From the NYT, we hear about how feral cats invaded a Chilean jail after which (as one expects) the prisoners turned ailurophiles. Click under to learn, or discover it archived right here.
Excerpts:
Some say they have been first introduced in to take out the rats. Others contend they wandered in on their very own.
What everybody can agree on — together with those that have lived or labored at Chile’s largest jail the longest — is that the cats have been right here first.
For a long time, they’ve walked alongside the jail’s excessive partitions, sunbathed on the steel roof and skittered between cells crowded with 10 males every. To jail officers, they have been a peculiarity of types, and principally ignored. The cats saved multiplying into the a whole bunch.
Then jail officers realized one thing else: The feline residents weren’t solely good for the rat drawback. They have been additionally good for the inmates.
“They’re our companions,” stated Carlos Nuñez, a balding prisoner exhibiting off a 2-year-old tabby he named Feita, or Ugly, from behind jail bars. While caring for a number of cats throughout his 14-year sentence for home housebreaking, he stated he found their particular essence, in contrast with, say, a cellmate or perhaps a canine.
YES! “Even a d*g”!!!!
“A cat makes you worry about it, feed it, take care of it, give it special attention,” he stated. “When we were outside and free, we never did this. We discovered it in here.”
Known merely as “the Pen,” the 180-year-old foremost penitentiary in Santiago, Chile’s capital, has lengthy been generally known as a place the place males reside in cages and cats roam free. What is now extra clearly understood is the optimistic impact of the jail’s roughly 300 cats on the 5,600 human residents.
The felines’ presence “has changed the inmates’ mood, has regulated their behavior and has strengthened their sense of responsibility with their duties, especially caring for animals,” stated the jail’s warden, Col. Helen Leal González, who has two cats of her personal at home, Reina and Dante, and a set of cat collectible figurines on her desk.
“Prisons are hostile places,” she added in her workplace, carrying a good bun, billy membership and fight boots. “So of course, when you see there’s an animal giving affection and generating these positive feelings, it logically causes a change in behavior, a change in mindset.”
Prisoners informally undertake the cats, work collectively to look after them, share their meals and beds and, in some instances, have constructed them little homes. In return, the cats present one thing invaluable in a lockup infamous for overcrowding and squalid circumstances: love, affection and acceptance.
“Sometimes you’ll be depressed and it’s like she senses that you’re a bit down,” stated Reinaldo Rodriguez, 48, who’s scheduled to be imprisoned till 2031 on a firearms conviction. “She comes and glues herself to you. She’ll contact her face to yours.
Formal applications to attach prisoners and animals turned extra widespread within the late Nineteen Seventies, and after persistently optimistic outcomes, they’ve expanded internationally, together with to Japan, the Netherlands and Brazil.
They have grow to be significantly well-liked within the United States. In Arizona, prisoners practice wild horses to patrol the U.S. border with Mexico. In Minnesota and Michigan, prisoners practice dogs for the blind and deaf. And in Massachusetts, prisoners assist look after wounded or sick wildlife, like hawks, coyotes and raccoons.
Connecting inmates and dogs has repeatedly been proven to result in “a decrease in recidivism, improved empathy, improved social skills and a safer and more positive relationship between inmates and prison officials,” stated Beatriz Villafaina-Domínguez, a researcher in Spain who reviewed 20 separate research of such applications.
Dogs have been the most typical animal utilized by prisons, adopted by horses, and in most applications, animals are delivered to the inmates, or vice versa. In Chile, nonetheless, the inmates developed an natural connection to the stray cats who reside alongside them.
Chileans know finest!
The program’s success has been partly because of the inmates, Ms. Sandoval stated. The prisoners accumulate cats that want care and produce them to the volunteers.
On a recent day, 4 ladies lugged cat carriers into the jail grounds, on the hunt for quite a few felines, together with Lucky, Aquila, Dropón and her six new kittens, and Mr. Nuñez’s cat, Ugly.
The courtyard was chaotic, packed for an inmate soccer match, however prisoners politely made manner for the ladies.
Quickly, males cradling cats in tattooed arms got here bounding down stairs alongside the courtyard, handing animals by way of jail bars to the volunteers. In one cease, Denys Carmona Rojas, 57, a prisoner serving eight years on gun costs, doted on a litter of kittens in a field. He stated he had helped increase many kittens in his cell, recounting one case through which he fed particular milk to a litter after the mom died throughout delivery.
From the NYT. There is extra on the website.
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From CNN, a brief tail of a Thai farmer who vegetation rice at totally different occasions in a discipline in order that the rising shoots, which change colour, create the picture of a sleeping cat hugging a fish. Click to learn:
A sleeping cat hugs a fish in an image seen from the air, picked out in sprouting rainbow seedlings in a rice discipline in Thailand as an example a standard proverb about abundance.
Farmer Tanyapong Jaikham and a workforce planted the seedlings at varied spots within the discipline within the northern province of Chiang Rai to depict cartoon cats, hoping to lure vacationers and cat lovers.
“We’re expecting tens of thousands to come and see the art in the rice fields,” he stated.
The course of depends on GPS coordinates to position the seedlings as designated in an preliminary artist’s sketch, he stated, with the vegetation altering tint as they develop.
Viewing towers are being constructed within the surrounding space to present guests a glimpse of the art work, which relies on a Thai saying, “There is fish in the water and rice in the fields.”
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And right here’s a 9.5-minute video of the Way Things Should be: cats cooperating to defeat predatory d*gs (TRIGGER WARNING: Scratching and biting of d*gs! What I don’t perceive why the photographer, within the second clip, didn’t assist the blind man and his information canine. People would like to movie violence than cease it. Fortunately, it seems as if no dogs have been damage.
Notice the cats’ bushy tails.
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Lagniappe: A heartwarming video of a raveled and sick stray kitten saved and changed into a stunning housecat.
h/t: Susan, Debra
