I bring this up because it seems to once again be gaining traction in the zeitgeist: I cannot comprehend why UFO hunters put so much time and effort into trying to force governments to “reveal the truth about extraterrestrial contact”, but I also cannot fathom how they think aliens even have a chance of successfully contacting us in-person in the first place.
a) Why does anyone believe extraterrestrials would be able to track us down at all? Space is BIG.
b) If aliens knew we existed in the first place, please explain the math of how they’d get here. Even taking Star Trek logic into account and considering warp drive as a possibility, when considering relativity, Newton’s third law and the mathematics of achieving the right conditions of either for deep space travel, warp drive still seems implausible.
c) In the mathematically improbable situation where intelligent life did manage to get here, why would they be tiptoeing around in the background for seemingly 80 or so years when they are clearly technologically superior to us and nothing humanity has available to itself could remotely stop them? It seems silly to imagine these incredible lifeforms getting here and then having an “oops we crash landed” event.
d) Lastly, governments successfully covering up such an event(s) for decades is a fairy tale. Governments playing around with flight and stealth technology for the last 100 years? Yeah that seems likely.
Do I think intelligent life exists? Absolutely. Is there a chance those beings have contacted or reached us? 99.9999999% no. Is it fun to speculate about the possibilities and portray those possibilities in stories? Of course. Should people be spending time and money forming organizations to “force the government to tell the truth”, thereby wasting everyone else’s time and resources and ultimately being drains on society? Absolutely not. I don’t get it.
One of the two families I’ve seen this with don’t feed their cat up there in the actual sense, but also don’t make much of an effort to stop it if the cat just goes up there and eats whatever is within reach. Cat swiped the bologna from your sandwich? “Oh well, la-di-da, gonna make me another sandwich then and wait until the cat is done with the first one so I can throw away the bread.”
Luckily they don’t have children, so Toxoplasmosis won’t affect an innocent bystander, but still … no. Just no. I’ve never allowed any of my pets to do that. They might get the last bite of my food after I’m finished, but only if they didn’t beg too obtrusively and it is something they can easily digest. Not to mention that it can’t be healthy in the long run if they just allow their pet to eat lots of “human food” all the time.
The other family does indeed feed their cats on a shelf in the living room so the dog can’t get to the cat food, but they didn’t teach their cats that other elevated surfaces might not be okay, and I swear those cats know dang well that they’re allowed to do whatever the f- they want. One of them jumped into their fridge once, with all the casual confidence it could muster. Instead of picking the cat up and removing it from the fridge, he went to fetch the treats to coax it out, and then couldn’t seem to understand it when I told him he’s rewarding a bad behaviour. Judging by their furniture they also don’t mind their cats scratching the couch. The dog on the other hand is well behaved.
In both cases, the entire family (at least the ones I’ve met so far) seem to think that cats are, by default, un-teachable, so they don’t even try. And in both cases they think I “got lucky” with my own cat as he does indeed respect boundaries despite being an asshole in a couple of other aspects.
I’ve not met any other “direct examples” so far, but whenever I’m telling someone else about this it happens astoundingly often that they just shrug and go “oh well, you can’t teach cats anyway, what do you expect…” - I have seriously no idea whether this is a cultural thing (I’m German) or whether I’m just surrounded by weirdos, but either way it happens way too often for my taste.
removing a cat from a fridge sounds like a very straightforward thing to do and treats shouldn’t be required. you just grab the cat.
some friends of mine made this very beautiful thing in the living room to feed cats up high where dog couldn’t get it. shelves kind of staircased around the room about 1m, 2m and 2.5m high. cats loved the 2.5m perch. it was put together out of antique furniture that matched their style, not ugly carpet cat furniture stuff. i doubt they would tolerate cat on countertop or cat in fridge or cat in cooking pot.
one german lady I knew told me that if my cats sleep on my bed it means I should move my bed. Apparently in germany it is widely believed that cats like bad “lay lines” so anywhere they sleep indicates bad energy. Ever since then I have imagine cat owners in germany endlessly moving their bed around a room trying to find the one location where the cat will no longer be attracted to it. So maybe the problem is that the countertops of your friends have all been build along strongly dangerous lay lines while yours have not been. Now you are full of “good lay line privilege” pretending it’s all due to your hard work. Have you ever even once suggested to these friends that they should move their counters?