Woman with double chin says she would rather starve to feed her cats

NEWS AND COMMENT: This is a BBC story published eight hours ago. The headline is "Cost of living: pet owner would rather starve to feed cats".

Under the headline is a picture (see below) of the woman, Miari Workman, holding her two cats. She has a double chin and she's clearly carrying too much weight. Starving? Not eating enough? Nah!

Ms Workman has made a bold statement which has caught the attention of the news media but she's clearly not carrying through on that statement. She has no need to starve herself because she is finding a way not to and that, by the way, is to go down to a local pet food bank. Free cat food.

I wonder sometimes whether people use pet food banks who should be using them. Do people who operate pet food banks actually check with care the credentials of their customers? Do they check whether they really are out-of-pocket completely to the point where they have to starve themselves as Ms Workman indicates?

I don't think so. In fact, I'm certain that it never happens. She says that she is a single mom with kids and two cats and really struggles with money. This is what is likely to happen because if you've got children you've got to be around for them and therefore you can't go out to work. And therefore, you rely on welfare benefits. And human and pet food banks.

I think though that she has made a statement which is over the top. If she was really skinny and looking pale then I would believe her. But her words are empty.

She also says that the pet food bank "helped tremendously". And "Sometimes I'll feed my daughter and go without and make sure I've got food for the cats."

She goes without food but I think she could go without a little more food because she needs to eat less. That is quite obvious.

Although I can't believe this woman, I can believe, through personal experience that food prices in the UK have rocketed and I believe a lot of the time the rises are unjustified. I believe that the supermarkets are jumping on the bandwagon of inflation and adding an extra price rise in order to increase their profit margins. This is unscrupulous.

Pet food has risen by 12.6% over the past 12 months and human food has risen by 18.2% over the same period.

The one good thing that Ms Workman states is that when you adopt a cat you don't just get rid of them because you're struggling to pay your expenses. You find a way to keep looking after them. Too many people find it too easy to abandon their cat companions as a time convenient to them. 

And sometimes people use events such as the cost-of-living crisis in the UK to get rid of their cat. It's a way of justifying it.

An animal welfare assistant at Blue Cross, who runs the pet food bank, Gemma Greg, 25, said that since January she had noticed that more people were using their charity. And she also said that many families were looking to have their pets rehomed for financial reasons.

I'm back to my original point. The last thing you should do is to get rid of your cat. You can find other ways to save money. You can stop paying subscriptions for mobile phones. You can stop or reduce your outgoings in many areas. You can save enough money by restricting your outgoings to allow you to afford cat food. I just don't see inflation as a good excuse.

Purchase on AmazonSmile to give to animal charities (no cost to you)

Idaho Humane Society's Facebook post usefully reminds people that they can help charities like their animal shelter by purchasing products online via AmazonSmile. I was aware of it but I had not become involved with it which is careless because you simply purchase on Amazon in the usual way and can select a charity to which Amazon will donate. They say that they have donated $355 million to charities under the scheme so far.

AmazonSmile is a separate portal from their main website but it offers the same products and prices as their normal website. There is one difference: when you purchase on AmazonSmile, the retailer's foundation contributes 0.5% of the price of eligible purchases to the charity of your choice.

It doesn't cost anything for the charities to receive money this way and 100% of the donation goes to the charity. If you are a regular Amazon user as I am it's a great way to give to charities without any effort.

I regret to say that up until now I have not used AmazonSmile. I will do so from now on. Amazon has a webpage which provides instructions how to set up your Amazon smile purchases (click here to read it - note sometimes external links stop working). It is available on smile.amazon.com. 

And they say that "you'll find the exact same low prices, vast selection and convenient shopping experience as on Amazon.com". Tens of millions of products are eligible for donations. They are marked "Eligible for AmazonSmile donation". And there are over 1 million 501(c)(3) public charitable organizations registered with this program.

A NEGATIVE VIEWPOINT: It might be useful to also include a negative viewpoint about this scheme. Some cynics state that the scheme is a method of promoting Amazon because they are a very wealthy company with almost a monopoly on online purchases and therefore, they want to soften this image by saying that they give to charity which they do. 

But a purchaser who wants to use this scheme has to fiddle around a little bit to set it up and on a purchase of about $20 very little goes to charity at 0.05% of the purchase price excluding VAT and other add-ons. So, yes, that is a negative. You have to be committed to set it up and there is this slight lack of genuineness about the scheme but I still think is worthwhile because even doing a very small amount is doing something for animal welfare if you choose an animal welfare charity as I would. It's worth the effort I would say.

But the fact is that if you spend $5000 over a couple of years, you'll be giving $25 to charity; money that you would not have donated normally. If a million people use the scheme that's $25m.

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.