Some pros and cons of pet health insurance

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Are banks doing enough for animal welfare?

The question that I have is whether high street banks, the big banks in any country, are doing enough for animal welfare by donating to, for example, animal shelters or conservationists and campaign groups fighting for improvements in wildlife welfare.

There's lots of options for a bank to donate even a small sum relative to their overall income to improve the plight of persecuted wildlife. It's a topic of major concern nowadays because of the coronavirus pandemic. People have been switched on to the need to respect nature because it is believed that the pandemic originated in a wet market in China where the workers disrespected nature. This allowed the disease to spread from a wild animal to a person and then to many more people.

Corporate giving clipart in the public domain (deemed).

Corporate donations to charity is probably quite a tricky discussion for directors of these big businesses. I have no idea whether they discuss it at all. But I would have thought that it would be good publicity for a cold-hearted big business to get involved in charitable giving particularly on the issue of animal welfare.

I can sense that there is a growing interest in the citizens of many countries in the area of animal welfare. If I am right then a bank giving for the purpose of improving animal welfare would be good publicity. Banks always need good publicity because they project an image of greed in my view and everything they do is about making money for the directors - the fat cats. They provide a very average service in terms of interest rates on savings to the decent citizens who are their customers.

I bank with Lloyds in the UK and there provided me with a terrible service recently after my debit card was stolen. They wouldn't compensate me until I pushed really hard and they provided terrible instructions on how to reset my pin number. The whole experience has been poor and they could do a lot better. I sense that the banks become complacent because we have to rely on them. Complacency breeds contempt which in turn breeds poor customer service.

Unsurprisingly, when I googled for information about banks giving to animal welfare charities I couldn't find anything at all. Absolutely nothing was thrown up by Google. I had hoped to see at least one bank donating a small sum of money by their standards to the advancement of animal welfare either domestic or wild animal but nothing, nada, zilch. That does not mean that some bank somewhere gives money towards animal welfare and it is simply not publicised or Google can't find information, but it looks bleak.

The British government, thanks to Carrie Symonds, is doing more about animal welfare and I can't see why the banks in Britain can't jump on that bandwagon and do more themselves. If they want to present a more caring image to the wider public there's nothing better that they can do than to give to animal welfare charities or charities involved in wildlife conservation. There is a pressing need on both fronts for improvements. Let's see it happen.

Super cute dwarf kitten video

This is a super-cute short video of a super-cute tabby dwarf kitten wandering around a hard floor. It doesn't get much cuter except the music is not particularly great as far as I am concerned. Please remember by the way that this sort of video can stop working after a while because they get pulled from the website of origin which in this case is Pinterest.

You have to think about the more serious aspects of what looks like a totally innocent video. I'm referring to the fact that the breeding of dwarf cats is questionable. I know that the breeders do all they can to be healthy cats but dwarf cats can inherit a couple of known genetic illnesses. If you breed cats with that potential then you shouldn't do it in my opinion. The Germans would agree with me because they call it "torture breeding". Also, although it's very cute for a cat to have very short legs it goes against nature. Who cares about nature?

Well, a lot of people do especially nowadays with the coronavirus pandemic. People are beginning to see that we should respect nature otherwise we get a backlash from nature. And short legs means that a domestic cat loses a lot of what they are given by nature which is that wonderful athleticism. Their ability to jump beautifully and with great precision. A lot of that is lost in dwarf cats.

Dwarf cat owners say that their cat can jump just fine. Yes, they can jump just fine but not as well as a normal cat because the levers i.e. the length of the bones, are not there and jumping power comes about through fast twitch muscles and long levers. That principle by the way is used when you throw a tennis ball with one of those extenders that dog owners buy. These extenders, as I have called them, increase the lever length of the throwing arm which means that the person can throw the tennis ball much further and with relative ease for a dog to chase.

So we have a sweet, cute video with crappy music but there's something slightly difficult to accept behind the cuteness which is the health and behavioural aspects of the kitten that we see.

Ultimate cat climbs Christmas tree video

Maybe this is the ultimate cat climbing a Christmas tree video. He is so accomplised but what happened after the video stopped? How much of the tree was destroyed?! I would have liked to have seen a bit more; to have seen how he got there and how he got off. 

Ginger tabby cat enjoys his bit of fun. Screenshot.

I wonder whether her was put on the tree for the cameras? It kind of looks like that because I don't think he would have got up there without destroying something below which would have stopped him proceeding unless his owner didn't mind the Christmas tree being destroyed! 

It's a cute little video though and re-emphhasises the fascination that domestic cats have with Christmas trees and which is why you can buy them which are cat-proof. They have the lower branches cut off or missing so they look a bit like umbrellas. 

They don't look very good but they reduce anxiety levels in cat owners.

On a more serious note, during the Christmas season of 2019 a man in Johnson, Tennessee was charged with killing his cat because they climbed his Christmas tree.

Happy #Caturdaypic.twitter.com/YrmEseTYkH

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 19, 2020