LAX Cat Fingerprinting: A Simple Hoax or Sign of the Times?

Cat airline travel, formerly a feline right of passage, may soon go the way of the Hindenberg, if what the lady from Southwest says is true.

In a recent phone conversation with my partner Hank, the Southwest lady said the airlines are “straying away” from companion animal travel on their passenger planes.  I swear, that’s what she said and that’s the words she used. 

This news comes as a major shock to me.  It just can’t be true.  How are Brody and Herman ever going to see Niagara Falls, the Big Apple, and the remnants of the Berlin Wall if they can’t fly?

Anyway, maybe it’s not true, because I just read another story about how incredibly misinformed some airline employees are about cats and travel.  In fact, as it turns, one new worker was actually telling folks they would have to get their cat fingerprinted if it traveled through Los Angeles International Airport.  Read about it here.

 Well, I obviously need to get to the bottom of this one.  How about you, do you find that the airlines are “straying away” from pet travel, or has your little kitten been wracking up the free flyer miles no problem visiting a hot little Persian they met in Miami?  

I’d love to hear what the real story is for jet-setting kitties, and the people who pack for them.

Got a License to Cat?

In East Longmeadow, Massachusetts, there’s a lot of cats.  How many cats? Well, this sentence from the local paper might illustrate:

According to [animal control], scenes of cats roaming around town are more than a usual occurrence in East Longmeadow.

Yes, those roaming-cat scenes, played out more than usually.  Wait, what?  More than usual, for what?  Who is to say what a usual occurrence of roaming-cat scenes is?  What does this tortured sentence mean, and is it going to lead to other tortured sentences, like kitty behind bars?

Okay, sure, this is a serious topic.  All kitties need to get their shots, I suppose, whether they be Tommy B. Homekitty or Felicity Free-Me-or-I’ll Freak Feral.  But if the Universe had meant for kitty to need a license, couldn’t it have furnished him with a neat little back pocket? 

Anyway, animal licenses are so dog.   If we start licensing cats, I think we need to find a way to felinize the entire process.  I’m not sure what that would look like, but the best minds of our generation should be able to come up with something.

Theater and Cats DO Mix!

Those serious Sioux City thespians are leading the way to a whole new vision in cat-theater futures.  The Sioux City Journal reports today that if you bring a can of cat food to the theater for the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, it’s as good as a ticket.  Proceeds go to the local humane society. 

You can bring other cat stuff as well to serve as your admission price, just don’t bring your cat — contemporary theater for now remains wholly unprepared for cat-inclusive audiences and will need to surmount obvious technological barriers before that dream is realized.

Cats Versus Windmills: This Spin Job Needs a Quixote

Cats are back in the headlines, this time taking fall-guy status in the Great Windmill-Bird Debate of ‘07.   It’s enough to make you want to pull a Quixote on whatever windmill executive came up with this latest spin of anti-cat PR. 

Okay, cats have a song bird problem, it’s true.  The problem is, there is something undeniably attractive about slaughtering little singers who can’t help but give themselves away with the essence of what makes them song birds, their lovely little voices. 

But the main problem is not the song, the bird, or the cat.  These three are but an innocent catastrophe waiting to happen, set into motion by nature herself, and diverted into a force 90 million housecats strong by none other than the species voted most likely to change the planet’s climate this century.

It’s hard enough we have to blame ourselves for how bad things have gotten around old Earth here, and it only makes it worse when we shift responsibility to the creatures we keep.  I’m telling you, cats are blameless — the blood they spill is all on us.

Personally, I don’t mind curbing my little killer’s freedom by keeping him inside so I don’t have to handle the guilt that comes along with the dead bodies on my doormat.  I keep my cats inside as well, you’ll be glad to know.

As for Mr. Windmill PR spin executive, shame on you for using cats to take the heat off your clean-energy industry.   That’s about as useful as Quixote busting a cap in some windmill’s backside, although not nearly as entertaining and literarily significant.

Cats: The 9500 Year Old Answer to Rats at Taco Bell

The rats at KFC/Taco Bell video points up the fact that cats have been alienated from their job-by-nature: The decimating of rodents attracted to human food resources. Normally, cats would have long ago vanquished that rodent population right out of Bell-ville.

In fact, a few enthusiastic cat volunteers saw the rat story on the TV news and said “Let us at those rat bastards,” in so many cat words.

But send in the cats and you contend with cat germs instead of rat germs, and regulation wonks with their anti-cat-in-restaurant laws have already shown that rat germs are clearly the policy-preferred. Rats in turn love us so much, they are practically domestic animals. Only they harvest off of us instead of vice versa. The nerve.

Yet if it wasn’t rats filling that niche, it might be something worse, like giant nasty spiders, so let’s go with rats, because rats keep cats in business – for now.

That’s right, even rats cannot last forever (no industry does no matter how stable). And the disturbing trend now is not to replace jobs or retrain, but rather a growing alienation between cats and work itself. Self Help for Cats, the book, offers alternatives to this latest human experiment-in-lives that has already played itself out in no doubt a lot of lost time and inefficiency on the part of some perfectly good and talented individuals – our list-less, goalless cats!