Thrown Out in the Trash by His Owners and Then Condemned to Die by the Veterinarians, Asher Is Saved in His Darkest Hour by the RSPCA in Its Finest Hour
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| Asher Was in Bad Shape When He Was Fished Out of the Trash |
"(We have) twenty-four to forty-eight hours to try and pull this boy back from the brink."
-- the Stourbridge RSPCA
In the eternal war between ailurophobes and cats, the former have all the advantages. They are perfidious, strike without warning, utilize countless weapons and poisons, and they are utterly merciless.
It accordingly is all but impossible for any unsuspecting cat, no matter how intrepid and resourceful, to survive even one attempt that is made upon its life by a determined human, but within the short time span of only a few days an extremely fortunate fifteen-year-old black-colored tom named Asher was able to have overcome two such attempts. That is even more remarkable when his advanced years and rapidly deteriorating health are taken into consideration.
At this stage of his life he should have been at home taking life easy with a family that not only cherished his existence but loved him to bits but that is hardly how that things turned out for him. Rather, his guardians stuffed him into a pink Peppa Pig Cooler Bag and then deposited him in a trash receptacle.
It has not been revealed but, presumably, he was either bound or the bag was sealed. Otherwise, he in all probability would have been capable of freeing himself and thus climbing out of the rubbish bin.
By and by other residents of the area passed his way and unwittingly piled their own bags of trash on top of him, thus foreclosing all conceivable escape routes to him. How long that he was forced to have remained in that terrible predicament waiting to be either suffocated to death, crushed to smithereens by a trash compactor, or incinerated at a waste disposal plant is not known but likely it was not any longer than a few days at most considering that refuse is usually collected at least once or twice a week in most urban locales.
Eventually the garbagemen who collect the trash in Kidderminster, a textile town of fifty-seven-thousand residents twenty-seven kilometers southwest of Birmingham in Worcestershire, the West Midlands, came by on November 8th and, one way or the other, tumbled to Asher's presence. Exactly how that came about is another mystery.
Nowadays most refuse is deposited in either wheelie bins or Dumpsters which in turn are emptied by one-man operated mechanized trucks. No manual exertion and human intervention of any sort are required. Long gone are the days of two-man vehicles whereby one bloke monopolized the leisurely job of driving while another hapless soul was forced into running along behind and emptying the trash cans.
The strong suspicion therefore is that the garbagemen where at first attracted by the Peppa Pig bag and that it was what ultimately saved Asher's life. Peppa Pig is, among other things, a highly successful cartoon show that airs on English television and is directed at preschoolers.
Its merchandise is therefore highly coveted. For example, the cooler bag in which Asher was found retails on Amazon for US$43 plus tax and carriage.
Furthermore, since the show has been on the air for around twenty years, that in turn leads to the strong suspicion that Asher came from a family that has, or at one time did have, very young children at home. Even more appallingly, it thus would appear that the youngsters stood idly by and watched as their parents so cruelly disposed of their childhood confidant and faithful playmate.
Regardless of how that they came to stumble upon Asher's presence, the trash haulers certainly did not waste any time in doing the right thing by contacting the RSPCA in Stourbridge, eleven kilometers north of Kidderminster, which immediately came and collected him. He then was taken to an unidentified veterinary clinic where he was diagnosed to be emaciated, dehydrated, anemic, and having fleas. He additionally had sustained some sort of undisclosed injury to his right front paw and, saddest of all, he likely has cataracts on both of his eyes or is suffering from nuclear sclerosis.
His poor health also points to the inescapable conclusion that he had been starved and severely neglected over the course of an extended period of time before he was tossed out in the trash. As far as it has been publicly disclosed, there were not any visible signs of physical abuse on his body but that is not conclusive in that bruises, cuts, and other minor injuries tend to heal fairly quickly.
When it rains it pours and Asher's deliverance from an almost certain death, one way or the other, in the trash proved to have been short-lived because the loathsome veterinarians did not want any part in treating him. Instead, they offered to promptly dispatch him to the devil for a quick, easy, and handsome fee.
Quite obviously, if there ever were a gaggle of individuals who were deserving of being killed off it was the veterinarians themselves and most assuredly not Asher. Besides, since when does being old, hungry, thirsty, anemic, and having a few fleas qualify as a terminal illness?
The only things that he needed were food, water, iron, a good going over with a flea comb, and a warm and secure bed in order to rest up in until he regained his strength. His injured paw and ocular problems could have been addressed at a later date.
At that critical juncture, things certainly looked bleak for Asher and the garbagemen's noble and compassionate rescue of him appeared to have been to no avail. Only the RSPCA stood between him and the gallows and its past record in regard to respecting a cat's right to live can only be described as dismal at best.
Most damning of all, it has a long and sordid history of stealing and killing owners' cats. (See Cat Defender posts of June 5, 2007 and October 23, 2010 entitled, respectively, "The RSPCA's Unlawful Seizure and Senseless Killing of Mork Leaves His Sister, Mindy, Brokenhearted and His Caretakers Devastated" and "The RSPCA Steals and Executes Nightshift Who Was His Elderly Caretaker's Last Surviving Link to Her Dead Husband," plus the Daily Mail, November 6, 2014, "RSPCA Forced to Apologize for Wrongly Putting Down Cat Belonging to Family It Accused of Cruelty in Bungled Prosecution," Kent Online, August 13, 2016, "Heartbreak for Larkfield Family after Cat Is Put to Sleep Without Their Knowledge," and The Chronicle of Chester, August 11, 2016, "Distraught Saltney Family Blast (sic) RSPCA after Their Cat Was Put Down.")
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| Asher Was Found in This Peppa Pig Cooler Bag |
Secondly, it always has operated more of an extermination factory than a rescue. (See the Daily Mail, December 30, 2012, "Revealed: RSPCA Destroys Half of the Animals That It Rescues -- Yet Thousands Are Completely Healthy.")
Thirdly, even on those very rare occasions when it actually does make arrests of criminals who have abused and killed cats it prosecutes the guilty with wet noodles. Consequently, when it inevitably fails to send any of these monsters to jail, it ludicrously publicly maintains that the ends of justice have been served and that the lives of all cats are now safer because of its action.
On the contrary, the message that its lax enforcement of the anti-cruelty statutes is sending to abusers and killers is that it is open season on cats and kittens in England and Wales. (See Cat Defender posts of March 9, 2012, March 13, 2012, August 31, 2015, and October 6, 2022 entitled, respectively, "An Amateur Ornithologist Guns Down Hartley with an Air Rifle, Feigns Remorse, and Then Cheats Justice by Begging and Lying," "The Sick Wife Defense Works Like a Charm for Cunning Patrick Doyle after He Traps a Cat and Then Shoots It with an Air Rifle While Still in Its Cage," "Beaten and Entombed Above Ground for Several Weeks, a Forever Nameless Cat from Colchester Is Finished Off by the RSPCA which Refuses to Even Investigate Her Death," and "A Much Ballyhooed New Law Produces the Same Old Perverted Justice as Cardiff Crown Court Allows Tristian Paul Pearson to Get Away with Poisoning to Death Bailey and Luna with Antifreeze.")
In its defense, the RSPCA is far from being the only humane group that winks at cruelty to cats. Au contraire, there is not any known rescue group, police force, prosecutor, court, and politician in the world that takes these hideous crimes even halfway seriously.
Even most owners could care less about the myriad of crimes that are committed every second of the day against their neighbors' cats. Nobody really cares about this crime wave until it is brought home to their cats and by then it is way too late.
Consequently, it hardly could have been expected that the RSPCA would have raised any objections to the veterinarians killing off of another preeminently treatable cat. Plus, it had another powerful incentive for going along with them: money. In that regard, it unquestionably would have been cheaper and less bothersome for the perennially overworked and cash-strapped rescue group to have allowed them to have rubbed out Asher.
"The world is a bad dog," Joe Conrad reflected in his 1915 novel, Victory. "It will bite you if you give it a chance..."
Whereas there is undeniably a good deal of truth in that dire assessment of the human condition, miracles still do occur every once in a while and on this particular occasion the RSPCA surprisingly rose to the occasion and did what was totally out of character for it by choosing life over death, justice over expediency, and compassion over monetary considerations and said no to the morally retarded and totally unscrupulous veterinarians. Asher also sans doute profited mightily from the utter absurdity and barbarity of the practitioners' diagnosis. Either way, that compassionate decision was the charity's finest hour in recent memory.
It has not been specified if the charity took him to another surgery or if it instead took charge of his treatment itself but, in any event, it fed and watered him and placed him on intravenous fluids. "(We have) twenty-four to forty-hours to pull this boy back from the brink," a spokesperson for the charity told the BBC on November 9th. (See "Cat Found in Bin Buried Under Rubbish.")
The food, water, fluids, and rest did the trick and a day later the RSPCA was able to tell the BBC that Asher was "a little perkier." He still was far from being out of the woods, however, and the organization issued a plea for the public to help with his "extensive vets' (sic) bills."
Nothing further was heard concerning Asher and his heroic fight to live until November 25th."Now named Asher, he has luckily pulled through and following treatment for fleas, anemia, and dehydration, he is on the mend at Stourbridge and District RSPCA along with endless tender loving care," it announced on Facebook.
As horrific, traumatic, and cruel as what had been done to him, Asher at least survived. Sadly, a cat named Dewi was found dead in another trash can in Stourbridge a few weeks earlier. "(He had been) thrown away into the recycling bin as though his life had never mattered," the spokesperson for the RSPCA lamented to the BBC.
Even though the charity was too late in order to have saved his life, it nevertheless attempted to posthumously do right by him. "Well, he mattered to us and we fought tooth and nail to recover his body and will be getting him cremated to give the end of his life some dignity, rather than being left to decompose at the bottom of a household bin," the spokesperson continued to the BBC.
The RSPCA has not stated what it plans on doing with his ashes but hopefully they will be preserved. It would have been far preferable, however, if the charity could have seen its way clear to have preserved his remains and to have provided Dewi with a memorial service, a proper burial, and a fitting tombstone.
Cremation is not nearly enough. All cats, but especially those who have met with foul play, need to be remembered and in that regard only proper burials and tombstones will suffice. "We're not sure how many more stories of cruelty we can take," the RSPCA's weary spokesperson added to the BBC. "It is utterly relentless."
The same is equally true for feline abandonments and surrenders to shelters which are at a three-year high in England and Wales. During just the month of September alone one-thousand-nine-hundred-sixty-nine animals (cats, dogs, and other species) were abandoned.
Probably at least that many additional animals either fell through the myriad of cracks in the animal protection network or, like Asher, met with malice aforethought. The RSPCA has not broken down those statistics for September but it is a good bet that a lion's share of those animals that were abandoned were cats. (See the Caerphilly Observer, November 15, 2023, "Cat and Two Kittens Found Abandoned in Rhymney.")
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| Hopefully Asher's Problems with His Eyes Can Be Remedied |
In recent history, the most notorious individual to have utilized the trash in an effort to have done in a cat was a forty-five-year-old cashier at the Royal Bank of Scotland named Mary Bale of Coventry in Warwickshire. On August 2, 2010, she stole Stephanie and Darryl Andrews-Mann's four-year-old cat, Lola, off the street and stuffed her into a wheelie bin.
Thanks to a surveillance camera that was mounted on the outside her owners' house, Lola was rescued fifteen hours later and just before the trash was to have been collected. Bale later was let off by Coventry Magistrates' Court with a small fine and court costs. (See the BBC, October 19, 2010, "Coventry Cat Bin Woman Mary Bale Fined for Cruelty.")
When it is taken into consideration that nobody ever actually goes through the refuse in order to look for both live and dead cats, it thus may be safely assumed that accidental discoveries of that nature, such as occurred with Asher, surely must constitute only around one per cent of the multitudes of felines that die in the trash. All is not hopeless, however, in that there are some concrete and relatively inexpensive safeguards that could be implemented in order to substantially cut down on these fatalities.
First of all, large black plastic trash bags and all other opaque receptacles, such as Peppa Pig paraphernalia, should be banned from the trash in favor of much smaller translucent bags. Two years ago when the Charlotte Mecklenburg School System was having a huge problem with guns being brought onto campus its administrators banned conventional bookbags in favor of transparent ones and that, coupled with the installation of metal detectors, has pretty much put an end to that potentially deadly dilemma.
Secondly, candid cameras could be installed either on or nearby all trash cans and Dumpsters. Thirdly, sensors and x-rays could be installed on garbage trucks that would be capable of detecting the presence of both live and dead animals before they are crushed. Fourthly, this same sort of technology could be installed at all recycling and waste disposal plants in order to perform the same chore before the trash is burned.
If implemented, those safeguards would be the first time on record that technology has been used in order to save feline lives as opposed to spying upon, controlling, and exterminating them in droves. (See Cat Defender post of November 18, 2016 entitled "A Clever Devil at the University of Adelaide Boasts That He Has Discovered the Achilles' Heel of Cats with His Invention of Robotic Grooming Traps as the Thoroughly Evil Australians' All-Out War Against the Species Enters Its Final Stages.")
Consequently, it is a foregone conclusion that such readily available remedies never will be even so much as contemplated by the elites let alone implemented. Technology does not always have to remain the sole prerogative of fascists, totalitarians, and cat-killers but that is the way that things stand at the moment.
Another venue favored by owners who want to get shed of their cats are the busy highways. (See Cat Defender posts of January 14, 2008, August 28, 2008, February 21, 2009, July 2, 2009, July 16, 2010, and August 12, 2010 entitled, respectively, "Freeway Miraculously Survives Being Tossed Out the Window of a Truck on Busy Interstate-95 in South Florida," "In Memoriam: Trooper Survives Being Thrown from a Speeding Automobile Only to Later Die on the Operating Table," "A Daring Rescue in the Sky Spares the Life of a Cat That Was Dumped on an Overpass in Houston," "Three-Week-Old Lucky Is Rescued by a Staten Island Judge after She Was Tossed Out the Window of a Pickup Truck on Hylan Boulevard," "Tossed Out the Window of a Car Like an Empty Beer Can, an Injured Chattanooga Kitten Is Left to Die after at Least Two Veterinarians Refused to Treat It," and "Gia and Mr. T. Survive Separate Attempts Made on Their Lives after They Are Abandoned on Busy Bridges During Inclement Weather.")
Almost as bad, disposing of kittens and cats in traffic is the perfect crime and, as far as it is known, none of the monsters who perpetrate these despicable crimes ever has been apprehended. For that to happen at least one conscientious motorist would have to witness such behavior and then get the perpetrator's license plate number. After doing that, the eyewitness then would somehow have to convince the good-for-nothing police to go after him.
A third popular venue that owners utilize in order to get rid of their unwanted cats and kittens is the water. Consequently, some of them throw them off of bridges whereas others stuff them into cages and bags that are in turn weighted down with rocks and then either toss them into streams or leave them on beaches in order to be drowned in the incoming tide. (See Cat Defender posts of January 13, 2006, May 20, 2008, July 6, 2009, August 9, 2010, September 27, 2010, March 25, 2011, June 25, 2011, and July 9, 2014 entitled, respectively, "Montana Firefighters Rescue a 'Lucky' Calico Cat Who Was Caged and Purposefully Thrown into an Icy River," "Malice Aforethought: An Upstate New York Cat Is Saved from a Watery Grave by a Dead Tree and a Passerby; a New Hampshire Cat Is Not Nearly So Fortunate," "Miracle Survives a Drowning Attempt on the McClugage Bridge and Later Hitchhikes a Ride to Safety Underneath the Car of a Compassionate Motorist," "Sunday Afternoon Boaters Pluck Splat Out of Clouter Creek after She Is Thrown Off the Mark Clark Expressway Bridge in Charleston," "Caged, Shot Thirty Times with an Air Gun, and Then Tossed into a Bay to Drown, Lovey Is Rescued in the Middle of the Night by a Good Samaritan," "Compassionate Construction Workers Interrupt Their Busy Day in Order to Rescue Chabot-Matrix from a Stream in Maine," "The Unsinkable Molly Brown Rides the Waves of Outrageous Misfortune to a Safe Harbor on Governors Island but It Is Unclear What Has Happened to Her," and "Dumped in the Normans Kill, Chance Did Not Have a Prayer in Hell Until a Jogger Who had Turned Off the Music Heard His Desperate Cries for Help.")
As is the case with those cats and kittens that are thrown in the trash and dumped in traffic, nobody ever has so much as hazarded a guess as to the pervasiveness of the practice of drowning cats in streams. Equally disturbing, absolutely none of the individuals who engage in this unspeakable practice ever has been apprehended.
In addition to all the cats and kittens that wind up in the trash, crushed to death on highways, and drowned in streams, countless additional ones are abandoned to the streets and woods in order to fend for themselves in a hostile world. Still others are killed off by their owners and their corpses buried with nobody any the wiser that they ever existed.
All of this criminal behavior buggers the question as to why is the abandonment of cats and kittens so prevalent? The almost unanimous answer that is put forward by rescue groups in both England and the United States is the ever-increasing cost of living.
Predictably, the capitalistic media has jumped on that bandwagon. (See The Manchester Evening News, July 10, 2022, "'Watch Out You'll Be Sorry': The Cat Rescuers Facing Abuse and Threats from Desperate Owners Dumping Pets," the BBC, August 16, 2022, "Pet Bills: The People Reuniting Families with Their Pets," The Washington Post, December 27, 2022, "People Are Giving Up Pets. Blame Inflation," and The Guardian of London, December 29, 2022, "Kitten Boom at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home Blamed on Cost of Living Crisis.")
Although seemingly plausible, such an explanation does not hold up under scrutiny. First of all, water is free as are soil, grass, and old newspapers, the latter of which works just as well as store-bought litter.
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| Carrie Jurney Expects the Public to Feel Sorry for Her and to Give Her Money |
Most importantly of all, cat food is anything but exorbitantly priced and therefore well within the reach of any owner, no matter how meager their income. Even those owners who prefer to spend their money on booze, dope, games of chance, and whores as opposed to their cats could share their meat and other foods with their cats. For instance, Chinese restaurateurs feed their mousers meat mixed with white rice.
Besides, there are pet food banks and some rescue groups hand out commercial cat food gratis. The notion that Limey and yank owners are too poor in order to feed their cats is therefore pure balderdash.
Also, it certainly does not cost owners a penny more to shelter and to keep their cats warm during the winter months than it does for them to do likewise for themselves, their spouses, and their children. Owners who get evicted from their apartments are up the spout to be sure but even some of them still manage to somehow hang onto and to and to safeguard their cats while living in their automobiles and even on the street. Besides the Patels, who own more than ninety per cent of the motels in the United States, allow the homeless to bring their cats and dogs along with them when they take up residence.
If the homeless are therefore perfectly capable and willing to hang onto their cats, the housed most assuredly do not have anything even remotely resembling a valid excuse for abandoning theirs whenever they run into financial difficulties. (See Cat Defender post of July 5, 2013 entitled "Tabor's Long and Winding Road Leads Her Back Home but Leaves Her with a Broken Heart.")
Even so, it nevertheless would be some small measure of a benefit to low income guardians if England and the United States were to repeal their taxes on pet food, accessories (leashes, cages, collars und so weiter), and over-the-counter medications. Most state governments in the United States do not tax human food so it does not make sense for them to tax pet food and accessories. Cats are not luxury items but cherished family members.
Secondly, rescue groups are blaming the abandonment of large numbers of cats on COVID-19 but that is a tragedy that they themselves are responsible for creating and they did so by unconscionably adopting out scores of cats to totally unsuitable owners. Once the lockdowns ended, some of those individuals wasted little time in showing their true colors by abandoning their cats and surrendering them to shelters without either so much as a second thought or an ounce of remorse.
Most individuals who work at shelters are seasoned veterans who have been around long time enough in order to have known what was afoot when their cats began flying out the door like hot cakes. Instead of doing their due diligence by scrutinizing all potential adopters even more closely, they did just the opposite by taking advantage of the opportunity presented to them by the pandemic and getting rid of their cats.
Now, they have been caught out but instead of taking responsibility for their own mistakes they are fobbing off all the blame on adopters. At the very least, they should have made contingency plans to have better coped with all the cats that were sure to have been returned to them by putting aside some of the money that they had raked in off of their adoptions in the first place.
Thirdly, some rescue groups are blaming the dramatic increase in feline abandonments on the decision of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in Manhattan and other charities to discontinue their sterilization services during COVID but that is unlikely to have had much of an impact upon the matter considering that nowadays just about all cats are not only vaccinated and microchipped but also sterilized before they leave shelters. Such an accusation might carry more weight when leveled against social media sites such as Facebook and Gumtree given that the animals that are sold on those platforms are less likely to have been sterilized. (See The Manchester Evening News, February 2, 2019, "Cats Who've Been Bought on Facebook Are Being Dumped in Freezing Temperatures on the Street.")
Fourthly, there does not appear to be much doubt that the sky-high cost of veterinary care is a strong disincentive for individuals to both adopt and to hold on to their cats. (See The New York Times, August 13, 2023, "Too Many Cats, Too Few Vets: New York City Animal Shelters Are Bursting" and the New York Post, August 21, 2023, "New York City Overrun with Stray Cats as Shelters Field 'Hundreds' of Daily Requests to Take In Felines.")
Instead of lowering the exorbitant prices that they charge and eliminating unnecessary diagnostic tests, practitioners keep on increasing both the former as well as the latter. Realizing full well that only the bourgeoisie and the rich can afford to have their cats treated, these low-life, despicable capitalists urge everybody else to allow them to kill off their beloved companions for a much more modest fee.
Much like the Shylocks, slumlords, dollar stores, salvation hustlers, and the United States Government, veterinarians will do almost anything for a lousy buck. Their odious practice of operating thinly disguised slaughterhouses and calling them surgeries is so prevalent that they ought to be required by law to advertise themselves as feline extermination factories as opposed to veterinary clinics. (See Cat Defender posts of December 22, 2011, March 19, 2014, April 8, 2018, and August 14, 2021 entitled, respectively, "A Rogue TNR Practitioner and Three Unscrupulous Veterinarians Kill at Least Sixty-Two Cats with the Complicity of the Mayor's Alliance for NYC's Animals," "The Cheap and Greedy Moral Degenerates at PennVet Extend Their Warmest Christmas Greetings to an Impecunious, but Preeminently Treatable, Cat Via a Jab of Sodium Pentobarbital," "A Rare Behind the Scenes Glimpse at the Ruthless Murders of Two Cats by an Indiana Veterinarian Exposes All Those Who Claim That Lethal Injections Are Humane to Be Barefaced Liars," and "Amazing Little Juicebox Overcomes Not Only a Near Fatal Mauling at the Hands of His Owners' Dog but also Penury and Being Cruelly Abandoned to Shift for Himself Inside the Snake Pit World of Veterinary Medicine.")
"We all go into this because we love animals," Carrie Jurney of Not One More Vet of San Jose told the Los Angeles Times on September 27, 2021. (See "The Sad Reality for Veterinarians.") "You don't go into it for any other reason."
That is utter baloney! The members of this dastardly and ignoble profession do not care one whit about either cats or their owners; on the contrary, they only care about money and they are not the least bit particular about how that they get it. For example, instead of lowering the exorbitant prices that she charges for her services, Jurney spends a substantial amount of her time online begging for donations from already tapped-out owners.
She also desperately wants the public to feel sorry for her and her colleagues. "When you take into account the rates of student debt you have to go into currently to become a veterinarian, it's actually not a financially rewarding profession at all," she bellyached to the Los Angeles Times.
In other words, cats must die and their owners be left brokenhearted all because veterinarians were so stupid as to have shelled out the insanely expensive tuition demanded by veterinary schools. Instead of badgering pet owners for welfare, Jurney should demand that her former professors at the University of Georgia's College of Veterinary Medicine share some of their loot with her. She should be forewarned, however, that it is going to require the combined cunning and slipperiness of Bernie Madoff, Ivan Boesky, and Sam Bankman-Fried for her to cadge so much as a red cent out of any of those confirmed tightwads.
Besides, Jurney and her colleagues are not faring nearly as poorly financially as she claims. According to data found online, veterinarians in the United States earn more than US$100,000 a year but that is not nearly enough for Jurney and her fellow money grabbers. It accordingly is just too bad that she and her colleagues do not practice in England where those of their ilk are forced to get by on around US$67,000 per year.
Like several other powerful groups in the United States, she additionally is a fascist who does not brook any criticism. "Unfortunately, a lot of grieving pet owners in the last few years decided to take to social media to berate their veterinarian when things don't go perfectly. It's a really challenging and stressful situation," she told the Los Angeles Times. "If people could help us in combating that cyberbullying that is all too common online, it would mean so much to the community."
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| Asher Is Alive and in a New Home in Spite of the Veterinarians' Wishes |
Most reprehensibly of all, she expects the public to sympathize with her and her colleagues not only for the multitudes of cats and dogs that the execute every day but for the psychological toll that doing so takes on them. "I spend a lot of time talking about euthanasia and how sometimes it's a blessing to help your patients pass peacefully," she nonsensically argued to the Los Angeles Times. "But if you talk about euthanasia every single day as the appropriate way to end suffering, and you yourself are suffering, you can see how there can be some transference there."
That is more of the self-serving baloney that those who kill animals and their supporters within the capitalistic media hand the public all the time. For example, in 2005 Karin Brulliard of The Washington Post bent over backwards praising staffers at the Loudoun County Animal Shelter in Leesburg, Virginia, for rubbing out one-thousand-three-hundred-sixty cats and dogs in 2004.
That total constituted an astounding forty-seven per cent of all the animals that it impounded. Yet, none of their lives mattered one whit to Old Brulliard Bird; instead, she cried a proverbial river for their exterminators. (See Cat Defender post of September 30, 2005 entitled "The Morally Bankrupt Washington Post Pens a Love Letter to Shelter Workers Who Exterminate Cats and Dogs.")
It would be a step in the right direction if those veterinarians and shelter workers who are taking their own lives were doing so out of remorse and shame for all the dastardly crimes that they have committed against totally innocent cats and dogs but that is hardly the case. Au contraire, they likely are taking the Roman way out because they, like Jurney, do not foresee any possible way of becoming fabulously wealthy in their chosen professions by the age of thirty, retiring to the Caribbean, and accordingly never doing another lick of work throughout the remainder of their utterly worthless lives.
Despite the unaffordability of veterinary care, abandoning, surrendering, and having cats killed off are not morally acceptable options for owners. Home care can sometimes work wonders and valuable tips on how to treat and to keep cats healthy can sometimes be found by visiting, not the propaganda web sites that are run by surgeries, but rather online sites whose contributors are owners who share their expertise and advice for free.
Speaking more broadly, none of the explanations advanced by shelters and the capitalistic media constitute valid reasons for abandoning cats. On the contrary, those individuals who do so are unfit guardians who do not possess so much as an ounce of either morality or compassion. Instead, they simply acquire cats on a whim and then proceed to use, abuse, and to get rid of them as easily, conveniently, and cheaply as possible and they do so every bit as remorselessly as if they were nothing more than worn-out pairs of old shoes.
Lots of individuals and groups within the animal welfare community blow a considerable amount of smoke about adoption as being the key to solving the problem of homeless cats but, as the reprehensible behavior of Asher's owners have more than abundantly demonstrated, that is problematic at best. Shelters, for instance, need to do a far better job of screening potential adopters as well as to conduct unannounced follow-up home visits in order to ensure that the cats and kittens that they sell back to the public are being properly treated and maintained. They might also want to consider allocating more resources to sanctuaries and TNR.
The RSPCA has appealed to the public for information regarding the identity of the family who not only abandoned Asher but attempted to kill him as well but it is highly unlikely that such a half-hearted ploy is going to lead to anything productive. If it had been even halfway serious about apprehending the culprit, it at the very least would have had the Peppa Pig Cooler Bag dusted for fingerprints and other trace evidence. It likewise would have combed Asher's fur and examined the area underneath his nails for evidence.
If the bag had been purchased either online or from a retailer there might be a record of the sale that could have been traced. The charity also could have found out through either surveillance cameras or by staking out the trash can in which Asher was found the identities of those individuals who frequent it. From there it would have been relatively easy for it to have determined if any of them have, or have had, young children at home who might have been fans of the Peppa Pig television show.
It also is possible that rescue groups and breeders in Kidderminster might not only remember Asher but have a record of his adoption. The RSPCA has not disclosed whether or not he has been sterilized but if the answer to that inquiry should be affirmative, the veterinarian who performed the operation just might remember him.
His guardians removed whatever he may have worn in the way of a collar and a tag so that avenue of inquiry has been foreclosed and it also is unlikely that he has been microchipped. He therefore likely did not come from a shelter.
Regrettably, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that none of those lines of inquiry have been pursued by the RSPCA. For starters, it likely does not have either the investigators or the financial resources for such an undertaking. Secondly, the organization likely has little interest in finding and prosecuting the culprit.
Like everywhere else in the world, cruelty to cats is simply taken for granted in England and Wales, much like the rising and setting of the sun each morning and evening. Nevertheless, something desperately needs to be done about owners who not only dump their cats and kittens but attempt to kill them as well.
As for Asher, things have turned out far better for him than anyone ever could have imagined that they would back on November 8th when he was found half-dead at the bottom of that wretched trash bin. "Just one month after being found dumped near a bin by a refuse collector in Kidderminster, fifteen-year-old Asher has finally gone from a starved, malnourished old boy to finally getting the spring back in his step!" the RSPCA proudly announced December 8th on Facebook.
That is not all either. He has been adopted and now has a new home. No details have been announced but, presumably, he is living either in or nearby Stourbridge.
Normally, it is extremely difficult for rescue groups to find homes for elderly cats but the mere fact that the RSPCA was able to have pulled off such a herculean feat in such short order is another feather in its cap. Perhaps it will be able to build upon its superlative treatment of Asher by learning to respect the sanctity of all feline lives as well as continuing to stand up to the predatory charlatans who practice veterinary medicine; its Stourbridge branch has courageously and compassionately pointed the way forward.
The charity has not made any mention about his eyes but hopefully he is not going blind. He has suffered too much and come too far for that to happen to him on top of everything else that he has been forced into overcoming.
Sadly, the outside world likely has seen and heard the last of him. All that really matters, however, is that he survived and is now safe and sound and hopefully with a new owner who will not only be everything to him that his previous guardians were not but will endeavor day and night in order to make his remaining days and years truly golden.
Photos: the RSPCA (Asher and the bag in which he was found) and the Los Angeles Times (Jurney).
posted by Moonraker @ 3:45 PM
