A Lynch Mob Comprised of Dishonest Eggheads from the University of Lincoln Issues Another Scurrilous Broadside Against Cats by Declaring That They Do Not Need Guardians in Order to Safeguard Their Fragile Lives

The University of Lincoln: An Idyllic Hangout for a Den of Cat-Haters

"We do not reject that cats may have social preferences, nor that some cats form this type of attachment in certain circumstances, nor do we wish to imply that cats do not form some form of affectionate social relationship or bond with their owners (a broader sense of the term 'attachment'), only that the relationship with the primary caregiver is not typically characterized by a preference for that individual based on them (sic) providing safety and security to the cat."
-- Daniel Simon Mills and Alice Potter

There always has been good money in the naked exploitation and abuse of cats as research subjects and since there are so many of them thousands can go missing without hardly anyone ever noticing that they are gone. Plus, their docility and utter defenseless makes them ideal targets for thoroughly evil professors to exploit to the hilt.

As a result, vivisectors have been having a field day at their expense and laughing all the way to the bank for centuries. In desperate need of some sort of rationale in order to justify their en masse feline eradication schemes, ornithologists and wildlife biologists likewise have hopped on the bandwagon and now can be counted upon to annually gush forth with a steady stream of totally bogus scientific papers that depict members of the species as devils incarnate, sans only the horns, long tails, and pitchforks.

Being totally lacking in objectivity, honesty, and tact, these inveterate cat-haters are easily unmasked for what they are and their scurrilous screeds debunked and relegated to the rubbish heaps from which they originated. At the University of Lincoln in Lincolnshire, however, a far more insidious rat pack of feline defamers and maligners is hard at work on a long-term project aimed at manufacturing a scientific foundation for divesting both domestic and homeless cats of the few hard-fought protections of the law and the humane considerations that their supporters only recently have won for them.

For example, on September 2nd the school's Daniel Simon Mills and Alice Potter published in the journal PLOS ONE a paper entitled "Domestic Cats (Felis silvestris catus) Do Not Show Signs of Secure Attachment to Their Owners" which was the end product of their taking of eighteen domestic cats and running them through a modified version of the Ainsworth Strange Situation Test (SST) that was developed in the 1970's by psychologist Mary Ainsworth in order to study how infants reacted when their mothers left them alone in a room with perfect strangers. Over the years the test has been improvised in order to study attachment issues in chimpanzees, dogs, hand-reared wolves and, of course, cats.

Over the course of a seven-week period between May and July of 2012 the researchers subjected the cats to eighteen, three-minute episodes whereby they either were locked in a room by themselves, with their owners, or with strangers. The goal of these exercises was to assess the amount of contact sought by the cats, their level of passive behavior, and any visible signs of distress that they exhibited when their owners left the room.

From these observations, they first concluded that cats do not suffer from separation anxiety. "Previous research has suggested that some cats show signs of separation anxiety when left alone by their owners, in the same way that dogs do, but the results of our study show that they are in fact much more independent than canine companions," Mills told the University of Lincoln in a September 3rd press release. (See "Standing on Their Own Four Feet: New Research Shows Why (sic) Cats Are More Independent Than Dogs.") "It seems that what we interpret as separation anxiety might actually be signs of frustration."

Secondly, the researchers reject the notion that cats are securely attached to their owners. "Although cats vocalized more when the owner rather than the stranger left the cat with the other individual, there was no other evidence consistent with the interpretation of the bond between a cat and its owner meeting the requirement of a secure attachment," they wrote in the Abstract to the PLOS ONE article cited supra.

From that, Mills and Potter concluded that cats do not look to their owners to provide them with safety and security. "We do not reject that cats may have social preferences, nor that some cats form this type of attachment in certain circumstances, nor do we wish to imply that cats do not form some form of affectionate social relationship or bond with their owners (a broader sense of the term 'attachment'), only that the relationship with the primary caregiver is not typically characterized by a preference for that individual based on them (sic) providing safety and security to the cat," they summarized in the PLOS ONE article.

Aside from their final product being cloaked in enough psychological mumbo jumbo, statistical gobbledygook, and tortured prose so as to satisfy the undiscriminating intellectual palate of almost any high-strutting, supercilious buffoon with a Ph.D., the minuscule fifty-four minutes that Mills and Potter spent observing the cats as they ran them through the rather limited and crabbed strictures of the SST is hardly sufficient in order to support the far-reaching conclusions that they purport to have uncovered. Even they slyly admit that the SST may not be suitable for studying feline attachment issues. "An alternative explanation for these results might be that the modified SST used here is not an appropriate instrument for measuring attachment, and the finding that the behavior of cats appears to be very variable (and unreliable across time) may have wider implications for those using behavioral assessments to evaluate cats, such as for rehoming," they added.

"Don't use cats," an anonymous science professor once told a student. "They'll screw up your data." In hindsight, it is just too bad that Mills and Potter did not have enough bon sens to have heeded that advice.

Secondly, in respect to the rehoming of cats there is hardly anything new in their cautionary note in that Michael Moyer of PennVet in Philadelphia and others have long maintained that cats do not belong in shelters in the first place. Why, just shanghaiing them off the street and then falsely imprisoning them behind bars scares them, for good reason, nearly to death.

The stress and trauma that accompanies such a nightmarish experience in turn quite often renders them temporarily anti-social and that deplorable situation is not helped by staffers who poke pencils and pens at them in a thoroughly dishonest and ludicrous attempt to assess their sociability for adoption. The shelter environment also sickens them by allowing latent viruses to emerge and spread.

Placing their litter boxes alongside their food dishes also distresses them as do the disinfectants that are used in order to clean their cages. (See The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 11, 2011, "Shelter Shock. Cats Can Get Sick from the Stress. One Proposed Remedy? Keep Them Out.")

In addition to the fatal flaws relating to both the smallness of their sample and the SST, Mills and Potter are guilty of failing to realize that all so-called scientific research must take into consideration the constraints imposed by time, place, and circumstances. The commission of such an egregious error is certainly nothing new in that ornithologists, wildlife biologists, and other inveterate cat-haters have been engaging in the same dishonest modus operandi for years when it comes to their studies of alleged feline predation.

By doing so they intentionally neglect, inter alia, the petits faits that most cats do not hunt at all and even if they did there would not be very much for those that live in the snow belt to eat during the wintertime. None of that ever has in the least deterred them from ludicrously concluding that cats kill billions of birds and small mammals each year and therefore must be systematically exterminated.

Mills and Potter additionally are guilty of failing to realize that cats, like all animals, have different personalities, histories, and inclinations. Pythagoras and Aristotle, just to name two, understood that thousands of years ago and for the academic community to so stubbornly persist in denying it can only be attributed to a combination of extreme prejudice and blatant dishonesty. To put the matter succinctly, just as it would be idiotic for any serious investigator to maintain that all individuals behave in a like manner, so too is it the case with cats.

Much more to the point, whether or not cats suffer from separation anxiety, are securely attached to their owners, and look to them for safety and security depends largely upon their breeding, histories, personalities, and circumstances. For instance, cats that are robbed of their sex lives by sterilization, divested of their abilities to climb and hunt by being cruelly declawed, cooped up indoors all by themselves, and made to be fully dependent upon their owners for both their survival and enrichment are more likely to not only suffer from separation anxiety but also to look upon their caretakers as the only stars in the firmament.

Under such utterly appalling circumstances, they most often are never allowed to learn a blessed thing about the outside world, other cats, and individuals other than their caretakers. They accordingly are in even worse shape than those individuals who spend their entire lives in caves like the one described by Plato in Book One of The Republic. (See Cat Defender post of February 2, 2015 entitled "Cruelly Declawed and Locked Up Indoors for All of His Life, Nicky Is Suddenly Thrust into the Bitter Cold and Snow for Twenty-One Consecutive Days with Predictably Tragic Results.")

By contrast, cats that grow up outdoors and learn early on how to hunt and cope with other cats and animals, the elements, and people are forced by necessity to be far more self-sufficient and independent than those that are cruelly denatured. Mills and Potter, however, give short shrift to these rather obvious differences.

Daniel Simon Mills

For instance, the cats used in their study were domestics and all of them except one had access to the outdoors. The authors are however conspicuously silent as to just how much access they were permitted and as a consequence that could have been anything from roaming at will to being confined in a small garden for brief periods of time each day.

They even appear to reject the notion that there is any substantive difference between indoor and outdoor cats as far as questions of attachment are concerned. "Although, we accept it is possible, if unlikely, that the typical relationship between owners and their cats in Mexico is different to that which generally occurs between owners and their cats in the United Kingdom, or that there is a difference in the relationship between owners and cats kept indoors...and cats with outdoor access," they state in the PLOS ONE article.

Their limited research, however, does not in any way support such a conclusion. Furthermore, they fail to take into account the vastly different amounts of love, nurturing, instruction, and guidance that owners provide to their cats. For example, it is entirely conceivable that cats which have been rescued from abusers, dogs, and other enemies by their owners might come to rely upon them for their personal safety.

Overall, Mills and Potter have failed to adequately address a wide range of variables in the cat-human relationship and as such their research boils down to little more than prejudice and opinion. In fact, their misguided foray into the cat thicket begins and culminates in rank prejudice.

"The domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus) has recently passed (sic) the dog as the most popular companion animal in Europe," is how they begin their PLOS ONE article. "Ease of care, ability to live in a small residence and the capacity to cope with being left alone for long periods of time have been reported as reasons for this popularity. Indeed, some have suggested that cats are 'ideal' companions for owners who work long hours."

From that resounding endorsement of cruelly incarcerating cats indoors and treating them with abject neglect, Mills proceeds to conjure up an old evolutionary myth as additional support for his initial prejudice. "If you think about it, why should cats depend on people for safety and security?" he rhetorically asked the readers of Live Science to ponder on September 4th. (See "Sorry, Cat Lovers: Felix Doesn't Need You.") "Cats are naturally very independent hunters."

Au contraire, even footloose cats are not anywhere near the lonely, solitary hunters that he imagines. For example, they often hunt together, share prey, nurture each other's kittens, play together, groom each other, and sleep in piles in order to keep warm during cold weather.

Most glaring of all, he totally overlooks that they are drawn together as devout worshipers of the great god Eros. To sum up, just as no man is an island unto himself, so too is it the case with cats.

The closest that Mills and Potter come to even admitting that these phenomena exist is when they grudgingly acknowledge that cats groom each other, rub noses, and sometimes form "cooperative colonies of related females."

Even if researchers one day should be able to substantiate some of Mills and Potter's findings, that in no way would alter the conclusion that their research is not only irrelevant but dangerous and defamatory to boot. That is because all cats desperately need caretakers whether or not they look to them to provide for their personal safety.

In fact, their total ignorance of the machinations of their sworn enemies makes it imperative that their owners and caretakers provide for their personal safety. It often has been observed that a cat has the intellectual development of a four-year-old child and no responsible and caring parent would expect it to be able to protect itself and the same rationale is even more applicable in the case of cats.

Besides needing to be supplied with food, water, shelter, veterinary care, and companionship, they desperately require owners who are willing to go to the mat in order to protect them. Specifically, their fragile lives must be safeguarded against the evil designs of motorists, poisoners, cat-haters, animals such as dogs, raccoons and coyotes, fur and meat traffickers, Animal Control officers, shelters, vivisectors, and eggheads like Mills and Potter.

The existence of those harsh realities has not in any way dissuaded the capitalist media, however, from seizing upon Mills and Potter's one-sided palaver in order to fallaciously declare that cats do not need humans. In addition to the headline in Live Science, the one in The Telegraph's September 3rd edition screamed "Cats Do Not Need Their Owners, Scientists Conclude.")

Science Alert jumped on the bandwagon September 4th by proclaiming "Your Cat Doesn't Really Need You Around After All, Study Finds." Like sheep to the slaughter, an article posted the same day on CNET declared "Cats Don't Need Their Owners, Researchers Say."

The occasionally reliable National Post of Toronto could not resist the temptation to join the siren call when on September 4th it followed suit by idiotically caroling "Your Cat Doesn't Love You: Science." Always on the lookout to put the screws to cats, the slimy and disreputable Washington Post declared on that same date that "Your Cat Might Not Really Care About You, Study Suggests."

Their irresponsible reporting was nothing, however, compared to the utter nonsense that flowed from the lips of so-called cat expert Celia Haddon who, amazingly enough, has published around forty books including at least nine concerning cats. "This study shows that cats do not need their humans to feel safe, they don't depend on us, they look after themselves," she blew long and hard to The Telegraph in the article cited supra. "And abandoned or feral cats get on just fine on their own. Cats are not pack animals, they don't depend on other cats. So they are not going to depend on their owners."

She is not only off her trolley about domesticated cats but she is positively loony when it comes to those that are homeless. Even those that live in managed colonies where they are supplied with food, water, and shelter still need around-the-clock armed security guards in order to protect them from their myriad of enemies.

Cats that are totally on their own stand little chance of surviving because, first of all, food is too difficult to obtain. "Even a cat, as an animal known to have nine lives, cannot live without food," George Henry Borrow pointed out the obvious in his 1862 travel book, Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery"

Moreover, even so much as scavenging in trash cans can kill them. (See Cat Defender posts of September 24, 2015, January 16, 2008, and December 18, 2007 entitled, respectively, "Henry Is Saved by Cats Protection after Swallowing Part of a Plastic Trash Bag but His Fate Would Have Been Entirely Different if He Had Fallen into the Clutches of the Mercenaries at PennVet," "From a Mason Jar to Death Row: Homeless New Jersey Cat Is Once Again Fighting for His Life," and "Wild Oats Survives Nineteen Days with a Peanut Butter Jar Stuck on Her Head.")

There additionally are a myriad of insuperable cataclysmic events that force all cats to rely upon their owners and others for their deliverance and most prominently among them is war. (See Cat Defender posts of August 10, 2006, October 12, 2006, November 14, 2006, and July 16, 2008 entitled, respectively, "Death Toll Mounts for Cats and Other Animals Slaughtered and Left Homeless in Lebanon by Israeli War Criminals," "A Few Hundred Cats and Dogs Are Airlifted Out of Lebanon but Cluster Bombs and an Oil Slick Continue to Kill Animals and Marine Life," "The Military Is Killings Cats and Dogs by the Tens of Thousands as Imperialistic America Attempts to Conquer the World," and "Targeted for Elimination by the American War Machine and Cheney's Henchmen, Baghdad's Cats Are Befriended by an English Mercenary.")

Cats likewise are pretty much helpless when they become enveloped in natural disasters. (See Cat Defender post of December 19, 2005 entitled "At Least One-Hundred-Thousand Cats and Dogs Were Killed by Katrina Along the Gulf Coast.")

Celia Haddon

Cats also require human assistance in order to survive wildfires whether they are caused by arson, carelessness, or lightning strikes. (See Cat Defender posts of July 3, 2008, February 21, 2013, and December 13, 2013 entitled, respectively, "Phoenix Is Severely Burned but Still Manages to Save One of Her Kittens from the Humboldt Fire," "Orphaned by a Wildfire and Then Rescued by a Forest Ranger, Chips Is Bracing for a Frightening Return to the Wild," and "Chips Is Abandoned in the Perilous California Wild Where Her Fur Alone Is Worth $700 to Trappers.")

While it is quite obvious that both Haddon and the capitalist media have carried Mills and Potter's rather meager findings way too far, neither of the authors in post-publication interviews has publicly contradicted their expanded interpretation of their research. In fact, they appear to have acquiesced to such a view.

"It (hers and Mills' research) suggests that if a cat is scared or has been involved in an incident it's not going to want to cuddle, it's going to want to go and hide, so owners need to provide a place for that to happen," Potter opined to The Telegraph. "Likewise an owner shouldn't worry if their cat doesn't want to be comforted. It's just doing what comes naturally."

That arguably is the most asinine advice that anyone ever could give to a cat owner. First of all, cats are extremely adept at concealing not only their emotions but especially illnesses. As a result, by the time that an owner finally realizes that something is amiss it often is too late to even save the cat's life.

Consequently, cats need to be given a good once-over at least twice a day. That way parasites can be removed from their fur and skin and minor scrapes and bruises treated.

Abrupt changes in mood, diet, and the use of the litter box can signal that something is terribly wrong. It also must always be borne in mind that cats not only go off by themselves in order to hide but also to die.

Most outrageous of all, Mills and Potter's research is a reaffirmation of the age-old prejudice that views cats as being something considerably less than sentient and caring beings and as such to be totally unworthy of society's love, respect, care and, above all, the protection of its anti-cruelty statutes. For instance in his 1906 Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defined a cat as "a soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle."

Across the pond, it has been Rudyard Kipling's 1902 defamatory essay entitled "The Cat That Walked by Himself" that continues to this very day to be the most insidious poison contaminating the minds of the English public. For example, after feasting her jaundiced peepers on Mills and Potter's baloney, The Telegraph's Sarah Knapton could not refrain from moronically thundering, "Rudyard Kipling was right."

Divested of all its contrived logic and scholarly pretenses, Mills and Potter's paper amounts to little more than a modern-day rehash of Kipling's outrageous lies and prejudices. In that vein, it never must be forgotten that his ailurophobic rant sanctified feline abuse as the solemn duty of every man and dog on the planet. Quite obviously, Mills and Potter now have assumed that mantle for themselves.

On all of those issues Mills, Potter, Bierce, and Kipling are simply wrong. First of all, cats are every bit as intelligent, loyal, and loving as dogs and other animals. "The cat has too much spirit to have no heart," is the way that Ernest Menaul once put it.

Secondly, they are capable of extraordinary acts of compassion and gratitude and that is considerably more than can be said for most humans. (See Cat Defender posts of March 27, 2010, April 20, 2012, April 21, 2012, May 18, 2009, April 18, 2009, and April 11, 2009 entitled, respectively, "Taken In Off the Street by a Compassionate Woman, Sumo Returns the Favor by Alerting Her to a Cancerous Growth on Her Bosum," "Grateful for Being Provided with a Loving Home, Fidge in Turn Saves Her Mistress's Life by Alerting Her to a Malignant Growth on Her Breast," "Adopted from a Shelter Only Hours Previously, Pudding Saves His Rescuer's Life by Awakening Her from a Diabetic Seizure," "Elijah Teaches Himself How to Detect Low Blood Sugar Levels in His Guardians and Others," "Blackie Stays Up Nights Monitoring His Guardian's Breathing for Emphysema Attacks," and "Tiger Saves His Owner's Life by Alerting Him to a Cancerous Growth on His Left Lung.")

Thirdly, it has been medically substantiated that owning a cat increases life-expectancies, alleviates stress, and reduces the likelihood of heart attacks by forty per cent. Even something as mundane as simply holding a purring cat in one's lap has been known to help with bone and muscle repair, pain relief, and dyspnea.

"If you put a cat and a bunch of broken bones in the same room, the bones will heal," an old Sprichwort maintains. (See "Four Brilliant Ways Cats Are Secretly Helping Their Owners Live Healthier Lives," April 1, 2015, at www.upworthy.com.)

Fourthly, cats quite often even risk their own lives in order to save those of their guardians. (See Cat Defender post of April 23, 2007 entitled "Winnie Saves Indiana Family of Three from Dying of Carbon Monoxide.")

Fifthly, if they appear to be aloof and standoffish that is because after millenniums of simply horrendous abuse they have more than ample justification for their wariness. Besides, going one's own way and minding one's own business is not, contrary to what most people believe, either a crime or a valid excuse for failing to enforce the anti-cruelty statutes as they pertain to cats.

This is by no means the first time in recent memory that researchers at the University of Lincoln have concocted misleading research to the detriment of the species. About a year ago Mills and Potter's colleague, Sarah Ellis, placed tracking devices on around one-hundred cats residing in both urban and rural areas and from the minuscule amount of data that she collected concluded that city dwellers should not be allowed to own more than one cat.

"As humans, the more we love something, the more we want it and the greater the number of it we want," she argued to London's Independent on September 29, 2014. (See "Expert Urges Cat Lovers to Own Just One Animal Each.") "We love cats therefore we're not content with one -- we want two or three or four and if our neighbor feels the same way and his neighbor feels the same, we suddenly have a huge problem -- three households with nine cats."

Statements such as those demonstrate the dreadful consequences that accrue whenever pop psychology is combined with abysmal ignorance. First of all, it is doubtful that very many individuals truly desire to own more than either one or two cats.

Rather, they wind up with a houses full of them simply because they either cannot afford the exorbitant fees that veterinarians charge in order to sterilize them or they compassionately take in homeless cats in order to save them from the knackers. Contrary to what the overzealous Ellis postulates, caring for cats is an entirely different matter from either chasing shekels, owning multiple automobiles, or acquiring eighteen different diplomas from various degree mills.

Sarah Ellis

Secondly, it is utterly preposterous for her to maintain that a trio of families owning three cats each is a "huge problem." Even a single owner with nine cats would not pose much of a dilemma so long as that individual possessed the prerequisite money, space, and savoir-faire in order to properly care for them.

Nevertheless, Ellis goes on to declare that keeping more than one cat in an urban setting leads to both unresolvable territorial disputes and psychological harm brought on by stress. "Although we feel really happy because we've rescued them and given them a home, we've actually created a situation where they are not happy at all."

In making such uninformed and unsupported far-reaching conclusions Ellis is guilty of committing the same blunders as Mills and Potter. That is because cats have different personalities and reside with all types of owners in a variety of abodes. She accordingly does not possess either the knowledge or the empirical evidence to back up her hackneyed opinions.

Secondly, even if territorial disputes and stressful situations should develop, knowledgeable owners know how to alleviate them. Thirdly, she is completely silent as what is to become of the millions of cats that she wants to evict from multi-feline households. It does not take much imagination, however, to divine the cruel fate that she has in mind for them.

Ellis' inhumane proposal was quickly debunked by Celia Hammond of the Celia Hammond Animal Trust of London. "This is an academic view," she told The Independent. "Those involved in rehoming cats on a daily basis know this is ridiculous."

She then proceeded to methodically expose Ellis' lies one-by-one, starting with her and her colleagues' assertion that cats are solitary animals. "We observe that the cats (those that are homeless) live as large, extended families, kittens grow up within the family group and mother cats will even rear each other's kittens," she stated October 2, 2014 in an untitled article posted on her organization's Facebook page. "These cats are not solitary animals and do not choose to leave the group to live singly."

She next went on to explain that it is precisely human intervention, as opposed to nature, that makes some cats less able to get along with their mates. "Taking a kitten away from its own family and raising it with a human family but without the company of other cats will alter its behavior toward members of its own species when it meets them again," she added in the Facebook article. "We do have cats in our care who prefer to be single, this is generally because they have previously been raised singly and lived as an only cat with a previous owner, for these cats plenty of human company is essential."

Next, and perhaps most important of all, Hammond flatly rejected Ellis' claim that multiple-cat households are detrimental to the health of their members; au contraire, they are beneficial to it. "Particularly in today's society when many cat owners work long hours or cats are kept indoors only in flats it is particularly important that they have each other's company otherwise they can suffer loneliness, frustration and boredom which can develop into behavioral problems," she added. "For anyone else considering offering a home to a cat, particularly people who work or lead busy lifestyles we would strongly recommend a related or bonded pair of cats."

Finally, she pointed out the immeasurable harm that Ellis' proposal would do if it were implemented. "(It is) an opinion which could lead to more single cats leading lonely lives in flats or where owners work full-time," she concluded. "It will also make it harder for rescue organizations to rehome bonded pairs of cats that love each other and want to be together."

Incidentally, Ellis reviewed Mills and Potter's manuscript and added in her own two cents' worth. Based upon the way that she runs around peddling her services to seemingly every cat defamer on the planet her behavior recalls to mind novelist Pete Dexter's characterization of Jonathan Yardley, the book editor of the Washington Post, as "a worn-out old whore." (See Salon, March 9, 2007, "Street Writing Man.")

It thus would appear that Mills, Potter, and Ellis are engaged in a contest to determine not only which one of them can lasso in the largest amount of research money but to simultaneously make the biggest imbecile out of either himself or herself in the process. That in no way is meant to imply that they are stupid, only that they surely must hate cats with a passion if they were willing to pony up the US$1,350 that PLOS ONE charges hack scholars in order to publish their long-winded spiels.

As someone who teaches veterinary medicine, Mills obviously knows better and that accordingly makes it more than likely that his spurious research is attributable to the long-held disdain that members of his ignoble profession always have harbored in their malignant bosoms for cats. Potter's complicity in his shenanigans can be explained in large part by her affiliation as a cat behaviorist with the thoroughly discredited RSPCA. (See Daily Mail articles of December 30, 2012 and December 6, 2014 entitled, respectively, "Revealed: RSPCA Destroys Half of the Animals That It Rescues -- Yet Thousands Are Completely Healthy" and "RSPCA Forced to Apologize for Wrongly Putting Down Cat Belonging to Family It Accused of Cruelty in Bungled Prosecution," plus Cat Defender posts of June 5, 2007 and October 23, 2010 entitled, respectively, "RSPCA's Unlawful Seizure and Senseless Killing of Mork Leaves His Sister, Mindy, Brokenhearted and His Caretakers Devastated" and "RSPCA Steals and Executes Nightshift Who Was His Elderly Caretakers's Last Surviving Link to Her Dead Husband.")

Far from being an isolated case, the University of Lincoln is merely one of countless institutions of higher learning to recently become engulfed in the cat hating and defamation craze that is sweeping college campuses all around the world like a wildfire out of control. (See Cat Defender post of July 18, 2011 entitled "Evil Professors Have Transformed College Campuses into Hotbeds of Hatred Where Cats Routinely Are Vilified, Horribly Abused, and Systematically Killed.")

Perhaps most reprehensible of all has been the traitorous conduct of those individuals who lent their cats to Mills, Potter, and Ellis in order to be used as guinea pigs during the course of their totally bogus research. As far as they are concerned, nothing short of being dipped in hot oil and then hurled headfirst down an abandoned mine shaft will suffice as an apt punishment. The species already has far too many enemies without owners selling its members down the river to those whose only goal is to do them harm.

This is not merely an obscure tempest in an academic teapot; on the contrary, there is a considerable amount at stake here and judging from both the willingness of cat owners to cooperate with the researchers coupled with the capitalist media's resounding endorsement of their bogus findings, there can be little doubt that the most outrageous lies ever concocted about cats count for considerably more than does the unvarnished truth. Moreover, that is especially the case if they are dressed up in scholarly outerwear and emanate from a mainstay of the intellectual establishment, such as the University of Lincoln.

They also enjoy a life-expectancy that surpasses even that of cats. "One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives," Mark Twain astutely observed in his 1894 novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Finally, anyone who either understands anything about cats or cares so much as a jot about their welfare realizes only too well just how wrongheaded and potentially damaging are the lies so profusely disseminated by the Lincoln gang. First of all, the goal should be to inspire owners to be more caring and protective, not less, of their cats.

That includes above all protecting them from their enemies. Furthermore, caring owners do not abandon their cats under any circumstances and they most assuredly do not have them killed off once they become either sick, elderly, too expensive to care for, or their presence is not longer desired.

As far as those that are homeless are concerned, the movement to protect them has come too far to be derailed by either the Lincoln gang or numskulls like Haddon. They are richly entitled to food, water, veterinary care, shelter, and armed protection. Trumping all of those concerns, their inalienable right to live must be respected and the anti-cruelty statutes stringently enforced against all those who abuse them.

On each and every one of these issues, the University of Lincoln has declared, either explicitly or inexplicitly, its opposition and, accordingly, its mendacious and defamatory professors must be exposed and confronted. The school also is in desperate need of a new motto because Libertas per Sapeintiam is absolutely the last thing on this earth that it either represents or is promoting, especially with the likes of Mills, Potter, and Ellis amongst its ranks.

Photos: Chris Goddard of the University of Lincoln via Wikipedia (campus), University of Lincoln (Mills and Ellis), and Macmillan Publishing Company (Haddon).