Thursday, 2 April 2009

Election Fraud Kills the Tiger

Indirectly but surely, election fraud kills the tiger in India and Asia. I have already mentioned in a post called, cats and corruption how corruption in government and government agencies in India severely diminishes the effectiveness of any strategies in relation to the preservation of the tiger. That post was not critical of the fact that there is corruption. I was simply quoting people living in Asia. It is the people of India who are critical of the corruption. For me, it is more a sadness that it continues to happen and the tiger population continues to decline.

A recent Time news article (2nd April 2009, "Election payouts were charity, not bribes") supports what I have said, not directly, of course, in relation to wildcats but they quote as an example, Manish Tiwani a spokesman for Congress who told the Times that it was "absolutely preposterous [that it was happening]". Mr Tiwani clearly believes that one of the top leaders of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Party, Mr Jaswat Singh, has been openly trying to bribe his way into Parliament two weeks before the elections.

This seems to be symptomatic of Asian politics and it is in Asia where the tiger has its home. Where there is corruption on what seems to be a significant scale they is little hope of protecting the tiger as big business is invloved in the export of tiger body parts. Where there is business there is money and politicians migrate towards money and business to serve self interest only. And frankly, the tiger gets in the way of making money unless it is being used to make money. It could be argued that the tiger is a financial burden unless used as a supply of body parts in breach of CITES. CITES seems to be openly breached.

It has been claimed that the criminalisation of Indian politics began in the 1980s when the dominance of Congress crumbled and regional groups started to determine the composition of fragile coalition governments. The competition to get votes became tougher and this lead to any means possible to get elected including fraud. The criminal courts are hopelessly inefficient so even if someone is charged with election fraud or vote rigging it may take up to 30 years for the case to be concluded.

In India it seems that the lawmakers are also lawbreakers and under these circumstances it is very hard to make real progress on what might be considered a secondary matter the preservation of the wild tiger in India. Ultimately election fraud kills the tiger.



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Economic Euthanasia of Cats

The economic euthanasia of cats (and dogs) is causing concern. Economic euthanasia means putting down a cat because people can't afford the vet's bills when their cat is ill or injured. Some people can't even afford the bill to euthanize their cat so they go to a cat shelter where they do it for free I guess. This sounds terrible. What is also happening is that optimal treatment as recommended by the vet is being refused and a lesser form of treatment requested. Obviously the second level treatment is not as good but it is the best that can be afforded.

This must all translate into more companion cat deaths and/or suffering. I was down at the G20 Summit demonstrations on behalf of the cat a coupe of days ago because the economic crisis is hurting not only people but companion cats. There have been significant increases in shelters being asked to euthanise cats (and dogs) because of the financial crisis. It must be a huge worry for people because as soon as their cat is ill they will have to decide what to do. And this will end up with delayed treatment and an agonising decision sometimes for concerned people.

People who keep cats and dogs are having to play God. The economic euthanasia of cats is really about that. As usual it all boils down to money. I wonder if people will be more wary in the future when deciding whether to keep a companion cat. If so, that might, in the long term, be a good thing as it would gradually have an effect on the overpopulation of cats (if one believes that there is a cat overpopulation problem).

What would I do if my cat suffered a serious injury or illness and the vet's bill was over £1,000? I have not pet insurance as I don't believe in it. I would pay but there would come a time when I would have to make that awful decision whether to to let her go. These are bad times for the domestic cat, not individual cats but as a whole things are worse. Sometimes, I would extremely rarely people simply abandon their cat. How could anyone do that?

See also how the oldest cat shelter organisation in Britain lost £11 million.



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Kitten Taming

I have just received an email from Amazon promoting a book called "Kitten Taming". I just don't get it, sorry. If we adopt or even buy a kitten we should expect this animal to behave like a kitten and we should expect and look forward to an adult cat to also behave like an adult cat. Isn't that why we adopted a kitten in the first place?

A well socialized and healthy kitten (balanced personality for a domestic cat) will use the litter naturally. All the other stuff such as tearing around the home and leaving scratch marks is all part of having a kitten. Why else have one? If any training is required it should be directed at us. To train us to start accepting companion cats as companion cats.

Cats Protection Creating Live Rehoming

The famous and venerable cat rescue organization in the UK, Cats Protection are creating live rehoming pages for their main site. This will be a searchable database of individual cats. The Communications Manager, James Blake, says that, "The functionality of the site will allow users to search for cats by age, breed, colour etc and will offer a postcode search facility."

James responded to a request from me as to whether Cats Protection would consider adapting the Petfinder.com model, which is well known throughout America by people looking to adopt a rescue cat. Petfinder work with independent cat rescue organisations to allow them to present to Americans, on a very active and interactive website, cats that are in their care. People can search for and see individual cats then make contact with the shelter concerned.

At present Cats Protection simply lists their shelters and the person seeking to adopt a cat contacts the center by phone and then by visiting. Of course they has to be a meeting between cat and human at some stage but initially the process can be facilitated. The current system at Cats Protection is cumbersome and an old fashioned method. In the modern world of the expanding and improving internet it could be argued that this is not good enough particularly as Cats Protection is a very wealthy organisation by cat rescue standards. Or they were until they lost £11 of precious donor's money that was invested in bankrupt Icelandic banks (see Cats Protection Organisation for more on this story). They may be able to recover some of this but I have serious doubts whether they ever will, which is tragic for homeless cats. As I recall the money was earmarked for 2 new shelters, which are now on hold. That in itself means that cats that could have been rehomed are now possibly being euthanized.

Anyway, I am pleased to hear from James that Cats Protection are creating live rehoming pages. This will be a major step in the successful rehoming of cats. The next question is how long will this take and when will it be up and running? I'll return to this is about 6 months and see!

This is a video they produced about neutering your cat:





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Dali Atomicus Incorporated Three Flying Cats

Dali Atomicus by Salvidor Dali and Philippe Halsman
Dali Atomicus Incorporated Three Flying Cats

This very famous photograph incorporates three flying cats and is by the very well know photographer Philippe Halsman (2 May 1906 Riga, Latvia - 25 June 1979 New York City). He is described as a portrait photographer by the Wikipedia author. As I remember he also took dramatic fashion photographs. He was a fine technician, setting up his photographs meticulously.

Now cats interest me! This is the main website: Pictures of Cats.org. I tend to get a bit upset when I see cats thrown through the air for the sake of "art", albeit (for me) very good art indeed. I like Salvador Dali's work and the work of Mr Halsman but I don't like seeing three flying cats, at a considerable height, especially when it took 28 takes to get things right. This photograph was the result of a collaboration between these two artists that lasted many years, I understand.

Please note that the large heading picture is an unretouched photo. The final version is the smaller picture to the right of this page.

You can see the person (Halsman's wife, I believe) holding the chair on the left and the strings holding up the easel and painting, for example. The concept was to explore idea of suspension. Halsman also became well known for jumping pictures, another form of suspension. He produced a book of 178 photographs of celebrities jumping. He felt (correctly) that in jumping a person's mask is thrown away as he or she is concentrating on jumping successfully for the camera.

Back to those cats! They were thrown with the water. Remember this was well before CGI (computer graphic images). It was all manual and natural. It looks to me as if the top cat was in a bucket of water and thrown with the water, while the other two were thrown by someone else from a dry start! Cats have wonderful self-righting abilities as we know but this looks a bit brutal to me. I would expect the cats to have been alright, however.

The water takes an interesting route and the picture in the easel was retouched in.



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Dali Atomicus Incorporated Three Flying Cats - the photos are in the public domain in the EU and America and other countries because copyright was not renewed. The top picture was downloaded from Wikimedia - user: Trialsanderrors and the lower final finished version is from Flickr (presume also copyright free) by monkeyc.net.

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