Fine article. Though I have a problem with one part of it.
You’re throwing baseless accusations about people because they don’t happen to share your same view point on the innate rights of animals. Calling them sadists, don’t have a problem with that because it has a foundation. Really, you just wanted to insult someone because you don’t like what they did, I don’t care about that, go ahead – but the baseless attacks on their intelligence makes you look like a moron yourself.
Seems OP considers sadism a serious - and seriously meant - accusation. Perhaps he’s a teenager himself, or has been worked over by some particularly nasty animal rightists, leading him to red-flag any allusion that fuzzbutts might have “innate rights.”
When I was growing up in Toronto in the late 60’s and early 70’s, there was a hi-rise building, Rochdale College, that was designed to be a progressive new age college (and student residence). There was supposed to be no structure, people learned at their own pace and organized their own classes etc. Sort of an “anarcho-syndicalist commune”.
The predictable happened, people were cracking the stairwells driving their motorcycles down the stairs, the drug dealers took over whole floors, lookouts would pull the fire alarm whenever there was a raid.
A policeman in an interview described one drug raid, they were walking up to the building when SPLAT a cat landed on the pavement just missing them, launched possibly from as high as the 17th floor. He never mentioned whether it landed on its feet, but apparently it did not matter. Not all cats survive every fall.
OTOH, I recall an Scientific American article on freefall where they had a sequence of photos of a cat held by its legs upside-down and being dropped from a foot up. It still landed on its feet. The article described the kid of gyrations cats and gymnasts go through to change orientation in midair with nothing to push on or against.
Then there’s the famous story about the guys in NASA who decided to find out what a cat would do in zero G? Which way does he orient himself if there’s no gravity? They weren’t making a special flight of the 707 Vomit Comet just to give a cat a ride, so they mounted a camera in a fighter cockpit and instructed the pilot to put the jet in a zero-G parabolic arch and then release the cat. They have some fantastic footage of a fighter jock trying to shake a cat loose from his arm, and the cat hanging on for dear life.
A KC-135 is not a jet fighter - it’s an airliner. This one has the passenger/cargo section open for experimenters to have room to move around.
It does fly a parabolic arc to create free fall.
The experimenters do wear flight suits, but are not typically fighter jocks. Rather, they are mostly engineers.
Of course the cat is going to hold on. Someone wasn’t thinking when they expected to be able to pull a cat out and release it without incident. I mean, cat’s come armed with razor-sharp gripping devices.
I don’t see how it was a baseless attack… If you need to carry out the mentioned experiment in order to “figure out” what will happen when you drop any living creature from 800 ft 99.9999999% of the time… you are pretty fucking stupid…
FWIW I don’t believe the author of the note as far as the cat surviving is concerned…
The real question is if an airplane with a cat in it would be capable of overcoming the friction between the ground and its wheels in order to take off…
md20000 said that they weren’t going to take the Vomit Comet up just for this one experiment, so they used a fighter. What part are you disputing?
Powers &8^]
