Oliver the Missing Mog

Psychics, eh? Is there anything they can’t do? They can cure/heal/treat/help cancer, use their magic to confirm police reports and wear flat caps with their arses hanging out, and they can contact dead people who never actually existed. They’re a marvellous lot!

But that’s not the full extent of the psychic realm, it seems, as the BBC reported last week:

‘An Indian psychic is helping to search for cat which went missing from a Lincolnshire village. Oliver, a four-year-old tabby and white cat, went missing from Boothby Graffoe in October.

Owner Sue Machen, 56, has paid £1,000 for Hertfordshire-based company Animal Search UK to hunt for the animal.

It has employed psychic Sarita Gupta, who is based in Bangalore, to help in the search, a move which has been criticised by a sceptics’ society’. - Source: BBC

That’s right – we’re dealing psychic pet detectives! Which, to be clear, isn’t a detective who specialises in finding psychic pets (I can’t really see how one could make a full career out of that, really), but instead people who claim to use their psychic powers to detect and locate missing pets. Obviously.

So, what’s the story here? Well, it’s pretty simple - Oliver is a white and grey tabby cat. He has a white stomach and legs, and is tabby down his back and tail. He also has a distinctive black spot on the left side of his pink nose. And he’s missing. His owner Sue Machen, ‘distraught’ (according to the Fail) turned to Animal Search UK to locate him, and – as the newspapers report – they hired Indian mystic, magic woman and general all-round superhero Sarita Gupta to locate said missing moggy.

Miss Gupta, it’s reported, had similar success a fortnight ago in finding a tabby called Chiquitita in Birmingham, so she has form in this area, as Tom Watkins of Animal Search UK attests:

‘We did a search in Birmingham recently where the owner contacted her and was told the cat would be found where children play.

‘We then got a call from somebody – and when we searched a local garden, the cat was found trapped in a Wendy house. It was quite remarkable.’ – Source: Daily Fail

Remarkable indeed. So, what’s the Gupta feeling for the location of dear Ollie?

‘Ms Gupta believes the cat has been adopted as a stray by a new family, who do not know he has an owner.’ – Source: BBC

Amazing. Or not, as the spokesperson for the sceptics society explained to the BBC:

‘Looking at the advice given by the psychic in both cases, we have the suggestion that the cat is staying with another family, and the idea that lost cats like to be near children. Both of these are incredibly obvious scenarios to suggest for a missing cat, and would likely be the suggestions you’d get from someone without psychic powers – and without the need for a fee, too’. - Source: BBC

Now there’s some REAL wisdom, if you ask me. Which they did – because the very cool thing is, when the BBC saw a story of a missing cat and a psychic, they turned to we Merseyside Skeptics for balance. I can’t begin to tell you how happy it makes me that they actually bothered putting balance into the tale. In fact, in full, what I told the BBC was:

‘Looking at the advice given by the psychic in both cases, we have the suggestion that the cat is staying with another family, and the idea that lost cats like to be near children. Both of these are incredibly obvious scenarios to suggest for a missing cat, and would likely be the suggestions you’d get from someone without psychic powers – and without the need for a fee, too.

I’m sure if the cat is living with another family, people will feel it proves Ms Gupta’s psychic skills. However, if the same advice had been given by a non-psychic party, purely as an educated guess, nobody would suggest psychic powers were at play.

Of course, if Ms Gupta were interested in demonstrating that her skills work in less predictable and obvious scenarios, the Merseyside Skeptics Society would be only to happy to help put her powers to a fair and reasonable test’. – Source: Erm, Me.

And I stand by that – if Ms Gupta, or any other psychic, is in any way interested in demonstrating their talents, please contact me and we’ll discuss it: press@merseysideskeptics.org.uk. I check my email obsessively, and promise I’ll get back to you immediately.

Still, that’s not quite everything, where our little Ollie is concerned. Never one to shy away from a bit of research, I thought I’d check out what Animal Search UK have to say about the case of Oliver and the psychic. Fortunately, their website prominently displays their contact details, so I thought ‘why not?’

Interestingly enough, I was able to get straight through to Tom Watkins, who’s the lead investigator in the case of missing Oliver. He was happy to discuss the case, although entirely reticent to give me any details not already in the public domain (which is understandable, I suppose). First of all, I asked if employing psychics is the norm for their pet searching – as it turns out, they don’t hire psychics, they only consider psychic information when provided to them via the owners independently consulting a witch of their own accord. So strike one for the Daily Fail, who titled their whole piece ‘Distraught owner of missing cat pays team of PSYCHICS £1,000 to find her moggy’.

Further, when I asked how much stock his company places in the information of psychics, Tom told me: ‘We listen to them if the owners want us to, we don’t place too much stock in what they say, but we don’t discount anything’.

Interestingly, Tom was also able to confirm to me that the moggy in Birmingham was indeed located pretty much exactly where the psychic said it would be – in the sense that it was somewhere that children play. OK, sure a wendy house seems like a great hit there (although, of course, missing cats are more likely to be found by/with children than you’d imagine, I expect). However, Tom would not share any other details of that case, when I asked. Data protection? Possibly. I’ll come back to that.

Even more interestingly, Tom seemed to be a little confused as to the timelines involved with missing Ollie. As the papers have all reported, the psychic has been drafted in to help. When I asked Tom when this involvement occurred, he told me it was last week (roughly the time of the article). Which I found a little interesting, given that the website ‘ThisIsLincolnshire’ reported on Sue’s contact with a psychic back in December 2009. As I say, not one to shy away from the research. So, of course, I mentioned this to Tom… who confirmed that Sue contacted psychics to locate her missing cat 6 months ago. And, amazingly, the cat still isn’t found. Which says an awful lot about the quality of the psychic’s information, if you ask me.

So, bearing all of this in mind, one particular question springs to mind: Why is it that a story which essentially boils down to ‘psychic fails to help find missing cat after 6 months of involvement’ makes the national press, while supposedly a week before the story the same psychic successfully helped locate a missing cat in Birmingham, in a tale that’s not even been reported in local media in Birmingham?

Why is it that the success story gets no column inches, whereas the ongoing and unsuccessful search makes headlines across the world?

And why is there not a single report of a cat called Chiquitita in Birmingham, a missing cat being found in a wendy house, or Animal Search UK locating a missing cat in Birmingham? Isn’t it strange that even the company themselves don’t feature this amazing success story on their website, despite having a ‘Latest News‘ page and a ‘Happy Tails‘ page?

Is it me, or does anyone sense a shaggy cat story here?

Finally, just to cap off the story, it’s worth noting that the tale gets a whopping 850-word write-up in the Mail, in the most glowing and positive of terms, with the psychic angle largely peripheral throughout. As would be consistent, say, with a piece of PR.

Speaking of the Daily Mail and my own relative silence of late, here’s something uber-old-hat by now (news these days moves so fast) but I felt I had to write it up partly because a) it’s batshit insane, b) it’s a good example of how fallacious arguments are entirely interchangeably applicable to a whole range of topics and c) it gives me a chance to make some cheap gags:

Vaccines ‘are making our dogs sick as vets cash in’ - Source: Daily Mail (obviously).

See what I mean? Replace ‘dogs’ for ‘babies’ and ‘vets’ for ‘doctors’, and you’ve got a textbook anti-vaccination statement, a la Miss McCarthy. And it doesn’t stop there:

“Vaccines given to dogs are making them ill, a pet charity claimed yesterday. Profit-hungry drug companies and vets are ‘frightening’ dog owners into inoculating their pets more often than necessary, according to Canine Health Concern.”

If this isn’t PR for the Canine Health Concern charity, I don’t know what is. And it doesn’t stop there, either:

“Some puppies have developed conditions including autism and epilepsy after a raft of injections, it warns”

Yep – doggie autism. Doggie vaccines cause doggie autism, or so says the Canine Health Concern charity. Now, a few things to bear in mind:

• Vaccines don’t cause autism. That’s established fact.
• Dogs don’t have autism, or at least if they do it’s not caused by vaccines.
• Canine Health Concern is not a very large charity, and does not often get national news coverage the size their ‘Vaccines cause autism’ story has.

Those facts established, let’s continue in the Mail:

“Catherine O’Driscoll, from the charity, said: ‘We are not anti-vaccination. What we are saying is that currently our pets are receiving far too many. The latest scientific research shows that after the first course of injections as a puppy most dogs are immune against these diseases for at least seven years, if not for life. Every year pet vaccination companies hold National Vaccination Month, a national campaign when pet owners whose boosters have lapsed by 18 months or more are terrified into having their pet jabbed.”

Well, I’m sorry, Catherine, but that sounds pretty anti-vaccine to me. And it’s surely easy to see just how pot/kettle/black it is to speak of animal owners who are being terrified by Big Pharma into having their pet jabbed… with stuff that will give them AUTISM!!!!1!!11!!

This, of course, is the same non-anti-vaccination Catherine O’Driscoll who has written two anti-vaccination and anti-medicine books (‘What Vets Don’t Tell You about Vaccines‘ and ‘Shock to the System: The Facts about Animal Vaccination, Pet Food and How to Keep Your Pets Healthy‘) - the first page of one mentions going to a homeopathic vet who opened her eyes to how things really are; page two of the other book has Catherine admit she was a ‘science virgin’ and that ‘most of us – even the scientists – are science virgins’. Not to mention this beauty on page three:

“What nobody understands, and nobody seems to know, is how great the vaccination risk is. Will my dog die if I give him a vaccine? Will my child have brain damage if I give her a vaccine?” – Source: Shock to the System

Answer: No, Catherine, he won’t, and she won’t, and thanks for equating your dog’s life to that of your child’s.

So it’s hard to take Catherine seriously as a genuine source of unbiased, educated information. Well, it’s hard, unless you’re the Mail I mean. But then again, the Mail also ran with the back-up, super-proof tale of Charlie the Autistic Spaniel, whose owner told of his personality post-vaccination:

“Shutting a door or moving the washing basket terrified him. Then sometimes, despite calling his name, he wouldn’t even come to you… I simply cannot think of another explanation for the sudden change in his personality”

I can: He’s a fucking dog.

Elsewhere in the article, the Mail merrily quotes the letter produced by the crazy CHC and signed by ’17 vets and other pet experts’. Note that’s 17 total, not 17 vets AND other pet experts. And Catherine counts as a pet expert, remember. I wonder how many vets would sign a letter backing the use of vaccines… Fortunately, I know a vet, who I got straight onto the phone to – MSS member and sometime-blogger ‘Redwinelover‘, who quickly put paid to the notion that, as O’Driscoll suggests, a simple blood test would determine whether an animal needed a booster shot:

“It would actually be much more expensive to pay for the blood test to see if the dog is covered for the various diseases than it is to give one booster, as the booster shot can cover all the necessary vaccinations. There’s a certain percentage of dogs that will need the vaccination each time, so the best practice is to vaccinate yearly – after an extra 6 months past the booster date, 5-10%” of dogs are no longer immune; after an extra 12 months past the booster date that rises to 10-20%.

Also, vets are culpable if they were to forego vaccinating an animal and it develop the illness.”

What’s more, she confirmed to me that dogs don’t develop autism - or at least that there’s nowhere near enough personality work done on dogs to determine what robust diagnostic criteria would be for doggie autism.

So, I’ve been pretty disparaging of the CHC and O’Driscoll so far, and perhaps that seems harsh or ad-hom-y. Well, let’s take a brief look at the CHC website, and see if the criticism is justified.

“CHC advocates real food for dogs.  That is, food that Mother Nature has designed, over millions of years, and which has made the species thrive for millions of years.”

Ooh, an appeal-to-nature fallacy, combined with the sheer idiocy to overlook that ‘Mother Nature’ isn’t the one responsible for how food and vegetables are today – instead millenia of selective breeding by humans have moulded crops into the food we know today.

“Emotional Freedom Techniques - Based on impressive new discoveries involving the body’s subtle energies, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) has been clinically effective in thousands of cases for Trauma & Abuse, Stress & Anxiety, Fears & Phobias, Depression, Addictive Cravings, Children’s Issues and hundreds of physical symptoms including headaches, body pains and breathing difficulties.”

Ooh, some mystical reference to ‘subtle energies’ and a healing system so completely bonkers in adults that we’ve featured it several times.

And what’s this in their ‘Complementary Healthcare’ list?

Animal Life and Death:

So, when your animals don’t heal, despite what you see as your best efforts, it is not that you are failing in your duty, or seeming not to be capable of healing anyone or keeping anyone safe, it is just that they see their going as the next best step, their own path to healing of the spirit rather than of the physical body.

Back Flower Remedies:

There are 38 Flower Remedies, developed by Dr Bach with the aim of raising our vibrations so that we can hear our Spiritual Selves and fulfil our life purposes… If the dog becomes fixated on something that happened – for example, he heard a loud bang outside and now refuses to go into the garden, then White Chestnut can help him get the distressing event out of his mind and carry on with life.

Contacts – including details for:

I think it’s fair to say O’Driscoll and the Canine Health Concern charity aren’t the most reliable, sensible, sane sources of animal health information. Quick, someone call the Mail and tell them they’ve made a mistake, I’m positive they’ll issue a correction…

Conventional Medicine: Natural, holistic, and safe

As alternative medicines seem to get so much media exposure, I thought it was time I tried to explain how the conventional approach to medicine works, as I think people take it for granted without really being aware of what is involved. Alternative therapists often promote their treatments as being natural, safe and holistic, when often they are anything but that!

As a vet I believe I take a holistic approach to how I practise veterinary medicine, and approach my cases. If someone brings an ill animal into the surgery, before I examine it, I take a detailed history, which includes asking questions about the animal’s diet and lifestyle…. What food does it eat? Any recent change in diet? How many animals in the household, indoor or outdoor, and how many are showing symptoms. Any recent stress factors (e.g. moving house, people moving into or out of the home, recent kennelling, trauma, accidents or fights; major renovations). I’ll look at its previous medical history and check if it’s on concurrent medication, and check if the owners have medicated it with ‘over the counter’ or their own medication. What flea and worming treatments are being used, and when last applied. Vaccination status. Body condition. The animal’s signalment, ie breed, age, sex, entire/ neutered, all of which affect the conditions it could be susceptible to. I’ll keep in mind that very young, or old animals, as well as those that are obviously ill, may not be able to tolerate certain medications, or procedures.

By the time a dog has walked into the consult room, or a cat has been hauled out of its box, a decent vet will already have been judging it’s mental status, ability to walk, level of co-ordination, noted any lameness or neurological signs, any exercise intolerance, or dyspnoea, we’ll have looked for any swollen or bleeding areas, and we’ll be starting to pick up on on any coat or skin changes. We will also be assessing how friendly / aggressive it is, but that’s self preservation not medicine!

Then I’ll examine the animal head – tail, or by body system. Often people accuse us of only glancing at their animals, as the examinations are often done at speed. There is a time limitation here, not only due to the appt. system but also because animals quickly lose patience with being poked and prodded, so the longer you take, often the more difficult and less useful the exam can become, especially with cats, and aggressive dogs. By the time I have stroked your pets head, and had a look at it’s ears, mouth, nostrils and eyes, if everything looked ok, I’ve already started to rule out … glaucoma, hypertension, jaundice, dental disease, skull or mandible fractures, poor circulation, anaemia, polycythemia, clotting disorders, FIP, oral/ocular neoplasia, upper respiratory tract infection’s, conjunctivitis, blocked tear ducts, ocular and nasal FB’s, otitis externa/media/interna, retrobulbar abscesses, cyanosis, shock, and dehydration. But I’m not going to tell you all of that as I’m sweeping over the animal, because my brain is already onto the next part of the animal, while making a problem list, and a potential differential diagnoses list, as well as working out if further tests are required, and which would be the most helpful/ relevant and/or cost effective. I will bear in mind that your animal may have more than one thing wrong with it, and that not all of it’s clinical signs may be relevant (e.g. if a cat has had shit teeth for years and then stops eating … there’s likely to be something else wrong with it too.)

If we do prescribe medication for your animal you can be sure that it has been thoroughly developed and tested to ensure that it’s both effective and safe. I studied pharmacology as part of my training, so I understand how the medication works, when it’s appropriate to use it, and any potential side effects. The practice is inspected to ensure that the medication is correctly stored, and that records are kept of amounts and batch numbers, so that if there was ever a problem, it can be traced.

As well as the obvious treatments of medicine or surgery being provided, vet’s also give advice on husbandry. This can include changes in lifestyle such as rest, or more exercise; physiotherapy or swimming, a change in diet; advice about behaviour e.g. decreasing stress and providing a more stimulating environment. That’s what I call holistic. Yet the term is more often associated with alternative medicine and it shouldn’t be! Perhaps people would rather be told their dog had diabetes because it’s chakra’s were out of sync, rather than facing the fact it was caused by a high fat diet of leftovers and treats, and a lack of exercise.

Possible scenario… The acupuncturist suggests your dog is lethargic because it has a problem with its spleen. They tell you that the spleen is responsible for helping the body to get rid of toxins, and in your dog it’s not working properly. They suggest acupuncture (of course), and place needles through the dogs skin based on the meridians for the spleen. They tell you they will unblock the meridian, and the dogs energy levels should rise after. Even as I’m writing it I can’t believe people buy into this crap.

Of course they wouldn’t actually tell you what they thought was wrong with the spleen… e.g. infection, trauma, cancer, autoimmune problem etc. And of course there is no way to tell if there was a problem with the spleen just by looking at the dog, although you could suspect it was enlarged by abdominal palpation, in thin relaxed animals. In conventional medicine, if the spleen was causing the lethargy, it would be because it was affected by a not uncommon vascular tumour called a haemangiosarcoma. One of the reasons the dogs are lethargic is because they are bleeding into their abdomens, and without prompt diagnosis and surgery, they bleed to death. Sticking pins into a dog isn’t going to stop that happening. You might as well stick pins into a voodoo doll, and save the dog the discomfort!

If you really feel that the vet hasn’t given your animal a proper examination, or if you think they are incompetent, go and see a different vet for a second opinion. Don’t completely turn your back on conventional medicine and head off in search of the nearest Woo practitioner! Not only are you receiving poor quality diagnosis and treatment, but there are many potential dangers.

At best, nothing may happen, as treatments like homeopathy won’t have any effect at all. Of course an animal may deteriorate as it’s being deprived of an accurate assessment while you waste time with the quack. At worst, you may be told to stop giving medication that it’s already taking, with potentially catastrophic results. Many therapists promote the phenomenon known as the ‘healing crisis’ where they tell you to expect the animal to get worse before it gets better, supposedly due to the body fighting back and expelling toxins! Of course this would lead you to try and ignore your animal as it got worse, instead of seeking veterinary advice and help as soon as possible. Alternative medicine can be directly harmful to your animal too. Incorrect placement of acupuncture needles can cause bleeding, or nerve damage. The needles can spread infection if not sterile, or can break off and potentially cause a foreign body reaction. Manipulation therapies like osteopathy can cause bruising, pain and paralysis. Unlike conventional pharmaceuticals, herbal remedies have not been properly tested to ensure their safety. They can be directly toxic, interfere with other medications, and often contain other compounds and contaminants. For example, milk thistle has been associated with colic, diarrhoea, vomiting and fainting; and can interfere with anti diabetic and antiviral drugs. Artichoke just causes flatulence…

And lastly, some advice:

Please don’t tap the table or the animal when I’m trying to listen to it’s heart, or wait until that moment to tell me you’ve just remembered that it ate your mothers heart medication along with the packaging, but you’d forgotten to tell me until now. Please stop making homophobic jokes about ‘shirtlifters’ when I’m taking your dogs rectal temperature. And please don’t tell me that your pet didn’t mean it, just after it’s tried to bite my face; it doesn’t make me feel any better.