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| Ally Failed to Survive a Ride in One of Albertsons' Trucks |
"The charity regularly reunites owners with their much-loved cats, and in most cases this is only possible thanks to microchips."- - Madison Rogers of Cats Protection
The laundry list of those individuals and groups who were complicit, to one degree or another, in the killing of Garfield by no means ends with his owners, David and Tina Villers, the Christians at Ely Cathedral, Cats Protection, and opportunistic artists such as Cate Caruth and Sally Dunham but rather it extends to, most notably, the management, staff, vendors, and patrons of Sainsbury's who used and exploited him for their own selfish designs without contributing anything positive toward his well-being and safety. (See Cat Defender post of August 27, 2024 entitled "A Tale of Two Cats: Garfield Is Long Dead and Teddy Is Being Led Down the Same Path in Order to Soon Join Him.")
It should be obvious but a supermarket hardly qualifies as a safe and suitable home for a cat and Sainsbury's is far from being an anomaly in its naked exploitation and abject neglect of Garfield and his basic needs. Actually, such predatory, capitalistic enterprises have a long and checkered history of such utterly shameful behavior.
For example, on March 3, 2010 a simply gorgeous ten-year-old, brown and white Snowshoe Siamese subsequently dubbed Ally arrived in Billings in the back of one of Albertsons' delivery trucks. It never was specified but it is believed that she either climbed aboard or was shanghaied aboard in Salt Lake City and made the seven-hour journey on her own.
Upon arrival, she was taken to the Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter (YVAS) in Billings where she was diagnosed to have sustained an unspecified injury to her back and possibly a broken hip. All of that was in addition to being famished and dehydrated. Despite the severity of her injuries, YVAS did not treat her but instead placed her in foster care where she either died on her own or, more likely, was killed off on March 9th.
Albertsons ordered its employees not to discuss the matter even though Ally's injuries were consistent with a heavy object, such as a case of sodas, having been either accidentally or purposefully dropped on top of her. It is only a guess but it nevertheless is believed that she could have been saved if YVAS and Albertsons had thought that her life was worth saving. (See Cat Defender post of April 18, 2010 entitled "Ally's Last Ride Lands Her in a Death Trap Set by an Uncaring and Irresponsible Supermarket Chain and a Bargain Basement Shelter.")
In January of 2015, a gray female with black stripes named Mango was, like Garfield, reportedly run down and killed by a motorist in the parking lot of a Tesco's in Tiverton, Devon. Her death was later contradicted.
That which is not in doubt, however, is that she was cruelly evicted from the store shortly before her alleged death after having been allowed inside for four years by management. (See the Daily Mail, January 20, 2015 , "Is Mango the Cat Dead?")
Later that same year, a gray and white tom named Cecil, who had hung out inside Safeways in southeast Portland for seven years, was likewise rudely evicted. Afterwards he disappeared from the public's eye until an unconfirmed note posted on Reddit on December 30, 2018 reported that he was now living in the country and doing well. (See The Oregonian of Portland, December 3, 2016, "Portland Rallies Around Cecil, Beloved Safeway (sic) Cat.")
Supermarket cats additionally have been kidnapped. For instance, in 2014 a nine-year-old gray female with black stripes named Fudge was stolen from a Tesco's in Dumfries, one-hundred-twenty-seven kilometers south of Edinburgh in the South Uplands. Miraculously, she later was found in a garden but the only punishment that her abductor received was to be banned from the grocery store. (See Deadline News of Edinburgh, November 18, 2016, "Facebook Fight Erupts over Fudge the Celebrity Cat.")
During 2016 and 2017, a brown tom with black stripes of an undetermined age named George visited Wilkos in the Kings Chase Shopping Centre in the Kingswood section of Bristol, one-hundred-seventy-one kilometers west of London. One day he was sickened by the food that someone had given him and his family wisely got the message and thereafter reportedly kept him at home. (See the Bristol Post, articles dated February 13, 2017 and February 14, 2017 and entitled, respectively, "Celebrity Cat George Is Internet Famous Because He spends All Day at Wilkos and Refuses to Leave" and "Where Else in Kingswood Are You Likely to See 'Celebrity' Cat George?")
In 2009, Claire and Adam Owens of High Street in Saltney, fifty–five kilometers south of Liverpool and on the border with Wales, adopted a brown and white homeless and formerly abused tom named Brutus. Like Villers with Garfield, they soon tired of him and when a year later Morrisons opened a supermarket across the street from their house they turned him loose to live there.
As Tesco was later to have done with Mango and Safeways with Cecil, Morrisons kicked him out its store in 2012. The cold–hearted, predatory capitalists did, however, permit him to still hang out in their unheated and drafty recycling center.
Over the years he became both injured and lost from time to time but he only occasionally returned home for an odd meal and a nap. In 2013, he was diagnosed with kidney disease and the Owenses had him killed off on January 16, 2017.
Just as all that there now is left of Garfield is a bronze bust in Ely Country Park, all that remains of Brutus is a statue of him outside of Morrisons. (See the Chester Chronicle, January 16, 2017, "Heartbreak as Brutus the Morrisons' Cat Passes Away," The Telegraph of London, January 27, 2017, "Beloved Cat Brutus to Be Immortalized in Morrisons' Supermarket Statue," and Cat Defender post of April 24, 2019 entitled "The Life, Times, and Tragic Demise of a Supermarket Cat: Brutus of Morrisons, 2009–2017.")
So, what is the most common fate of supermarket cats? First of all, to be run down and deliberately killed by motorists and to die in their delivery trucks.
Secondly, to be nakedly exploited for profit only to be cruelly evicted into the elements and traffic as recompense for their loyal service. Thirdly, to b kidnapped, poisoned, and to disappear without so much as a trace.
All of that is on top of being forced to go without shelter, regular meals, water, veterinary care, and all protection. If mistreating cats in such a cavalier and inhumane fashion does not constitute animal cruelty, and in some instances felony animal cruelty at that, what the hell does? It thus seems clear to conclude that both owners and the operators of supermarkets who engage in such conduct belong nowhere but in jail and for long stretches of time at that.
Finally, the calling of the roll of what might best be termed as the traditional exploiters and abusers of cats never would be complete without giving the members of the thoroughly unscrupulous mass media their due. Most notably, they have been championing the abandonment, neglect, endangerment, abuse, and exploitation of cats like Garfield for as long as they have wagged their forked tongues and raced their stylos and pencils across the page.
For example, in England, the capitalistic media have long supported cat food manufacturers and others who have sponsored dangerous roaming contests
. (See Cat Defender post of December 5, 2006 entitled "Milo, Who Visits the Vet by Her Lonesome, Is Named Old Blighty's 'Most Adventurous Cat'.") |
| Morrisons Cruelly Relegated Brutus to Its Drafty Recycling Center |
When what they should be doing is campaigning for responsible cat ownership and the unqualified right of all members of the species to live and to be free from all abuse and exploitation, they are continuously beating a drum for the direct opposites. No improvement can be expected from the big liars and propagandists on Fleet Street but the taxpayers have every right to demand that the publicly-financed BBC stop cheerleading for the exploitation, abuse, abandonment, and killing of cats.
Or perhaps they support the conduct of the BBC? At any rate it would be interesting to observe their reaction if the network were to commence recommending that unwanted children be dumped in the street.
There never has been anything positive that could be said about the old mob of feline abusers but nowadays their efforts are being augmented by a new breed of dishonest and morally retarded villains: the Silicon Valley crowd and their stooges. First of all, there are the microchip manufacturers and database managers who have gone into collusion with shelters, veterinarians, and governments in order to shove these totally worthless devices down the gullets of a public already besotted by technology.
To run through the entire rigmarole one more time, implanted microchips do not afford cats so much as an iota of protection against those individuals and animals intent upon doing them harm. For instance, motorists who are intent upon intentionally running them down do not slam on the brakes because they suddenly remember that their intended victims are chipped.
Dogs, coyotes, foxes, and other animals do not spare the lives of cats because they might be chipped. What about serial killers, such as the Croydon and Brighton Cat Killers? Does anyone seriously believe that any of them are scared off by an implanted microchip?
Also, chips in no way deter poisoners, kidnappers, and a thousand other cat-haters, such as ornithologists and wildlife biologists, from perpetrating their foul deeds. The entire notion that microchips afford cats so much as a scintilla of protection is absurd. (See Cat Defender post of May 25, 2006 entitled "Plato's Misadventures Expose the Pitfalls of RFID Technology as Applied to Cats.")
Secondly, the jury is still out on the matter but implanted microchips have been linked to cancer. (See Cat Defender posts of September 21, 2007 and November 6, 2010 entitled, respectively, "The FDA Is Suppressing Research That Shows Implanted Microchips Cause Cancer in Mice, Rats, and Dogs" and "Bulkin Contracts Cancer from an Implanted Microchip and Now It Is Time for Digital Angel ® and Merck to Answer for Their Crimes in a Court of Law.")
Thirdly, some shelters and governmental agencies are so incompetent that they cannot even properly implant these devices and their malpractice has in turn ruined the lives of some cats. (See Cat Defender posts of April 28, 2016 and June 23, 2016 entitled, respectively, "Sassie Is Left Paralyzed as the Result of Yet Still Another Horribly Botched Attempt to Implant a Thoroughly Worthless and Pernicious Microchip Between Her Shoulders" and "The State of North Carolina's Veterinary Division Is Covering Up a Savage Beating Dished Out to Cooper at the Rowan County Animal Shelter During the Course of a Microchipping Fiasco.")
Fourthly, there are all sorts of difficulties with the databases that service microchips. For instance, administrators do not always cooperate in the return of lost cats to their owners. (See Cat Defender post of January 24, 2017 entitled "Tigger Is Finally Reunited with His Family Despite the Best Efforts of the Administrators of a Database to Keep Them Apart.")
Additionally, database operators are not running charities but rather they charge owners an annual fee for their services. Compounding an already considerably less than perfect scheme, many owners do not always keep their contact information current and that makes it almost impossible for shelters and veterinarians to contact them in the event that their errant cats should turn up out of the blue one day.
Fifthly, in the United States some shelters have admitted privately that they do not scan cats that they suspect of being homeless. Rather, they simply whack them as soon as they come through the front door.
Sixthly, other shelters are so incompetent that they cannot find and read the chips that are inside the cats that they impound. So, they too simply go ahead and kill them without so much as a second thought. (See WALA-TV of Mobile, May 16, 2008, "Cat's Microchip Didn't Save It from Being Euthanized" and WCAU-TV of Philadelphia, November 15, 2017, "Animal Shelter Euthanizes Man's Pet Cat after Failing to Find Microchip.")
Despite the mounting evidence against the efficacy of microchips, the lies continue to proliferate and the biggest prevaricator of all continues to be none other than Cats Protection. "The charity regularly reunites owners with their much-loved cats, and in most cases this is only possible thanks to microchips," the phony-baloney rescue group's Madison Rogers swore to The Independent of London on May 8th. (See "Cat Owners Urged to Take Action or Face £500 Fine Under New Laws.") "No matter how far from home they were found, or how long they have been missing, if a cat has a microchip there is a good chance that a lost cat will be swiftly returned home."
Despite her outrageous balderdash, it is highly doubtful that Cats Protection is reuniting all that many errant cats with their owners and that most definitely includes those that have been chipped and there are multitude of reasons for that. Topping that list are the machinations of some very clever cat-haters who steal, kill, and secretly dispose of the corpses of their victims. Still others transport them out of town and dump them at remote locations.
Secondly, although Cats Protection is loath to admit it, owners are arguably one of the biggest killers of cats. For example, some of them routinely drown kittens whereas others seal them up in trash bags and deposit them in Dumpsters. (See Cat Defender posts of July 3, 2006 and January 1, 2024 entitled, respectively, "Crooked Massachusetts Cops Allow an Elderly Politician to Get Away with Attempting to Drown a Kitten Named Lucky Girl" and "Seventeen Cats Are Found Dead in a Dumpster in Nashville in the Latest Sorry Chapter of Southerners' Longstanding Loathing for the Species.")
Quite obviously, implanted microchips do not protect cats and kittens from owners intent upon doing them harm. Even more damning, shelters such as Cats Protection are often complicit in the cold-blooded murders of these cats and kittens because they have failed to have done their due diligence in the first place.
They next compound their original mistakes by failing to conduct follow-up home visits in order to check on how the cats that they have adopted out a faring in their new environments. If the charity were willing to do at least that much it could save far more feline lives in a single month than all of its worthless microchips would in a year.
Thirdly, many kindhearted individuals take in homeless cats but since they do not own scanners they do not have any means of knowing if they have owners who want them back. Plus, they are not about to go to the trouble and expense of taking them to either a shelter or a veterinarian so that they can be scanned.
Fourthly, garbagemen and private citizens alike dispose of the corpses of cats that they pick up in the street and alongside roads every day by nonchalantly tossing them in the trash. None of them scan them for implanted microchips.
Fifthly, some of the miraculous reunions that shelters are able to facilitate do not occur until decades later and that puts the kibosh to Rogers' nonsense about cats being "swiftly returned home." (See Cat Defender posts of May 23, 2022 and October 16, 2023 entitled, respectively, "Tilly Is Returned to Her Owner after a Seventeen and One-Half Year Separation but Their Reunion Is Destined to Be, Sadly, a Brief and Bittersweet One" and "Daisy Is Found in Poor Health Wandering the Forbidding Streets of Caerphilly Eleven Years after She Vanished Without So Much as a Trace.")
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Reliance Upon a GPS Tracker Killed Rather Than Saved Basil
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Even more abhorrent, sometimes their former owners to not want any part of their long-lost cats and that raises the strong suspicion that they were the very ones who abandoned them in the first place. (See Cat Defender posts of September 22, 2020 and September 8, 2020 entitled, respectively, "Snitch Is Found Alive Fourteen Years after His Disappearance but His Old Owner Refuses to Take Him Back in Spite of the Shameful Neglect Shown Him by His New Caretaker" and "Cruelly and Heartlessly Abandoned in the Godforsaken Scottish Highlands a Dozen Years Ago, Georgie Is Amazingly Found to Be Still Alive but Her Former Owner Does Not Want Any Part of Her.")
Apparently it never has occurred to Cats Protection that owners dump their cats all the time and then something tragic happens to them. Even more sobering, no amount of electronic gadgetry is ever going to prevent them from doing so. Both cats and the charity therefore would perhaps be better served by requiring all would-be adopters to take and pass a brief course on the proper care of a cat instead of all the time blowing like a hurricane about worthless microchips.
It also seems clear that if Cats Protection truly believed any of the rubbish that it is all the time spouting about microchips it would at the very least purchase scanners and donate them free of charge to the public at large. It additionally would be lobbying for a law that would require local councils to scan all deceased cats that are found in public for implanted microchips and then to inform their owners and return their remains to them.
That would at least provide them with some measure of closure. The mere fact that it is totally unwilling to undertake either of these two worthwhile measures calls into question its belief in the utter baloney that it is fobbing off on the public concerning microchips.
Nevertheless, Cats Protection's years of telling lies and brown-nosing the Tories, when it instead should have been saving feline lives, paid a huge dividend on June 10th when it became the law in England and Wales that all cats had to be microchipped by the time that they reach the tender age of five months. Violators will be fined £500 and the law empowers local councils to seize unchipped cats, arrange for their violation and subjugation, and then to stick their owners with the bills.
Quite obviously, the limeys have lost their minds. For example, after lockdown thousands of them cruelly returned the cats that they only shortly before had adopted. In doing so they ludicrously claimed that they no longer could afford to feed them.
That of course was a bare-faced lie but people who are too cheap to even feed a cat are not about to pony up for either its microchipping or to pay a whopping fine for failing to have done so. The only thing that this insane law is destined to accomplish is to lead to more and more cats and kittens being abandoned to the streets and dumped at shelters and there does not seem to be any way that will not translate into the wholesale slaughter of additional innocent felines.
Secondly, just how do the fool limeys propose to go about seizing unchipped cats? Are they going to transform all of England and Wales into a police state whereby the local Gestapos regularly conduct midnight raids on individuals suspected of harboring an unchipped cat?
Other than being a sure-fire moneymaker for the manufacturers of microchips, database managers, veterinarians, shelters, and local governments, the only propose that England's new microchipping law serves is to put cats and their owners underneath the thumb of an ever-increasingly fascistic society.
The second recent development that ailurophobes have Silicon Valley to thank for are GPS trackers which, like microchips, endanger the lives of cats as opposed to protecting them. For example, on August 27th of last year Holly Mathews and Travis Lechner of Longmont, Colorado, outfitted a tuxedo named Basil that they had brought with them from Norway with one of these devices and then, apparently, went away for the day.
When they returned home at 9:05 p.m., her tracker alerted them that she was on the move inside an automobile in the eastern part of the city. They immediately gave chase in their old jalopy but when they reached St. Vrain's Creek they found her floating in a trash bag. Although her body was still warm, she had been shot in the head with either a conventional firearm or an air gun.
More than a year later no arrest apparently has been made in this shocking case even though it was immediately known which neighbor's house she had been visiting before she was taken on her last ride.
A GPS tracker did not provide her with any more safety and protection than would have an implanted microchip. (See Cat Defender post of November 15, 2023 entitled "Basil Was Abducted, Shot in the Head, and Her Body Dumped in a Creek and Although a Neighbor Was Immediately Implicated in Her Death, Apparently No Arrest Has Been Made More Than Two Months Later.")
It is not known what motivated Mathews and Lechner to equip Basil with a GPS tracker and then to have turned her loose in order to have roamed the perilous streets of Longmont but most individuals who do so want to gather photographs and other information that they can use on social media. Others claim to foolishly believe that by occasionally knowing the whereabouts of their cats they can somehow still protect them.
Still others could care less what happens to their cats. (See Cat Defender posts of June 11, 2007 and March 29, 2017 entitled, respectively, "Katzen-Kameras Are Not Only Cruel and Inhumane but Represent an Assault Upon Cats' Liberties and Privacy" and "Archie Is Knowingly Allowed to Sleep Smack-Dab in the Middle of a Busy Thoroughfare by His Derelict Owners Who Are Content with Merely Tracking His Movements by Satellite.")
Whether owners who use GPS trackers are motivated by greed and a lust for fame or simply are too lazy and uncaring in order to take proper care of them, they are taking a terrible risk with their lives. For that reason, this new breed of irresponsible guardians are on a pace to someday supplant traditional ailurophobes as the number one killers of cats.
That is not meant to imply that all users of Silicon Valley Snake Oil are ailurophobes but they are at the very least misguided and the end result of their irresponsibility is often the same for their cats just as if they had deliberately killed them. Furthermore, it is pointless for them to plead ignorance because it long has been known that man always has used technology against the animals rather than to have employed it in protecting them.
For instance, wildlife biologists and meat producers have been using technology for decades in order to reduce all wild and farm animals to the status of inanimate objects that they can control, exploit, and kill at will. In doing so they have robbed them of all legal and moral protections. (See Cat Defender posts of April 7, 2006, May 4, 2006, February 29, 2008, and May 21, 2009 entitled, respectively, "Hal the Central Park Coyote Is Suffocated to Death by Wildlife Biologists Attempting to Tag Him," "The Scientific Community's Use of High-Tech Surveillance Is Aimed at Subjugating, Not Saving, the Animals," "The Repeated Hounding Down and Tagging of Walruses Exposes Electronic Surveillance as Not Only Cruel but a Fraud," and "Macho B., America's Last Jaguar, Is Illegally Trapped, Radio-Collared, and Killed Off by Wildlife Biologists in Arizona.")
As morally revolting as all of that is, the plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose and those owners who can still be bothered to care about their cats' lives and well-being fully realize that the responsibility for protecting them rests squarely upon their shoulders. Rescue groups, governmental entities, and Silicon Valley Snake Oil purveyors are the enemies of all responsible cat ownership and should be recognized as such.
For even that to occur, however, this world needs many more individuals like Thomas Harris' fictional Clarice Sterling who in his 1991 novel, The Silence of the Lambs, could still hear the bleatings of the lambs on their way to the slaughterhouse in her sleep. Above all, it never must be forgotten that every cat that meets with foul play as the result of its owner's negligence constitutes a victory for the species' innumerable enemies.
Photos: Larry Mayer of the Billings Gazette (Ally), Facebook (Brutus), and KDVR-TV of Denver (Basil).
