Pet
Survivor Scandal
How The Colonel's campaign
was subverted by a TV game show on the Psychic Pets Network.
September,
2000
By Tomato the Cat – Best
Friends Investigative Reporter
The dumbing down of the pet public has reached new heights.
Just for starters, is anyone actually following The Colonel’s campaign?
Does anybody even care that an extremist group of former feral cats, living right here at the Best Friends WildCats Village, is planning to capture the presidency and then carry out its plan for world domination – and maybe beyond?
Have any of your pets at home been watching any of this?
No, to all three questions. Instead, they’ve all switched channels and are now glued to the new hit show on the Psychic Pets Network, Pet Survivor!, to see who’s going to be the next dog or cat to be voted – or, rather, adopted – off the island.
Not that Best Friends is an island, of course. The nearest ocean is more than 500 miles away. “Who cares?” said the producers when I queried them on this. They just looked around at the coral pink sand all over the sanctuary and muttered something about patching in a palm tree and some ocean in the background of the video.
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Betting on the Min Pin
My investigative assistant, Tammy the Greyhound, says that the producers
got the idea for the show when the PTB (Powers That Be) were trying to
find a home for a rather annoying little Min Pin dog called Carter.
Carter had been thoroughly spoiled in his former home (“He passed obedience training, but I failed,” confessed his former person in Missouri.) When her husband pulled the old “It’s me or the dog” routine, Carter came to Best Friends. He tried two new homes and came back from both for bad behavior. There were rumors that a deputation of dogs were heading over to the PTB to say “It’s us or the dog,”
Anyway, when Carter went up for adoption a third time, Tammy overheard a group of cats at the WildCats Village one evening betting over how long it would take this time for him to be returned to the sanctuary. (They all lost. Carter had hit the jackpot this time. His new person, in Ohio, describes him as “a bit of a project!” But she loves Min Pins and he’d doing better and everyone’s happy.)
But nobody at the WildCats Village was the slightest bit put off by losing their bets. Quite the opposite. By the following morning, the whole thing had escalated into a game show and in July they launched Pet Survivor! during prime time on the Psychic Pets Network. The ratings went straight through the roof.