Animal shelter staff threw away all blankets, towels, sheets, animal beds and other similar items

The Pennsylvania Humane Society, an umbrella animal charity working in partnership, as I understand it, with animal shelters, is seeking donations after a parvo outbreak contaminated items in one of their shelters.

Cat infected with feline distemper. Image in public domain.

In other words, a shelter within their auspices which has not been named by the way, but is in Altoona, was sadly affected by a feline panleukopenia viral outbreak (aka parvo) which is highly contagious. This resulted in the staff deciding to throw away all the items with which the infected cat had come into contact which included the ones in the title.

The shelter concerned ran a fundraiser which raised $1820 to help offset the medical costs.

The Humane Society is seeking donations to help with replacing the items that have been discarded.

There is also a need for funding to pay for paper towels because the staff, in cleaning up with bleach and OdoBan disinfectant, are using paper towels which are disposable. This is in order to minimise further infections and to try and put a stop to the outbreak as soon as possible.

RELATED: Best Disinfectant for Feline Viruses.

Bleach is a very good killer of this contagious virus. We are told that the shelter cats are vaccinated against feline panleukopenia. Unfortunately, the vaccine is not 100% effective. Cats are testing positive. Treatment by veterinarians is expensive hence the need for more funding.

The shelter has 37 cats in foster homes and 53 cats at the shelter. The cats and foster homes obviously helps with quarantine issues.

Feline panleukopenia is not invariably fatal but it is a serious and highly contagious viral disease. The prognosis is variable depending upon several factors including overall health, the cat's age and the timing and effectiveness of medical intervention. Kittens have a higher mortality rate while adult cats are often more resilient with a better chance of survival.

It is essential to isolate infected cats from other cats in the shelter and practice good hygiene to curtail the spread of the virus.

Source: The Altoona Mirror.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Imaginative Humane Society fundraiser goes viral

The Animal Friends and Humane Society, in Hamilton, Ohio have come up with an imaginative fundraiser on their Facebook page. They are asking visitors to provide them with the name of an ex-partner who they believe behave badly towards them. That name will go onto the base of a litter box and the litter box will be used for the rescue cats in their care.

Humane Society fundraiser goes viral on news media. Image: MikeB

They are accepting donations between February 1-12 and on their Facebook page there are instructions on how to make the donation. It is via an American mobile payment service called Venmo which is owned by PayPal.

There is a QR code on their Facebook page which you can scan using your smartphone or "search the Charity @AFHStreasurer2011." Your chance to kill 'two birds with one stone' to use an appropriate saying. You can clear your conscience of that pesky relationship that you had which bugs you and you can do some good for animal welfare.

Pandemic lockdowns exposed the less-than-optimal human-to-cat relationship

NEWS AND OPINION: I'm on my high horse again but I think that this is a very relevant topic. But first things first. The Kingston Humane Society has a nice photograph of a cat in one of their cages and what I like about it is the customised tent in one corner of the cage where the cat can hide. 

It's sad and nice at the same time. It's sad because cats in shelters need to hide because they are frightened but it is nice because the shelter has provided cats with a means to hide. A sort of home-from-home environment.

Kingston Humane Society cat in a cage with a tent to hide in. Image: the society.

The fact that cats need to hide indicates that their true character is probably not going to be shown at a shelter because of anxiety induced by the shelter environment. This affects adoptions.

That's the first point out of the way. The second point is this: like other cat and animal shelters, this one has too many animals in their care. Their capacity is 144 and they currently care for 315 which is more than twice their capacity.

The director of the Kingston Humane Society, Gord Hunter, puts this down to the after-effects of the Covid pandemic and those long lockdowns during which some people impulsively adopted a companion animal.

And there is the problem: people adopted these abandoned companion animals on a known temporary basis. They must have known that the lockdowns were going to end within a defined time. They must've realised that at the end of those lockdowns they would have to go back to their normal work routine, and they should have asked themselves whether they would retain their cat or dog companion when that happened.

If they didn't do that and many didn't, they were not committed to being the caregiver of a companion animal for the life of the animal. And that is the only way to adopt a cat or dog. If a person can't make that commitment, they should not adopt.

There might be some culpability with animal shelters in this regard by adopting out cats and dogs to people during the pandemic perhaps realising that this was a temporary state of affairs.

For me, it's a question of raising standards of cat caregiving. I know it's boring to discuss this, but the flood of unwanted animals adopted inwards to shelters such as the one in Kingston indicates a less than optimal human-to-cat relationship and standard of care.

This state of affairs is one reason why there are feral cats which are a perceived problem to many people. There needs to be some way of raising standards in the interest of human society and animal welfare. Education is the best answer and regulations are a secondary solution.

Source: Global News.

Two New Jersey towns support TNR with one trying and rejecting a trap/kill policy

NEWS AND COMMENT: This story concerns a couple of New Jersey, USA towns. One of them is Bayonne, a city in Hudson County and the other is actually described as a borough and it is Matawan. The latter tried to introduce, in a ham-fisted way, a feral cat trap/kill program which backfired badly.

Matawan

The borough administrators introduced an ordinance which said that they were going to trap stray cats and if nobody claimed them within seven days, they would kill them. And in a badly mismanaged way, they said that the Monmouth County SPCA would do the trapping and killing without consulting with them in the first place. And secondly, they employed the local police force to distribute notices about their new but flawed campaign.

From Facebook.

It all blew up in their face when the SPCA complained bitterly that they hadn't been consulted and the public rebuffed them. The police had to make a statement to say that they weren't involved in the killing of cats. Clearly, the campaign did the police no favours as it damaged their reputation.

Anyway, the mismanaged campaign, organised by Scott Carew (as I understand it), the borough's business administrator together with the animal control officer and councilwoman Melanie Wang, was abandoned without any stray or feral cats being trapped.

They made a U-turn on realising their error and have decided to introduce a new ordnance which focuses on TNR (trap-neuter-release). That's the way to go. But it took the public and the SPCA to teach them that lesson.

Humane and ethical approach

The public are concerned about feral and stray cats. Some people hate them while others are more sensitive towards their needs. But in general, the public want feral cats dealt with humanely. They realise that careless human cat ownership put them there in the first place and secondly, they are sentient beings. The ethical way to deal with feral cats is TNR. It is the only current way, but it requires a good investment and the involvement of the local authority.

This leads me nicely to another story from the same state, New Jersey, which reports that Bayonne's city council has decided to continue with a TNR program which is managed by the New Jersey Humane Society.

Bayonne

They have consistently put in sufficient funds (it seems to me) to run the program. This is a commitment from the local authority to fund TNR and they're using somebody who they respect, Geoffrey Santini, the city's animal control officer who works at the New Jersey Humane Society, to organise the TNR program.

Mr Santini is described by Bayonne's Municipal Services Director Suzanne Cavanaugh as a "lovely gentleman, and he is excellent at what he does. He is a true partner with the city of Bayonne."

That's how it should be done in my view. You have a city council or county council who are focused on TNR to control feral cat numbers. They fund it consistently and they work with the best people to arrange and manage the TNR programs.

According to the report, in the Hudson Reporter, the city has consistently funded TNR and recently agreed to an addendum to the ordnance to add a further $25,000 to the program. The program commenced, as I understand it, in April 2021 when it was funded with taxpayers money amounting to $54,123.

Comment: perhaps local administrators are realising that TNR is the only way forward. It has its flaws according to ornithologists and others because in essence you are putting feral cats back on the ground where they can continue to prey upon wildlife. But patience is required and consistency. Armed with these two qualities TNR works if funded properly.

It needs to be as widespread as possible to be as effective as possible. It is the only way to deal with feral cats currently until something better comes out such as contraception (drug placed in food) which doesn't work well enough.

There are other instances of councils trying to trap and kill feral cats, but they almost invariably end up with a backlash from the public who complain because, as stated, the majority of the public are against the cruelty of trap and kill policies.

Domestic cats caught in trap and kill programmes

And there is always the potential for killing a person's cat companion. There are still places where there are indoor/outdoor cats, and you cannot tell the difference between a feral cat and an outdoor domestic cat (pre-TNR which ear tips ferals). You don't want to kill someone's pet because that would be a catastrophe and it would open the doors to a criminal charge against the local authority for criminal damage.

Clever non-verbal teenage girl identifies as a cat

NEWS AND COMMENT-MELBOURNE PRIVATE SCHOOL: A year eight student at a Melbourne private school who is described as being 'phenomenally bright' but is non-verbal has decided to identify herself as a cat. There's been a trend of adopting a furry animal identity and there is a kind of a culture among some kids in some schools to do this. People take a different attitude towards it.

School kids. Pic: Getty Images.

Those who support the woke movement are very sensitive towards it and the school is providing support staff to deal with a range of psychological issues. The school said that some students were presenting with a range of issues including mental health, anxiety and identity issues. These sorts of issues are present in a sizeable percentage UK school kids according to reports. Self-harming comes to mind as well as a manifestation of these pressures.

The school in question is tackling the issue gently and their approach is to always take matters on a student-by-student basis and seek professional advice.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the right-wing types such as Sen Ralph Babet who has criticised the Melbourne schoolgirl in a tweet (see above). He said that the girl identifying as a cat is:

"...a symptom of allowing the woke radical left in society to run rampant, unchecked. Can we just put a stop to this garbage right now. You go to school to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. You are not a cat. You are a little girl. The end".

That, it seems, would reflect a lot of people's views who don't believe in the woke movement.

I do not think that it is appropriate to talk to a girl who identifies as a furry like that. I don't think people should either encourage them to be furries or criticise them. You have to address the underlying cause of it sensitively. That is the only way forward in my view. From the child's perspective it is very real. You can't just shout at them and criticise them.

There was a recent story, in January, when a group of students at a Michigan, USA school identified as furries and the news went viral because there was a report that the school was providing litter trays for those kids who identified as cats. This was denied by the school.

RELATED: School accused of installing cat litter trays for students who identify as ‘furries’.

Psychologists, Judith Locke, living in Brisbane, Australia, said that she wasn't surprised at this trend of young girls and boys identifying as animals because they romanticise them in their lives and through television and film. And a lot of kids have difficulties in accepting themselves. Comment: Facebook does not help with influencers presenting perfect bodies thanks to photo-editing. Kids are going to hate their bodies.

Another Australian psychologist, Michael Carr-Greg, said that he had a patient, a boy, who identified as a dog but once stressors in his life were removed, he resorted to identifying as a human being. He has only dealt with one patient with this sort of psychological problem.

Furries tend to be teenagers and young adults although there are some in their late 20s and 30s. You even find some 70 and 80-year-old furries.

Comment: I feel I've got to make a comment about this. I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist. But if a child, a 13 or 14-year-old in a school in Brisbane, Australia, commits to identifying as a cat and behaves as a cat as best they can by, for example, being non-verbal, this has to be a mental health issue and they clearly don't want to be themselves. They want to be something or somebody else.

And that desire must be based upon the fact that they don't like what's happening around them, it seems to me. They want to escape the human world and transition into the animal world where perhaps they think that they will be treated better. I sense a desire to escape the human world which places unacceptable pressures upon some teenage students. Arguably adults - the grown-ups - are creating a world that is unacceptable to our kids. And this does not surprise me because it is also unacceptable to the grown-ups too!!

If that is correct then the adults have to do something to improve the lives of teenagers. And I wondered too whether the woke movement encourages teenagers to identify like this. There is a massive discussion about children identifying as the opposite sex and in the UK, there's been a scandal about an NHS clinic (The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust) providing the permanent means for children to transition from male to female and female to male without doing proper research and taking a more holistic approach. 

They took what is called the 'affirmative approach' which means that if the child affirms that they want to be the opposite sex that was enough upon which to provide them with life changing treatments. That clinic is going be sued by about a thousand people because they ruined some lives.

And the argument is that the woke movement encouraged the so-called experts to go down the wrong path and encourage opposite sex identification when the patients were not ready to really know what they wanted and needed. I think this case is a bit similar to that. Teenagers don't really know how to cope with life's pressures. 

The cure it seems to me would be to alleviate those pressures and teach schoolchildren how to cope with the pressures that remain.

Extraordinary but sad picture of 47 cats inside a car

NEWS AND COMMENT-MINNESOTA: This is a story about a person who must have been made homeless. We should always be sympathetic towards homeless people even if they are homeless because of what they've done. And in the photograph, you can see there are 47 cats inside a car in which he was living. 

Or in which the cats were living because there was no space for a person to live with them. And if you look carefully you will see that they are all ginger tabby cats. There is no doubt in my mind that this person allowed his cats to breed to the point where the whole situation became completely unmanageable. He may have been evicted by his landlord. 

47 cats before rescue. Note: ginger tabbies all. Image in public domain.

Clearly, he must have been desperate to put 47 cats in a car to try and continue to care for them. And sadly, this photograph was taken on a day when the temperature outside was 32°C (90°F). The temperature inside the car would have been higher.

And this is why he apparently sought help because the cats were rescued. The local Humane Society spokesperson said: "Unfortunately, with the heat yesterday he recognised that it was above and beyond what he was capable of at this time. And he let us help them out."

We are told that he had previously given up 14 other cats that had been living in the car. Does that mean that there were 61 cats living in that car at one time!?

Fortunately, the cats were in reasonable health implying that they weren't in the car for very long. They will be sterilised and made available for adoption.

This is obviously a sad story both for the cats and the person to be in such a difficult predicament. The good point is that he sought help. If all cat orders sought help many more cats in hoarding situations would be saved from a premature death due to neglect; neglect through starvation or ill-health.

The man deserves credit for that. It is an admission to himself that he has failed. Not many hoarders have the courage to admit to themselves or the necessary enlightenment and awareness to realise that they are in trouble and need help. This is because many cat hoarders have borderline health problems.

Secondly, this man must really love cats. He wants to help cats. He failed because he allowed them to breed and in doing so, he achieved the opposite almost to what he desired because he has made their lives very difficult and jeopardised their health.

I would suggest that he requested help because he realised that he was harming his cats. This is indicative of a person who has his heart in the right place.

33 cats dumped on the roadside with food then 15 of them shot dead

DUNN COUNTY, WISCONSIN, USA - NEWS AND COMMENT: In a heinous crime of great brutality perpetrated by a person or persons, 33 cats appear to have been abandoned on the roadside with a pile of cat food. Then somebody shot at them killing 15.

 33 cats dumped on the roadside with food then 15 of them shot dead. Photo: Humane Soc.

Jamie Wagner, Kennel Manager at the Dunn County Humane Society attended the scene which she said has left her haunted. She said: "I was not prepared for what I saw. I have been working here 15 years, I have seen a lot of things. It was very horrific."

She said that it appeared that somebody had abandoned 33 cats and 15 had been shot. They don't know the circumstances as to why someone would do this. Comment: I know the reason why they did it. It is because they are cat-hating, nasty, insensitive, psychopathic individuals who think they can treat cats as inanimate objects without any consequences for what they're doing.

UPDATE 4/30/21: The reward for information leading to the person/people responsible for this act has been raised to...

Posted by Dunn County Humane Society on Wednesday, April 28, 2021

In a Facebook post from the Dunn County Humane Society they provided an update on April 30 telling us: "The reward for information leading to the person/people responsible for this act has been raised to $5000. Please report any tips directly to the Dunn County Sheriff's Department!"

They follow it by stating: "This is not the type of post we enjoy putting up, but this is such an act of cruelty that we need to do everything we can to find the person/people responsible. Any information regarding this incident would be greatly appreciated."

The details to contact these people are as follows:

• Dunn County Humane Society (715) 232-9790
• info@dunncountyhumanesociety.org
• Dunn County Sheriff’s Office (715) 232-1348

Comment: I have been reading news media stories about this sort of cat abuse/cruelty in America and in other countries, let's be clear, for 14 years. To me, it is not surprising or shocking. I have seen similar acts of cruelty reported in news media before. This story stands out somewhat because of the numbers involved. And it is the first time I have read of cats being abandoned on the roadside and then shot at. 

It takes a particular kind of individual to do it. It seems that a person abandon the cats then stepped back and shot at them but it is entirely possible that there were two or more perpetrators namely the person who abandon the cats and then another person came along, saw them, and decided to shoot at them. Therefore the police may be searching for two or more people as the Facebook post indicates.

God willing they'll be caught. But don't hold your breath because there is invariably a lack of evidence. This probably occurred in a remote place. No cameras. No evidence.

Note: The embedded FB post may stop working. If that has happened I apologise but I have no control over it.

Pictures of cats used in myGP app cervical cancer screening campaign

In an act of enlightenment, the organisers of a campaign to encourage British women to attend a cervical cancer screening employed a picture of three cats; one hairless, one long-haired and the third shorthaired. They've equated the lack of hair or hair length on these cats to pubic hair on women and as to whether they shave or wax their hair or not. Apparently women are embarrassed to go for cervical cancer screening unless they have had their pubic hair waxed or shaved beforehand. I think that's the connection between this campaign i.e. hair length or no hair and cervical cancer.

It's caused offence in some quarters of the female population while others see the benefit of it. The key aspect of this campaign is that it has got people talking about cervical cancer screening. This is the objective because it will help encourage women to go to a clinic. This will save lives.

Some women thought it was demeaning to equate cats with cervical screening. I think it is quite enlightened because it is a kind of a fusion between women's liking of domestic cats (or that is the perception) and cervical cancer. The connection comes in the amount of hair or fur people and cats have!

It's quite imaginative in that sense. My opinion is that women have been too sensitive about this campaign. The bottom line is that it gets people talking about it. Not enough women apparently are attending screening clinics and one reason is that they can't get waxed during coronavirus lockdowns because the waxing businesses are temporarily closed down because of social distancing rules. There is a connection then with the amount of pubic hair women have and cervical cancer!!

Gayle Maxwell, a cervical cancer survivor, found it amusing and laughed at it hard. She thinks any form of awareness is fantastic and found the campaign funny. Another lady thought that it was "seriously inappropriate". They thought it was making sexualised jokes about women's reproductive health. I go back to the original point: awareness. The campaign catches the eye and that equates to awareness. It is using the obsession with pictures of cats on the Internet to achieve this. Well done I say.

More than one tonne of plastic produced per person since 1950

The amount of plastic sloshing around the planet is equivalent to one tonne of plastic being produced by every person alive on the planet since 1950 (8.3 billion tonnes produced over the past 70 years). And clearly not enough is being done to rectify the problem. It's getting worse and worse annually. The problem is exponential. Dame Ellen MacArthur's foundation has called for an international treaty. Such a treaty would obtain the agreement of signatories to commit to doing something substantive about plastic production. Others say that it is too late to mess around with treaties. It can take years to get countries to agree to treaties and when they are signed they don't stick to the agreement. This happens all the time.

Of the 8.3 billion tons of plastic produced in the past 70 years, three quarters has become waste and a third of that has been mismanaged which includes being dumped or dropped as litter. There is 150 million tonnes of it in the oceans already and every year another 11 million tonnes ends up in the oceans. You'll find plastic in all parts of all the oceans.

Plastic pollution of the oceans. Picture in the public domain.

Urgent action is needed. It is believed that the amount of plastic in the oceans will treble over the next 20 years. The foundation's report refers to the 1987 Montréal protocol which has helped to protect the ozone layer. There is, therefore, some history in the success of treaties such as this. Germany, the Philippines and Vietnam are three countries who have called for a treaty but other countries such as Britain, the US, Japan, Australia and Canada don't support it, including the WWF.

A treaty (to be clear this is an international agreement) would place limitations on certain single-use plastic products such as straws and set targets on recycling and how to stop the products getting into the oceans.

The problem, as reported, is that although 115 countries have set up regulations regarding single-use plastic and how to limit its damage on the environment it's having little impact. Most of the restrictions concern plastic bag usage and disposal. It's a small part of the overall problem. Beach clean ups report that only 7% of items found are plastic bags.

Some major companies support the initiative such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mars, Tesco, Unilever and Nestlé. It is not enough. There needs to be a high level of commitment by governments. A campaign group, Changing Markets Foundation, said that calls for a global treaty were "just another delaying tactic by the plastic industry". They argue that the world needs "proven legislative solutions, like deposit systems and reuse targets".

Comment: I shop at Sainsbury's in the UK. I see little, very little commitment by this large company to limiting plastic usage. They still sell bottled water when it could be dispensed in a machine and the customer brings a non-plastic container to the shop and buys it by the litre. That's just my idea but the point I'm making is that I see almost no change in the attitude of Sainsbury's with respect to limiting plastic usage over the many years that this has been discussed. 

Other supermarkets have a similar attitude in my view. The big problem with humankind is that unless individuals are personally impacted by pollution of this kind and only if it affects their health and welfare do they lobby for change. If people can't see it they don't react to it even if it is killing them or harming them in some way or other.

Plastics are certainly killing wildlife but then again people don't see wildlife so in general people don't care about it. It's like trying to turn a juggernaut around. It just doesn't happen or it takes tens of years and which point it is too late.

What has this got to do with cats? A hell of a lot because micro-plastic particles find their way into all areas of our lives. They are in the food chain. They are in marine wildlife which humans and cats eat. Cat food I'm sure contains micro-plastic particles. It affects the health of us all both the human-animal, the domestic animal and the wild species particularly marine wildlife. It is all pervasive and you cannot dissociate the domestic cat from the problem.

Women Less Likely to Date Men Holding Cats!

You must have heard of it. A study (by Colorado State University) in which numerous women participated and which came to the conclusion that when women use dating apps or online websites to find a male partner they are less likely to select a man who presents himself to the world in a photograph holding a cat. Yuk, it's too wimpish for women. They found them less masculine, more neurotic, agreeable, and open; and less dateable. Damn it I have a picture like that :) . I am not gay...which leads to the point of the article... (The photo was Helmi Flick's idea entirely!).

This is me about 12 years ago. Women are going to hate me :) Photo: Helmi Flick. The cat is a Maine Coon show cat. The pic was taken at an American cat show.

I also think you probably know the reason why and I'm not referring to the study when I write this. It is coming out of my head because it is rather obvious. Women think that men who like cats might be gay. They sometimes associate gay men with domestic cats. The two go together like apple pie and custard or bangers and mash to some people - misguided people, no? I think they are very wrong because there are lots of men, macho men, alpha male men who also like cats.

However, stereotypically, I have to concede as does everybody else that in general the male of the human species prefers dogs. This is for the simple reason that dogs are pack animals and they look up to the male human as the leader of the pack. Men like this. Especially needy men like this because they want to be admired by anybody and anything including their companion dog.

The trouble with cats is that they are too independent for many men. They don't come to heel or on command. Although they do sometimes if you have a particularly good relationship with them and have gently trained them. But they are more independent and they let their human companion know that. A lot of people like this, particularly independent-minded women.

I think it all comes down to massaging the male ego as I've mentioned. Women don't need this but many men sometimes do. And women looking for men to date tend to participate in the process in a stereotypical way. They still are looking for a man who is physically strong, intellectually strong as well, who can protect them in a very hostile world, make a lot of money and set her up in a beautiful home where she can spend his hard earned cash. That sounds misogynistic and it probably is but it is not meant to be. I'm just presenting a stereotypical image which I have to because the whole study simply reinforces stereotypes.

I don't like it. It just says that nothing has moved on. There is no enlightenment in the modern era. We might as well be back in caves 50,000-100,000 years ago because the human mentality remains the same at a fundamental level in respect of the female's relationship with the male of the species and vice versa.

Declawing: I wish I knew then what I know now (Director Humane Society)

Lora O’Connor, director, Humane Society of Western Montana, Missoula  states that she wishes she knew a whole lot more about declawing when she was in her twenties.  If she had known more about declawing and what it entails when she was in her twenties she would not have had her cat, Vivian, declawed at the time.

I think that is quite a bold and very honest statement for a director of a branch of the Humane Society to make.  I think it carries weight.  I wonder how many other people regret declawing their cat?

I know of one who made the same admission on my website. There must be many people who privately think they were wrong to do it but won't admit it publicly. It is really a question of education, dare I say it. When a person really understands what delawing is about and why it is unnecessary and the sort of damage it does they won't ask a vet to do it again.

There are piles of problems. Many vets mislead clients about the declaw operation. They underplay its consequences and the severity of the operation. They give the impression it is just removing the "nails". Wrong. It is a bone fide amputation x 10.

And many vets botch the operation doing it too fast using a cheap guillotine device and in any case the operation is designed to be a botch. It can't be done properly with repercussions for the cat in extended complications.

I could go on but I won't. I just thought is was nice to see someone in authority working for the Humane Society making a frank admission of a mistake regarding something that has a negative impact on a cat's health and welfare. There are many alternatives to declawing which are far better.