Posted on 05/13/2005 3:25:55 PM PDT by martin_fierro
Chinese TV show's cat slinging act draws fire from pet lovers
Fri May 13, 1:22 PM ET
BEIJING (AFP) - A Chinese television channel was reportedly forced to apologize after receiving complaints from pet lovers about a programme in which a cat was thrown out of a four-storey building.
The Travel Channel broadcast a feature on May 4 showing how a cat can safely survive even when dropped from great height, Beijing Times said.
In the programme, a white cat was dropped from a four-storey building while a narrator said: "Miao Miao (the cat) quickly turns around, adjusts its four limbs, straightens its tail and goes down.
"Let's look at how it's doing ... it is okay!"
Angry pet lovers posted petitions on several websites and lodged complaints with the state broadcasting authorities and the television channel, saying the act could cause bone fractures or damage the animal's internal organs.
The Travel Channel apologised and promised it would not repeat the experiment, the report said.
During the heyday of communist ethics, China banned pets as frivolous and bourgeois but pet ownership has become a new vogue among the country's newly rich amid its robust market economic reforms.
Weirdness Ping
They eat cats in China, don't they?
why I love FR. strobing cats, where else?
Someone had to do it.
I think Cat Slinging is a demonstration sport in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
$4.95 at Archie McPhee
I tell you, any country that banned pets, or that holds them out as only for the wealthy, is a country that is truly ****ed-up!
My level of respect for the rulers (not to mention the whimpy ruled) of China just went down, and it's hard to do that when it was already as low as a snake.
Here's a picture of my buddy pal holding down the fort in Michigan while I eke out a living here in the Silicon Valley:
We are catless now.
But here is a more recent pic of my daughter with our newest family member Pyewacket, a very cute and docile yearling male ball python.
Pyewacket...the cat in Bell, Book and Candle.....Kim Novak was a beauty.
Sweet!
[Freepmail me to get on or off the Kitty Ping List.]
Yes, Pyewacket was the cat's name. However, there is a story behing that name:
Pyewacket was one of the familiar spirits of a witch detected by the notorious "witch finder general" Matthew Hopkins in March 1644 in his own town of Maningtree, Essex, UK. According to his story, he spied on the witches as they held their meeting close by his house, and heard them mention the name of a local woman. She was arrested and deprived of sleep for four nights, at the end of which she confessed and named her familiars. They were:
# Holt
# Jarmara
# Vinegar Tom
# Sacke and Sugar
# Newes
# Ilemauzer
# Pyewacket
# Pecke in the Crowne
# Griezzel Greedigutt
Hopkins says he and nine other witnesses saw the first five of these, which appeared to them in the exact forms described by the witch. Interestingly, only the first of these was a cat; the next two were dogs, and the others were a black rabbit and a polecat. So it’s not clear whether Pyewacket was a cat’s name or not.
How can you stand to leave your beautiful friend alone? Why don't you move him/her to California (yuck) with you?
My thoughts exactly. I was also going to say that the media are idiots everywhere you go. Let's drop an idiot media person out of a four story window and see if he lands on his feet.
Calling all kitties...
You must be thinking of the Olympic Kitty Toss; won last time out by Norwegian olympian Sven Olafsen, who tossed a 16-lb. cat 54 feet 7 inches -- a new world record.
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