,” Ashley Burling of Montana-based Help For Homeless Pets said. “When you’re talking about inflation, you’re talking about vet bills, pet food, pet supplies and pet rent. I think inflation, I think people going back to work after the pandemic, there’s other reasons that they’re surrendered.”

More than 70 percent of adoptable pets at the Nevada SPCA previous had homes, executive director Lori Heeren told the local NBC affiliate. Her organization is on pace for 2,500 surrenders in 2023.

News outlets tell the same story in local markets across the country, and the Humane Society is seeing the same trend nationally, CEO Kitty Block told CNN. While pet-related costs increased sharply in 2022 — with food and supplies increasing by as much as 30 percent, according to NielsenIQ — statistics show they haven’t relented yet this year. In fact, prices are still edging up, albeit at a slower rate than the previous year.

To cope, more people are leaning on pet food pantries. In Iowa, for example, the Animal Rescue League gave away more than 40,000 pounds of pet food in 2020 and 2021, and a whopping 146,000 pounds in 2022.

Shelter operators say they want people to know there are options so they don’t feel they have to part with cats and dogs who have become family.

“This is bigger than dogs or cats in shelters,” Block said. “It’s about the people who love them.”

PITB readers are the kind of people who dote on their cats and most of us couldn’t imagine abandoning them even in hard times, but chances are we all know someone who’s thought about parting with their fluffy overlords.

a gray cat eating from the ceramic bowl — Credit: Angelina Zhang on Pexels.com

They don’t have to give their beloved cats and dogs up. There are resources to help them meet their animal’s needs to prevent them from surrendering:

– Many local chapters of the Humane Society and SPCA, as well as private shelters, offer free spay/neuter clinics and free or low-cost veterinary exams. A guide from the Humane Society notes PetFinder allows users to search for pet-specific food pantries and low cost veterinary services

– There are programs that provide pet food to people who can no longer afford it

– Some shelters will place pets in temporary foster homes to help relieve the burden until their owners can take them back

– Buying food and medicine online is significantly cheaper than in grocery stores. Some offer deep discounts on meds to existing customers and prices from online retailers have remained relatively stable, especially when buying in quantity

– Social services programs may include provisions for pets

It’s in the best interests of shelters and animal welfare programs for cats and dogs to stay with their people, and not only because they don’t have the resources to house hundreds of abandoned pets on top of their usual intake.

Keeping people and pets together benefits both. Cats and dogs obviously don’t understand that their people are tearfully, reluctantly giving them up. All they know is they’ve been abandoned by the people who made them feel safe and loved. For the mental health and overall well-being of humans and their furry companions, they should stay together.

For some people, like Patricia Kelvin of Poland, Ohio, that means scrounging up whatever she can and cutting back on her own expenses before she will allow her cat to go without.

“There’s just no question in my mind. If my diet was going to be more beans than something else, I wouldn’t hesitate,” Kelvin told CNN. “If I had to sell my sterling silver, which I’ve had for 60 years, that would go before my little ‘Whiskers’ would be deprived.”

cat stories, Feline Ingenuity, news March 2, 2023

Cat Gets Help For Man Who Fell Off Waterfall, UK Government Once Considered Cat Cull During Pandemic

Someone bring this cat inside, give him a magnificent meal and make him king of the house.

After a man fell 30 feet down a “seasonal waterfall” into a creek drainage in Pleasant Valley, Calif., about 50 miles east of Sacramento, an insistently meowing outdoor cat led the man’s wife and neighbor “right to where the man fell,” per CBS News.

The incident happened a few minutes after 9 p.m. on Feb. 21, according to the El Dorado County Fire Protection District, whose EMTs rescued the man. Authorities haven’t provided updates on his status, but as he was airlifted to a hospital, his injuries were likely serious.

The heroic feline is described as the family’s “outdoor cat.” He should be amply rewarded with a real home.

Cat saves man who fell down waterfall — A photo from the scene showing the airlift helicopter in the background. Credit: El Dorado Fire Protection District

Oh hell no!

A former UK health minister said the government mulled a plan to “exterminate all pet cats” early in the Coronavirus pandemic when the virus was new and poorly understood, the Guardian reported.

“What we shouldn’t forget is how little we understood about this disease. There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” James Bethel told the UK’s Channel 4 news. “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”

Yeah, I can imagine a few million incredulous and angry people drawing their blinds, hiding their cats and figuring out ways to buy cat food and litter on the black market to avoid tipping off the authorities in the heavily CCTV-wired nation. If authorities tried to push the issue, things would have gotten ugly.

Here in the US we’d have another run on guns and Bud would run screaming underneath my bed, probably while demanding I slide his turkey and water bowl to him so he could lay low from “the feds.” Hey, he runs a catnip cartel. He’s used to it!

All jokes aside, I think we’ve forgotten that Chinese authorities were beating pets dead in the street and going house-to-house to put them down when the virus raged through the population there for the first time in late 2019. Animal welfare groups said thousands of pets were abandoned by their caretakers and either left to starve in empty homes or left to fend for themselves.

When the virus spread, ripping through countries like Italy, France, Belgium, Russia and taking hold in New York before spreading to the rest of the US, virologists still weren’t entirely certain whether cats — who are susceptible to an unrelated form of Coronavirus — could pass the infection to people. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that if the UK or other countries decided felines must be culled, US authorities may have followed.

The idea of a government demanding we kill our cats is disturbing on its own, never mind the prospect of it happening during a time when our pets were the few things helping us keep our sanity while we all huddled in isolation.

Thankfully reason prevailed and research ultimately proved that the chances of cats or dogs spreading COVID to humans is almost nonexistent.

cat photography, Cats in Games, Feline Overlords, Hero Cats, news, pop culture February 24, 2023

Check Out This Beautiful Gallery Of Larry The Cat, PLUS: A New Game Features A Furious Feline

As we noted on Sunday, Larry the Cat just celebrated his 12th anniversary as chief mouser at No. 10 Downing St., the UK prime minister’s residence and office. The Atlantic has a new gallery featuring photos of Larry’s adventures over the years, and it’s fantastic.

See Larry chase a pigeon, tolerate former President Barack Obama, pose for the press, bolt from a Mitsubishi bigwig, cautiously supervise a police dog working on his turf, hang out with photographers and steal the show during meetings of world leaders.

The gallery also includes rare photos of Larry inside No. 10 (during which he’s mostly gazing longingly at his turf outside) and other amusing moments from his long tenure as de facto head of government in the UK.

(Top image credit: Pete Souza/White House photo)

Cuddly carnage!

The camera pans from a wet, neon-lit street to the jagged remains of a wall spray painted with “Death to Humans” when a tiny head pops up, with the unmistakable shape of cat ears and the markings of a ginger tabby.

Zoom in: An orange tail speeds by, its owner just out of the frame, then the guitars kick in and Gori the cat stylishly disembowels some freak monster from atop his trusty Back To The Future-style hoverboard.

The game is called Gori: Cuddly Carnage, and it looks completely ridiculous, absolutely glorious and a hell of a lot of fun.

cuddlycarnage2 — Gori stylishly puts down a monster. Credit: Angry Demon Studio and Wired Productions

It’s from Angry Demon Studios and Wired Productions, the same people behind the well-received 80s/90s nostalgia trip Arcade Paradise, so the production values look great and Gori shares some elements of the retrowave aesthetic prevalent in Paradise.

It probably won’t get the kind of hype that the feline-centric Stray received, nor will people laud it for educating players about cat behavior, but that’s okay. It’s not that kind of game. Gori: Cuddly Carnage is still in development with no announced release date, but we’ll be keeping an eye on it.

ss_65c72aebb98390d4a3cda988cffa50065f871cf7.1920x1080 — Gori the “ultimate pet cat” on his hoverboard. Credit: Angry Demon Studio/Wired Productions

Uncategorized February 19, 2023

Sunday Cats: Larry The Cat Celebrates 12 Years As De Facto UK Ruler, Cat Rescued From Rubble Won’t Leave Rescuer’s Side

Prime ministers come and go, but Larry the Cat endures.

No. 10 Downing St. is the official office and residence of the prime minister. The building had a bit of a rodent problem in 2011, so former PM David Cameron’s staff adopted Larry from Battersea Dogs and Cats, a well-known rescue in the London area.

The shelter recommended Larry on the strength of his hunting skills, but at first it looked like his tenure as chief mouser at No. 10 might be as short as the prime ministers who serve him. Calls for his resignation grew louder as Larry was seen napping the days away while rodents still came and went with impunity.

Larry’s poor job performance reached the level of a scandal when the UK press reported the reason he was snoozing in daylight — he was sneaking off at night to visit his special lady friend, Maisie, who lives a few doors down at the residence of St. James Park’s keeper.

53d40c25d996d_-_larry-the-cat-151111-lrg — Ladies man, chief mouser and renaissance feline: Larry the Cat.

But Larry eased into his job, proved his worth as a hunter, and has even risen to the occasion by taking on tasks outside his job description. Most recently, he bravely defended No. 10 against a fox, chasing the canid intruder away.

With 12 years of service under his belt, Larry could easily retire. Battersea staff estimated the beloved mouser was at least two years old when he was adopted, putting him well into senior cat territory now. But like the late Queen Elizabeth II, Larry knows the British public needs some stability — and they’re not going to get it from their PMs, who shuffle through No. 10 as if it’s a hotel. Long live Larry!

A cat and his rescuer

It’s been almost two weeks since a magnitude 7.8 earthquake slammed Turkey and Syria, and rescue efforts are now turning to recovery as hopes fade for anyone still trapped beneath the rubble.

A staggering 44,000 people are dead, and authorities say they expect that figure to rise as they add to the long list of people who are still unaccounted for.

Among the death and destruction, however, are signs of hope. There have been dramatic stories of people rescued after being trapped for as long as 280 hours, and social media is full of images of dusty cats and dogs being pulled out by rescue teams.

One of them is a handsome white cat with distinctive black markings on his face. The little guy was rescued by firefighter Ali Cakas after enduring nine days buried beneath the ruins of a building, and he’s refused to leave Cakas’s side ever since.

1156255-cat-turkey — Cakas and Enkas,Credit: Ali Cakas/Instagram

The firefighter from Mardin, Turkey, named the grateful cat Enkas, which translates to “wreckage” or “rubble.”

Enkas has become the unofficial mascot of the Mardin Fire Department, and photos of the ongoing rescue efforts this week showed Enkas perched on Cakas’ shoulder or snuggling up with him during breaks.

Cakas has adopted his new friend, and their friendship is testament to the fact that some good can come from even the worst circumstances.

rescue-cat — A cat rescued after days spent buried beneath the rubble.

quot-enkaz-quot-the-cat-won-39-t-leave-the-side-of-its-rescuers-in-quake-hit-gaziantep — Enkas and his human have become inseparable after the latter pulled the former from a collapsed building more than 200 hours after the quake.

cat humor, Feline Overlords, Feline Weirdness February 16, 2023

Cat On The Street: Spy Balloons And UFO Scares

The humans have been freaking out about a big balloon flying over Humanland, believing other humans sent it to spy on them. But some humans think aliens are behind the nefarious balloons, and they’re not balloons at all — they’re super sneaky alien craft sent here to scout ahead for an invasion. What do you think?

“If I wanted caviar for breakfast, I would have told you. Stick with the schedule.” – Versace, 13, show cat

“You gonna eat that hedgehog?” – P-84, 1, puma

“Hey up, mates. What’s this, then? Can’t we just fire a few fecking missiles at them and get on with it?” – Liam Gallagher, 8, British cat

“Allow the aliens to land. They look delicious.” – Zanzibar, 5 months, apprentice murderer

“We need a bunker, do we have a bunker? Well why didn’t you BUILD a bunker? Do I have to think of everything?!?” – Buddy the Cat, 8, ex-president of Americats

“This is clearly the work of the aggressive regime in Luxembourg. We should invade, confiscate all their cheese and make them a vassal state.” – Cicero Nash, 4 1/2 months, couch stylist