Confusion over What the Pope Said or Didn’t Say about Animals Going to Heaven | PoC

Confusion over What the Pope Said or Didn’t Say about Animals Going to Heaven | PoC

This subject has been chewed over endlessly now by a plethora of Internet news websites and the vast majority of them initially, it appears, made a mistake in stating that Pope Francis made an off-the-cuff remark that animals go to heaven.

To be honest, if you believe in heaven then animals have an equal right to go to heaven as humans.  In fact, you could say animals have a greater right in humans because they are all innocent whereas humans are far from innocent. So this discussion is rather pointless unless you are a devout Catholic and a conservative Catholic.

In any case, the initial stories about Pope Francis appear to be incorrect and the whole thing has been fabricated by the news media not intentionally but in the same way that a message handed from one person to another becomes distorted, gradually.

The beginning of this sorry saga starts with an Italian newspaper which appears to have taken the saying of an earlier Pope who did in fact say that animals go to heaven which was then attributed to the current Pope.

In addition because the current Pope is a very natural person who likes to behave like an ordinary person to make a remark that animals are allowed to go to heaven was believable.  Pope Francis's character encouraged the newspapers to create this story.  It is believable that he would agree that animals can happen.  Perhaps he does believe this but he has not stated it as far as I am aware.

In fact, he has said something which indicates otherwise. He has said that people spend too much money and time on their pets and not enough time on the welfare of vulnerable children or something like that. I can almost agree with that.

In any case, if you click on the link above, at the top of the page I go into the subject into more detail

Domestic cats that look like tigers

There is one particular cat breed which is wholly designed, and which has been bred, to look like a tiger and that breed is the Toyger. This is an amalgamation of the word "toy" and "tiger". Below is a picture of the Toyger. As far as I'm aware, there are no known cat breeds other than the Toyger which are specifically designed to look like the tiger. I expect many people have heard of this breed. It remains relatively rare.

Photo copyright Helmi Flick.

 

I suppose you have to ask the philosophical question as to whether it is foolhardy to try and replicate the tiger in miniaturised form through selective breeding of the domestic cat. From my perspective it is a ridiculous idea but there are many people who would disagree with me. It seems that the policy behind the project is the same the lofty ideal behind the wild cat hybrids: to bring the wild into the living room. The big defect with the Toyger is that they'll walk like tigers because that is dictated by size. And the tiger gait is very much part of the cat.

It is still work in progress many years after beginning. The breeders are even trying to recreate the way the tiger walks. It is far better to adopt a rescue cat and in any case within all domestic cats whether they look like a tiger or not there is a tiger because the behaviour of the domestic cat is a whisker away from that of the wild cat.

Plastic in the Oceans Affects Us All Including Cats

The Mediterranean Sea is the worst of them all in terms of the amount of plastic floating around in it. There are 900,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre in the Mediterranean Sea. Most oceans had up to hundred thousand pieces per square kilometre. Overall, there are 5.2 trillion pieces of plastic in the seas and oceans of the world which weighs a quarter of 1 million tonnes.

These are estimates but they are based on what I consider to be a fairly sound basis. There were 24 expeditions to all oceans and two forms of counting plastic. Plastics were collected in fine nets. The larger pieces of plastic were counted at sea. The observations were conducted at more than 1,500 locations over a six-year period. The results are published in the online journal, Plos One.

What is disturbing is that a lot of the plastic in the seas and oceans is going missing and the conclusion that the scientists have tentatively come to is that the fish and sea birds are eating it. For example, the study stated that 288 million tonnes of plastic was produced in 2012 whereas the estimated weight of the plastic in the oceans was only 0.1% of that total.

A Japanese study conducted in 2012 found that the compounds in plastic had entered the tissue of seabirds. There is a lot of plastic in the sea and it appears to be entering the food chain. If that is the case then both humans and cats may very well be affected by this.

After the Mediterranean Sea the most polluted oceans are in this order: North Pacific (700,000 pieces per square kilometre), North Atlantic (680,000), South Atlantic (481,000), South Pacific (396,000), and the Indian Ocean which had an estimated hundred 161,000 pieces of plastic unit per square kilometre.

The final worrying bit of information in this article is that it takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to break down!

Source: Plus One via The Times

Cat hair loss health tip

I think you will find that the most common reason why cats lose hair is because of over grooming. The question that follows is, "why is the cat over grooming?".

Perhaps the most common reason why cats over groom is because of stress. Stress can be caused by a number of situations and events and it would be impossible to list them all here but perhaps the most typical would be stress caused by other cats in a multi-cat household. Another cause of stress would be the owner being away too much causing separation anxiety. It is up to the owner to figure out what is causing the stress. This will take a certain amount of observation of the behaviour of the cat or cats in their home and should become quite apparent very quickly what is going on.

After stress, the obvious reason why cats over groom is because their skin feels itchy. This leads to another secondary question namely why does the skin feel itchy? The most common reason for this is probably the flea bite allergy. Secondary to that would be irritation caused by other external parasites. After that I would suggest that either airborne or ingested allergens are the cause of the cat's skin feeling itchy.

In conclusion, therefore, if a cat is losing hair in a symmetrical way in easy accessible places then it is due to over grooming due to stress. If there are areas that are missing hair and the skin can be seen to have inflamed areas in it then this could quite likely be the flea bite allergy.

The cat flea is probably the most common cause of cat health problems and it is very important that cat owners ensure that the cat is free of fleas which obviously means for a high level of vigilance especially if the cat goes outside a lot.

Facebook becoming unfashionable among younger users

This is hardly about cats but it is, perhaps, indirectly about cats. Internet users appear to be falling out of love with Facebook and Twitter. This may be because the majority of users on Facebook are younger people and they have taken to using new services such as Instagram and Snapchat.

Ofcom, the regulator of telecoms and media in the UK, said that the portion of people who checked their social networks weekly had fallen from 65% a year earlier to 56% in October 2014.

Apparently Facebook and Twitter are also on the wane in the United States and Japan together with China. The rate of decline in those countries is slower than in the UK.

It appears that Facebook has become unfashionable with younger people which indicates that it is more fashionable with older people and with respect to this it may be the case that middle-aged and older cat lovers now spend more time on Facebook than they did on cat websites.

A lot of Websites have a Facebook presence and it is almost as if that the people who would have visited the website now visit Facebook instead. The idea of a website having a large Facebook presence is to promote the website but the danger is that people migrate to Facebook instead.

The way Facebook has dealt with this is is to buy up companies such as Instagram, which appeal to the younger market.

Instagram, which is a photo sharing network, say that they have 300 million users which overtakes the number of Twitter users (284 million).