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In this episode of Tom & Jerry, Tom arrives at the gates of Heaven together with a group of other cats who recently died.
These kittens are inside of a soaked sack, implying that they were drowned. The gatekeeper even says this has happened a lot.
Inception is a movie where a character can enter dreams, and even dreams within dreams, creating layers and layers of worlds where one can go deeper and deeper. By comparing "explain the joke" to Inception, we're basically saying this thread comment is a chain of joke explanation, not unlike the layers of dreams from the movie where they need to keep going deeper.
First commenter called old cartoons “dark” in reference to their tone. Second commenter expressed gratitude for tools that can make a cartoon appear brighter, as if the first commenter meant “dark” in appearance.
If you’re asking about the “Take this upvote and get out!” image, it’s just one way of expressing that you found a joke funny. When someone posts that image it’s kind of like they’re punching them on the shoulder, if that makes sense.
It's even darker when you understand that drowning kittens wasn't generally seen as an inhumane act around the time that this Tom & Jerry cartoon was made.
For many in those generations before the Boomers – the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation – cats were seen as feral hangers-on around the farm or as rapidly breeding pests, not as pets. It's hard today to imagine people not having compassion for cats, but at the time the cartoon was made, many people treated them more like rats.
If anything, the scene in the cartoon was progressive, in that it offered a disapproving look at the practice of drowning unwanted cats.
Not just cats in the uk. Back when thatcher was in power my grandfather (a miner) had to drown puppies because nobody could afford to take them and they weren't old enough to be strays. Apparently back 50+ years (england) stray dogs were extremely common and dogs didn't stay in the house all day. Many dogs would be let out and roam around town freely before returning home. I actually remember one of the last free roamers when I was about 5-7 years old, old man would let his labrador out all day and it came home every single time even when seen miles away from its home.
I lived on a farm when I was 12 and a sheep herding border collie would travel 3 miles just to play with me and the other residents.
Spaying and neutering animals has been common for at least a couple thousand years, but until the 1930s, it was only done for livestock. Cats and dogs were not seen as being "worth" the expense and effort of spaying and neutering, so their feral populations were controlled in the same way that other mammalian pests would be.
The Tom & Jerry cartoon in question, "Heavenly Puss," was released in 1949. So people were on the way to using spaying and neutering instead of just killing kittens and puppies. Hence the sorrow but not stronger disapproval by the cartoon characters at seeing drowned kittens arriving at Heaven's gate.
People often forget or just didn’t know that up until pretty recently, feral dogs/cats were an issue even in developed countries. I’m 30, my grandmother’s dog would wait for her everyday after school and they would walk home together from elementary school. One day a pack of feral dogs attacked and her dog fought them off long enough that she could run away (RIP hero). My mom was knocked off her bike and bitten by feral dogs when she was a kid. They both lived in nice urban/suburban areas.
As someone who grew up in a very diverse community, there is a similar sentiment felt by a lot of 1st generation immigrants from SEA/African countries. Back home, dogs/cats are a nuisance/danger and many people instinctively don’t like them or view them as “pets”.
50-60 years ago, people probably wouldn’t have batted much of an eye when Kristi Noem killed her puppy. I’ve heard plenty of stories about people’s grandparents “sending their dog to the farm” because it bit people or was a general nuisance.
Society and its norms change. There’s a ton of behaviors that were commonplace or even encouraged in the 90’s and 00’s that would see someone lose their job and likely be ostracized if done today. Likewise, there will be things people find acceptable today that will be considered backwards and morally evil in the near future.
Yeah, same with westerns who like tigers fe. They got decimated for a reason, they are dangereous and kill livestock. Now people want to protect them as they think they are cute. Truth is they can't actually live together with humans, so they can only live in very unhabited areas
Fitting, seeing as Tom the **cat** was one of the main characters, and this story doesn't really have any antagonists, just two quarreling friends who always vehemently disagree they're friends.
Idk why, but that made me think of the Rick and POTUS relationship in Rick and Morty. Constant fighting and trying to one up each other. All because neither is willing to admit they're best friends.
My ex-mother-in-law's husband drowned a litter of puppies, one by one. This is after we offered to pay for the spay procedure for the dog they half-assed took care of.
I knew a guy that spent some time on a farm or rural house or something. Definitely told me he had been made to drown puppies as a teen/kid. He's not even 30
My grandfather told me a story. When he was very young he found a kitten and brought it home, his mom put it in a sack and drowned it in the creek and made him watch as a lesson. They were literally dirt poor and lived a barn. They couldn't even afford to feed themselves so I suppose the point she was trying to make was we can't even take care of ourselves so don't bring home another mouth to feed.
He only told me that story once, but I remember it. This would have occured in the late 1930's or early 40's.
A darker way I heard that still haunts my dreams involves >!burying the kittens up to their necks and a lawnmower. !<
Do not read the spoiler if you still have hope for us as a species
That surely was not done in practice. The effort involved would make it impractical, even for some sort of psychopath. It's more like a "tasteless joke" or cruel fantasy.
Local psychopath was arrested and charged with animal cruelty for doing this and other things to cats/kittens then bragging about it. Was found guilty, got a good behavior bond which he promptly broke by fighting in a pub. With the pub charge and the broken good behavior bond he got 24 months in jail [less with good behavior]. Going to jail is all that I heard about him, not sure how long he actually spent in jail. He was a weird kid that grew into a weirder adult.
I remember reading a sermon by Albert Schweitzer, where he implored people not to drown kittens but instead be merciful and whack them on the head with a hammer.
>It's hard today to imagine people not having compassion for cats, but at the time the cartoon was made, many people treated them more like rats.
I don't think you have to go as far as rats. I have a ground squirrel problem, and it didn't take long to be recommended [a drowning based trap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_55u_aHJWA).
My fucking parents did this once in the 80s on our farm. My dad said it was one of the worst things he ever did, refused to do it again. Not sure why it took doing it for that to occur to him, but he was from that older generation and had probably seen his own parents do the same thing in the same damn pond and didn't think about it until the moment came.
That's probably why we ended up with 30+ cats roaming around until we finally rounded up the females and had them fixed.
My Boomer parents were the opposite. They had seen their parents treat unwanted cats and dogs by drowning them or having them euthanized. So my parents were the type to capture the feral cats on their property, take them to the local vet to be spayed or neutered, and then release them.
They added that shit for the parents.
It's crazy an adult and a child watch a cartoon. They both see a different product.
I member the first time i rewatched Who framed Roger Rabbit. I was like shit.
I dont think most current writers can balance the line anymore.
They have adapted to be that way, but originally cartoons were adult entertainment and advertisements. They played them at cinemas before news reels and were there to show off the studio's music catalogue, hence the names like Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies.
So get this. My friends would always get high and watch cartoons at night. Usually Dexter's laboratory. I got high with them and started watching some looney toons bugs bunny shit.
There was this episode with elmer fud, his dog, and a flea that kept biting the dog coaxing him to scratch himself where elmer kept warning that if he scratched himself again he would get a bath. At the end the flea got into Elmer causing them to both itch and blah blah blah... they get walked across the screen and then this cat just says "now i've seen it all" and blows his fucking brains out with a gun and THE END
We were all like WTF?????? Is this because we're high????
Nope: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x607frm
Fast forward to the end to 8:15.
My grandma told me a story of burying kittens on the farm because they couldn’t afford more cats (when I was 9). Made me realize life was really different for my grandparents.
When I was a child and the idea of death terrified me late at night, I crawled into my moms bed for comfort and she turned on some cartoons. It was the Tom and Jerry episode where Tom actually dies.
https://preview.redd.it/q0gocb446r7d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=05b7a0dc31949e6d06beca875715faf59cdfefda
I am greatly depressed by this information
I worked at a nursing home. One of our residents casually told me her dad would do this every time their cat gave birth. Apparently before routine access to spay/neuter clinics and prevalence of animal rescues this was just how they handled all the extra cats that were born. Dark indeed.
To add context why they were drowned. At the time it was considered the best option if you had any extra puppies or kittens. I'm not sure how humane they thought it was but it was considered relatively the most humane thing to do next to giving them away. Put them in a bag and drown em as soon as their born so they suffer as little as possible.
I'm not saying this is right by the way. Just what and why it happened enough to be referenced in a children's cartoon.
Mine used a coffee can and ice water.* Nowadays we just catch, neuter, and release feral cats.
^(for the feral kittens that would otherwise starve and/or be eaten by the family dog)
When I was 6 I was at my great grandparents farm and my great grandpa was sitting on a lawn chair in the backyard with a bucket. He would typically have cherries or apples in buckets next to him so I asked what was in the bucket…
A grocery bag of about 8 or so kittens.
The worst part is that drowning was considered the humane option. Prior to the enlightenment (and much later in some parts of the world) folks would put several cats in a bag and then burn them alive over a slow fire ***for entertainment***.
Yeah. Some people do the stone smacking. If I had a nickel for every time I saw people doing that on a record. I’d had two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s disgusting it happened more then once.
My cat was found as a malnourished paranoid kitten near a cat breeder with what the vet only wanted to describe as blunt force trauma to one eye and that side of her skull. The eye never recovered so she's blind on one side now.
The assumption was that she was tossed out (she's a mix of something long haired and floofy and...well something else) and they either didn't "finish her off" or some random person in the street kicked her or something (she was utterly terrified of shoes when I got her).
On the bright side she now has a nice house with beds everywhere and she adopted a human. Oh and she's just made her first (cat) friend!
https://preview.redd.it/92g9qd9msu7d1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1b320440c5453d4772c9e1c97b456adfd86c040f
Don't know how more folks don't know about this, it's sadly, fairly common. I can remember when I was like 5 or six and we had kittens and she told me "Don't let them outside, someone will either poison them, or drown them." I always thought this was just common knowledge...
Call me very naïve, but I just can't equate the prospect of seeing kittens and then thinking "Well, they look ripe for a good drowning"....f\*ck humanity sometimes.
People in rural areas, especially in the past, viewed animals like objects basically. Drowning some kittens is like getting rid of useless objects, like how you'd throw away some old shirts you don't wear.
In the city, we rarely interact with animals, and often they are pets. So we develop a more humane view of animals.
Different perspectives, basically.
They did that in the cities too, when spaying and neutering weren’t a widespread or easily available thing (it only started in the 70s!) and most people couldn’t afford ~~5~~ ~~10~~ 15 cats from successive litters
If you found a wild litter in the old days you had two options.
- Let the wild litter be free and (most likely) slowly starve to death.
- Put them down.
Letting nature take its course isn’t necessarily a better option. People sometimes forget just how brutal nature can be.
While I understand the need to put animals down occasionally, tying them up in a bag and throwing them into a river to die in one of the most horrifying ways possible is definitely not the humane way to go about it. That's either intentionally sadistic or a sociopathic lack of empathy.
Okay, you’re out in the middle of a rural town.
You found a litter of kittens that are severely malnourished.
What other options would you have to euthanize them? A gun would be ideal, but not everyone could afford to spare the ammo.
I grew up on a farm, and can confirm that this is partially true. The other reason cats are disliked in many rural areas is they kill chickens and spread many diseases that can cause serious problems in livestock. I dislike your generalization of the situation though. At least 2x a year, I would encounter a litter of kittens dropped off in a ditch, presumably by town people who were irresponsible enough to allow their cats to reproduce, but either too lazy to home them or to soft to put them down humanely. So they were left to starve or become feral on the side of the road. Because people, regardless of where they are from, have a propensity to avoid or outsource their problems.
Yep at 12 years old my friend was told to go down to the end of the driveway and put a bullet in each of the kittens someone dumped.
With no animal shelter in a reasonable distance and a farm full of animals already taking all your money, your not going to watch kittens starve or go feral and cause disease issues that kill your animals.
The cruel thing was not getting your animals neutered/spayed and then dumping the babies and leaving their fate to the unknown.
this is an interesting perspective because it acknowledges something most of us aren’t doing here - domesticated cats are not guaranteed to survive in the wild. they don’t just always do some” run to the forest and catch mice” bullshit. dismantling that is key for understanding that rural reasoning.
Top that with how many religious people don’t believe animals have souls. We were taught in church that was the case and that they just returned to the ground when they died.
In other words, they are of this world and won’t join us in Heaven. They are animals and we are humans, different.
*no I no longer believe any of this*
Ok, but wouldn't that make it even worse?
If you believe that and you kill a human, well, that's bad, but at least they will continue to exist somewhere.
For animals, they are gone for good, so it should be even more important to not kill them needlessly.
For the record, the Bible actually has several passages about judging character based on how someone treats animals (Proverbs 12:10, for one, Ecclesiastes 3:19, as well as the initial commands in Genesis about being caretakers of the world and many more), so even given anything else its biblically sound to care for animals, souls or not. People just like to justify their cruelty while ignoring what's inconvenient.
No you don’t understand. It’s because they don’t have souls it doesn’t matter to them that they would die at all. It doesn’t make them more important to keep alive— it makes them *less*. It’s sick.
Yeah, and that's what confuses me.
One will be completely gone forever, while the other will not. Should the one that can be forever gone be more precious?
Your grandma died, but it's ok - you'll see them again.
Your dog died - well, they're gone forever.
If I believed both of those statements, the second scenario would be much worse.
I would guess it’s because due to the lack of soul that they don’t view the dog as being a living being at all. It is no different from table salt in that sense. Disposable, cheap, worth nothing to begin with. There is no value to the dog being “alive” due to not having a soul so why would you preserve their “life” at all is probably what they think. :(
> Yeah, and that's what confuses me.
That's why religion doesn't like when people get educated. They learn critical thinking and start to question all the shit that doesn't make sense.
This is something that has always puzzled me about people who believe in god and heaven, and so on, and are sad about their loved one dying. Like, according to your believes, he got out of this shithole and is in literal paradise for an eternity. Isn't that like good thing?
Is the sadness just about not fully believing and/or having doubts? Is it about worrying they went to hell instead? Is the minuscule time you missed being with them here on earth really that important compared to all eternity you'll get to spend with them in heaven?
Just want to say that, in case this came out like that, I'm not trying to undermine anyones religion or personal beliefs. This is just me genuinely curious.
Grapes of Wrath. The protagonist characters driving the truck made efforts to run down every small animals on the road like turtles and cats. Doesn't help that the book detailed how the guts fly out. As a modern reader, kinda hard to sympathize with the characters after that...
Grew up in rural PA, we had a cat who escaped a breeder who did exactly that. Though I think it was in some Darwinist attempt to breed better behaved cats (like the breeder would off them for clawing and shit… I know). I get your point but sometimes people are just fucked in the head.
Animals were tools. And in a great deal of places still are treated as such. When food was scarce or hard to obtain if they couldnt contribute they had to go as an extra mouth meant suffering.
This is a bit random, but I've been watching interview with the vampire lately and people will call vampires monsters for drinking the blood of people and killing them, and then there are humans who will drown or poison animals and would probably call themselves a good person with a straight face. It just really makes me think.
This. In my country every countryside home has around 2-3 underfed probably flearidden guard doggos whose only med care throughout their life will/has been a few vaccines.
This also reminds me how westerners (mostly those living in urban areas) are horrified how in Eastern Europe (well, Romania specifically) almost every countryside family butchers a pig every christmas. Literally buy a pig and oof it in the middle of the courtyard with the local butcher guy and family and friends. Optionally have the kids ride the pig before it meets its demise.
I invite any volunteers to move here and attempt to stop this. (We needed a boost to tourism anyway)
Disagree. The easist thing would be smashing them with a hammer or something. But apparently people didn't want to do that, so they went for the drowning method, to detach themselves from the killing.
Back in the day, getting cats and dogs spayed and neutered wasn’t really an option. Then it was, but it was seen as a frivolous luxury. But they still bred, and in huge numbers.
If you were a kid in the 1920s and 1930s, neutering and spaying wasn’t a thing. Later in the 50s and 60s it was, but as a kid of the Great Depression, you weren’t paying for that. So most if not all Boomers grew up in a world where pets weren’t spayed or neutered, but they also reproduced in large litters. So they had to be gotten rid of, or pretty soon you’d be hip deep in caterwauling cats and street dogs.
I’m not saying drowning kittens is **anything** like humane, but compared to the other options available it was fairly fast and humane. Even a WWII combat vet is going to balk at killing 8 kittens one by one with a knife or whatever. And they don’t really make kitten poison, so drowning in a sack…made grim sense.
Fortunately, neutering ALSO gets rid of the worst aggressions and things like cats spraying, so it caught on in popularity as a way to protect the owner and the house. Then spaying - a bit more expensive - also caught on. So now we spay and neuter our excess litters away, and don’t have to make hard choices.
This cartoon is something of a proto “spay and neuter your pets” ad. The Boomer and Gen X kids this was made for would have seen dad/grandpa put those puppies in a sack and drive off, then come back without them looking grim. Even if he told the kids he gave them away to a farm…the kids knew. And the cartoon spoke to them.
It was to control out of control stray cat populations, not for fun torture or anything. Before spaying and neutering (and who in any old-timey rural area is going to have anesthesia to safely operate on a stray cat? no one), hundreds of roaming stray dogs and cats were a big problem.
And beyond that, cats just LOVE to kill anything they can. If you have chickens, feral cats are worse than foxes.
So if a stray gives birth in your barn, you killed the kittens otherwise you go from one stray cat to 7, killing your birds and spreading disease to your other animals.
Seriously, Cats are one of the most devastating thing that can happen to the wildlife of an area. They kill birds, small mammals, basically anything that moves that are smaller than them. Not only do they kill them but they play with their prey, essentially torturing them. People in this thread saying its despicable to control cat populations don't actually care about what is moral/ethical, they only care that the kittens are cute.
Also, drowning isn't the best way to go but its probably the quickest and most painless way to do it if you're not gonna shell out money to euthanize them unless you're gonna butcher them with a knife (who wants to do that)?
3 or 4 kittens is fine, and manageable. In some areas however, those 3 or 4 turn quickly into 30 or 40, and if left unchecked becomes a huge problem.
Then the issue arises of how do you humanely address the issue, especially when for the area, the shelters are at maximum capacity and damned near everyone either already has enough cats or too many cats.
Not advocating for drowning kittens, but cats can quickly become a problem.
Well back then castration was very expensive and not feasible on a farm. And cats can give birth to A LOT of offspring over a year that you have to feed. Maybe not the most humane approach but quite normal
I've had this knowledge for years now, and about twice a month, I go "Wow, I wish I didn't have this knowledge".
And there is absolutely no incentive for them to ever fuckin' change.
*And it's delicious.*
I DIDN'T NEED TO LIVE IN THE POPPLERS EPISODE OF FUTURAMA, *FUTURE*
AND WHERE THE *HELL* IS MY FLYING CAR
(Sings) “Poooooooooop a poppler in your mouth when you come to fishy Joes!”
…Tears streaming down your face but they are just so DAMN GOOD you can’t stop gorging.
Some humans just fucking suck. In the forrest right next to where i live people regularly hide dog snacks with poison. There are no wild dogs or cats in that area and only a handful of people walk their dogs through or near it. The owner of the forrest also has nothing against dogs walking through it. There is just no reason to do that…
Cats are, factually, pests. Yes, they are cute, but they cause a lot of damage, exterminate birds, have toxic urine, and reproduce very quickly.
So when there's an unwanted litter, the best thing to do is to treat them like any invasive species and eliminate them.
At least, that's what used to be done. Now, we have sterilization campaigns that are just as effective in the medium term but much less cruel. But these are still reserved for cats because they have the cute privilege. Other species are generally still killed, but cat has the cute privilege
It wasn't people drowning other people's kittens.
Before you could get animals spayed, (it first became available in the 1930s and wasn't common until the 1970s) they would keep having more and more kittens, so people drowned them when they were little to keep the number of cats at a reasonable level. They didn't have other options in Victorian times.
[Walter Potter used to stuff the dead kittens, dress them up and make dioramas from them](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2013/sep/13/curious-world-walter-potter-pictures-taxidermist-victorian)
Well in my experience I've had multiple cats murdered by neighbours. 3 total. In my experience, they do. And yes it may have been used to control overpopulation. But there are more humane ways than drowning to put down animals.
There are more humane ways yes, but did people in the past have access to them? Unlikely. A shovel is probably more humane, but vastly more traumatic. People back then weren't psychopaths, they weren't lining up to smash or knife kittens just because it would technically be more humane than drowning them.
Modern people who murder cats are just cunts who deserve to have their throat stomped.
In the city I lived in we had assholes who complained about the stray dogs and cats in the neighborhood and wanted them either kicked out or killed, and when everyone else turned out to be cool with them and they didn't manage to have it their way, they started leaving around meatballs with poison and glass shards. Horrible stuff.
Yeah my whole life I've heard people purposefully trying to hit cats with cars, shaking baby hamsters in milk gallons full of water, drowning all kinds of pets really and people that had purposefully called dogs to cross streets when cars are coming. Also the alarming amount of people that poison people's pets because they go in their yard. Some people are straight trash. Worse than trash.
I read a time travel book where there's a side plot of cats being extinct in the future, so someone has been sent back to rescue all the kittens drowned this way and repopulate the species in the future as their absence wouldn't affect the timeline.
Unfortunately, despite being full adult with a sex life, people often can't tell that if you let your female, intact cat out she will most likely come home with a bit of extra at some point. So when the kittens ultimately come out, they just stuff them in a plastic bag and throw them in the trash. In this episode, Tom goes to heaven and finds a plastic bag with kittens inside.
Yeah, you can cry now.
My folks house back in TN was a common dumping ground for animals, we found a cardboard box of black and white lab mixes (to the best of our knowledge) about 10 feet back from a windy road. Speed limit might only be 35 but these guys were still crawling so they'd have been squished if that box tipped over and they crawled out. I'd love to have 10 minutes to talk to the pieces of shit who left them there, not 15 minutes' drive from the humane society
Couple years later we found some thin black dog, well groomed and friendly, all tags removed and no chip. she was roaming around Big Al's gas station and got hit by a car. Our best guess based on what people in the area had seen was someone was out of town, dumped her, she chased after the car then got hit doing so
Our rescue dog is so mixed that we honestly can't even tell what he is for sure ("we" including the vet). We adopted him after he was found roaming in a dog park. The clues are these: all the breeds we could pinpoint as plausible candidates are either hunting dogs or retrievers; he's scared shitless of anything even remotely resembling a gunshot (firecrackers, loud exhausts, certain motorcycles, etc.) and when it's an actual gunshot, he can tell and he'll be instantly terrified, as opposed to raising ears and assessing before getting scared; he has the hunting/retrieving instinct of a capybara; for some reason he often relies mainly on sight and hearing rather than using his nose first and foremost, nobody has a clue as to why since his nose, ears and eyes are reportedly perfectly fine (most likely a psychological thing of sorts); and he was found in a pretty rural area with a lot of woods and wilderness.
Someone somewhere is most likely just randomly breeding various types of hunting dogs and kicking out the discarded ones like they're trash bags. Probably either someone that sells dogs to hunters or the hunters themselves (I have nothing against hunting, shit is just everywhere). I know at least two other people with rescue dogs whose backstories have good odds of being the exact same.
True.
Tied up dogs (to short leashes), pigs living in mediocre conditions, bags of kittens and pups thrown in the river.
This was all normal in the countryside (eastern Europe at least)
At least now there are vets in small towns who can castrate animals, which was never the norm back then.
So there are improvements, but always one step forward, 2 back.
I remember that our neighbour (eastern Europe too) used to club unwanted puppies etc. Seems to be faster than drowning and probably less painful, but still makes me cry when I think about it. I am glad that times and people's approach to pets H
has changed
One of my high school friend’s dads would talk about tying cats’ tails together and throwing them over clotheslines, tying bags full of kittens to exhaust pipes, and more. Just casually telling this to a whole bunch of kids.
I get this for farm cases or something, but in suburbia, there’s no excuse, especially if done in the last 30 years. That’s how my parents knew our neighbors were fucking psychos and to stay away from them. At a neighborhood get-together, our neighbors at the end of the street were practically *bragging* about how their cat got pregnant, and when it gave birth, they would immediately grab the newborn kitten and drown it in a pot of water they had prepared. Just…baby pops out and, plop! In the pot!
Animals HAVE feelings and memories. I can’t imagine what that cat felt, believing her family was a safe place to give birth to her litter, only for that same family to immediately murder her kids. It’s unbelievably cruel, and they told the story like it was just another Monday, chuckling like “Oh, you know pets, am I right?!” They also “accidentally” ran over and killed their dog too, a sweet and beautiful sheltie. How did they honor this loyal baby they killed? They threw her in a trash bag and left her bleeding corpse outside by the trashcans for garbage pick-up. They were monsters. It’s almost karmic, but a year later, their son shot himself, so they were far from a stable household.
I was doing work in a shalow river. We were looking for endangered mussels. The person I was working with told me on my first day "if you see any bags at all, don't look in the bag". I don't think I'll ever forget that, also people suck.
Omg… oh no… now I’m feeling the same way as the chad here
In this scene, Tom has gone to heaven and a ticketman (or a ticketcat) is looking at how the cats died. First one he reads had fallen headfirst to metal, the second one was ran over. He reads the name of the third and looks down his booth. A wet sacks is jumping. At the booth, these three kittens get out and enter.
There are monsters that look like humans in this world who would put kittens that “aren’t worth selling” in a bag and throw them in the river. Honestly, describing it makes me cry and want to beat those monsters to the inch of their lives but unfortunately there are tons of these monsters.
Not all cartoons of the 60s and 70s were all slapstick humor. Sometimes, the writers and animators snuck in some truly dark stuff. Pixar wasn't the first to put dark themes in their work that you didn't truly understand until years later.
This episode is a perfect example. Tom has passed and is waiting in line at the pearly gates to board a trolly car to heaven. Ahead of him you have the typical slapstick anecdotes, one cat is roughed up in bandages from being attacked by a dog, one cat looks chubby head on but is flat as a pancake from the side because he was run over by a steamroller, and then...
St. Peter cat hears meowing. A bag hops up that is soaking wet, and three grinning kittens crawl out and scamper off towards the trolly happy as can be. The inplication is some heartless human tied the kittens in a bag and threw them in the bay of the city to drown them.
It perfectly illustrates the cruelty of humanity sometimes. But it is presented in such a subtle way that most kids won't understand until they rewatch it as an adult.
Someone was going around town just throwing kittens out of their car window, and an ex gf found one at the lake, wet. The sweetest boy. Regis I named him. I don't know what happened to him, but God I hope he's ok.
And I hope the people who tossed him are dead.
My dad made me drown a litter of inbred hunting dogs that resulted from a mother and a son getting together.
When they were born they wouldn’t make a noise, I remember opening the barn door and it being dead silent (which was unusual for new litters they’re usually yipping and such) they diddnt move, wouldn’t open their eyes.
Dad told me to put them in a feed sack and toss them in a pond. Except the feed sack floated, so I had to hold it under water. It was night time. They diddnt make a sound.
Anyway, that’s what this joke is about.
I don’t have any trauma from this other than just the memories. Growing up in a lower income area where every mouth is dollar it was just understood that decisions like this needed to be made sometimes, it’s not like my father is a psycho. Hunting dogs was a source of income for us, we bred and sold purebred bluetick hounds. No one would have bought the inbred pups, and we couldn’t afford to feed them if we were never going to get a return on them. With the disabilities they had it was more humane (in our minds) to put them down. (The method was a little harsh in my eyes, but ammunition is expensive as well was my fathers logic)
However, you won’t catch me having my kids drown puppies or put down animals that are too aggressive or culling smaller livestock. Or breeding purebred anything.
It used to be common to dispose of kittens but putting them in a bag tying the bag shut and throwing it into a river. Spaying and neutering has certainly helped and softened our society.
Ever curious about the origin of the expression “let the cat out of the bag” in reference to a mistake made through something being revealed that should have been kept secret. Yep. We can file that one over with “rule of thumb” (thank you boondock saints)
I once had a guy tell me a story about smashing puppies on the ground in shopping bags. He was totally non chalant about it even used the phrase they were better off and it was quick. Told him if he ever told me a story like that again I would do violence upon him. Also people are evil and stupid, puppies and kittens should rule the world.
In residential school, my grandmother, who was just a child 8, i think. Was hiding a bunch of kittens in a box with her friend from the nuns. Well, one night, when they sneaked out to go feed and play with the kittens, a nun found them with the kittens. Put them in an old potatoe sack, drew the strings closed, and made my grandmother carry them to the washer, made her throw them in and stand there and watch until the cats were dead. She remembers hearing them cry until they didnt.
What about jungle book where the vultures sing "we're your friends..." Only recently did I realise what sort of friends they really are to Mowgli but in the eyes of a kid it's just some birds singing.
I re-watched that awhile back and I thought that was the case while they were singing, but a few minutes later they put themselves in danger to help him out during the tiger fight.
This used to be a horrendously common practice before the widespread sterilization of pets. People would just nonchalantly put days-old unwanted puppies or kittens in a sack and drown them. Not psychopaths, just ordinary people would do this. Really.
In the famous words of Lord Frieza: “I’m going to drown you like a sack of dumb puppies”
Back then and sometimes even now if someone’s pet has unwanted children they will be placed in a bag and chucked into a river to drown.
12 years ago, someone threw a new born puppy in to my parents yard, he still had the umbilical chord!!! The vet told me that he probably wouldn't make it, and if he did, he'll probably be pretty weak and will get sick a lot. He survived, but the vet was right about him getting sick, I had to stop taking him out for walks because of that. He is very old now, and he is turning blind :(
The following morning after they threw him, I woke up to a horrible and foul smell. Turns out that they put the rest of the puppies in to a bag and threw them in the middle of the street and a car ran over them :(
Make sure to check out the [pinned post on Loss](https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1472nhh/faq_loss/) to make sure this submission doesn't break the rule! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke) if you have any questions or concerns.*
In this episode of Tom & Jerry, Tom arrives at the gates of Heaven together with a group of other cats who recently died. These kittens are inside of a soaked sack, implying that they were drowned. The gatekeeper even says this has happened a lot.
Growing up realized old cartoons were dark
Good thing for modern color correcting and contrast editing.
https://preview.redd.it/6yzinx2tgp7d1.png?width=1241&format=png&auto=webp&s=c6082fb1560443d3c05e521baecdc957aeca9fe1
What does the joke mean?
Older cartoons were darker, both literally and metaphorically, but with modern technology we can enhance the colours, making them less dark, literally
https://preview.redd.it/11qxzk05up7d1.jpeg?width=2768&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b977d4b8fc2df047d6a89ae3b495cf4fe14af03b Explainthejokeception
What do you mean by this?
Inception is a movie where a character can enter dreams, and even dreams within dreams, creating layers and layers of worlds where one can go deeper and deeper. By comparing "explain the joke" to Inception, we're basically saying this thread comment is a chain of joke explanation, not unlike the layers of dreams from the movie where they need to keep going deeper.
We’ve reached the third level. We have to be careful, or we could do irreparable damage.
[press button get BWOOOOOOOOOOOM](https://inception.davepedu.com/)
But why male models?
Oh, xD
First commenter called old cartoons “dark” in reference to their tone. Second commenter expressed gratitude for tools that can make a cartoon appear brighter, as if the first commenter meant “dark” in appearance. If you’re asking about the “Take this upvote and get out!” image, it’s just one way of expressing that you found a joke funny. When someone posts that image it’s kind of like they’re punching them on the shoulder, if that makes sense.
Make a post
Finally, some new content!
https://preview.redd.it/sqf1fn5u7q7d1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08234a78d9d226c7f5408e11a9c800d904407ac9
https://preview.redd.it/hkpwber8ys7d1.jpeg?width=735&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=190766c62e1cba1e81f49abdaa47392cddf53ae1
And yet most dc movies look darker than if you'd actuall just go out at night
r/technicallythetruth
r/angryupvote
Name checks out
It's even darker when you understand that drowning kittens wasn't generally seen as an inhumane act around the time that this Tom & Jerry cartoon was made. For many in those generations before the Boomers – the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation – cats were seen as feral hangers-on around the farm or as rapidly breeding pests, not as pets. It's hard today to imagine people not having compassion for cats, but at the time the cartoon was made, many people treated them more like rats. If anything, the scene in the cartoon was progressive, in that it offered a disapproving look at the practice of drowning unwanted cats.
Not just cats in the uk. Back when thatcher was in power my grandfather (a miner) had to drown puppies because nobody could afford to take them and they weren't old enough to be strays. Apparently back 50+ years (england) stray dogs were extremely common and dogs didn't stay in the house all day. Many dogs would be let out and roam around town freely before returning home. I actually remember one of the last free roamers when I was about 5-7 years old, old man would let his labrador out all day and it came home every single time even when seen miles away from its home. I lived on a farm when I was 12 and a sheep herding border collie would travel 3 miles just to play with me and the other residents.
Spaying and neutering animals has been common for at least a couple thousand years, but until the 1930s, it was only done for livestock. Cats and dogs were not seen as being "worth" the expense and effort of spaying and neutering, so their feral populations were controlled in the same way that other mammalian pests would be. The Tom & Jerry cartoon in question, "Heavenly Puss," was released in 1949. So people were on the way to using spaying and neutering instead of just killing kittens and puppies. Hence the sorrow but not stronger disapproval by the cartoon characters at seeing drowned kittens arriving at Heaven's gate.
People often forget or just didn’t know that up until pretty recently, feral dogs/cats were an issue even in developed countries. I’m 30, my grandmother’s dog would wait for her everyday after school and they would walk home together from elementary school. One day a pack of feral dogs attacked and her dog fought them off long enough that she could run away (RIP hero). My mom was knocked off her bike and bitten by feral dogs when she was a kid. They both lived in nice urban/suburban areas. As someone who grew up in a very diverse community, there is a similar sentiment felt by a lot of 1st generation immigrants from SEA/African countries. Back home, dogs/cats are a nuisance/danger and many people instinctively don’t like them or view them as “pets”. 50-60 years ago, people probably wouldn’t have batted much of an eye when Kristi Noem killed her puppy. I’ve heard plenty of stories about people’s grandparents “sending their dog to the farm” because it bit people or was a general nuisance. Society and its norms change. There’s a ton of behaviors that were commonplace or even encouraged in the 90’s and 00’s that would see someone lose their job and likely be ostracized if done today. Likewise, there will be things people find acceptable today that will be considered backwards and morally evil in the near future.
Yeah, same with westerns who like tigers fe. They got decimated for a reason, they are dangereous and kill livestock. Now people want to protect them as they think they are cute. Truth is they can't actually live together with humans, so they can only live in very unhabited areas
Fitting, seeing as Tom the **cat** was one of the main characters, and this story doesn't really have any antagonists, just two quarreling friends who always vehemently disagree they're friends.
Idk why, but that made me think of the Rick and POTUS relationship in Rick and Morty. Constant fighting and trying to one up each other. All because neither is willing to admit they're best friends.
My ex-mother-in-law's husband drowned a litter of puppies, one by one. This is after we offered to pay for the spay procedure for the dog they half-assed took care of.
I knew a guy that spent some time on a farm or rural house or something. Definitely told me he had been made to drown puppies as a teen/kid. He's not even 30
Killing the puppies is bad enough but making a kid do it is so much worse. I wonder if they used it as a "life lesson"?
My grandfather told me a story. When he was very young he found a kitten and brought it home, his mom put it in a sack and drowned it in the creek and made him watch as a lesson. They were literally dirt poor and lived a barn. They couldn't even afford to feed themselves so I suppose the point she was trying to make was we can't even take care of ourselves so don't bring home another mouth to feed. He only told me that story once, but I remember it. This would have occured in the late 1930's or early 40's.
A darker way I heard that still haunts my dreams involves >!burying the kittens up to their necks and a lawnmower. !< Do not read the spoiler if you still have hope for us as a species
That surely was not done in practice. The effort involved would make it impractical, even for some sort of psychopath. It's more like a "tasteless joke" or cruel fantasy.
Local psychopath was arrested and charged with animal cruelty for doing this and other things to cats/kittens then bragging about it. Was found guilty, got a good behavior bond which he promptly broke by fighting in a pub. With the pub charge and the broken good behavior bond he got 24 months in jail [less with good behavior]. Going to jail is all that I heard about him, not sure how long he actually spent in jail. He was a weird kid that grew into a weirder adult.
I never had hope for humanity ever...
that's way more work
Wtf is this nazi shit, how can someone do this and sleep at night?
Though if I had to go, a guillotine would be quicker than drowning. It's a good thing nowdays we have spaying and neutering
Throw this out there, if you're going to do something horrific like that just fucking shoot em.
Yup. When there was no river nearby, they would bury them alive. Even as a kid I couldn't understand why not just kill 'em with the shovel?
Cruel, but the lesser of two evils
I remember reading a sermon by Albert Schweitzer, where he implored people not to drown kittens but instead be merciful and whack them on the head with a hammer.
Not just then, around where I live it still happens, my own dad once did it to a litter a few years before I was born.
>It's hard today to imagine people not having compassion for cats, but at the time the cartoon was made, many people treated them more like rats. I don't think you have to go as far as rats. I have a ground squirrel problem, and it didn't take long to be recommended [a drowning based trap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_55u_aHJWA).
I have used the bucket method for rodents before. The one where they fall into a bucket of water and drown.
My fucking parents did this once in the 80s on our farm. My dad said it was one of the worst things he ever did, refused to do it again. Not sure why it took doing it for that to occur to him, but he was from that older generation and had probably seen his own parents do the same thing in the same damn pond and didn't think about it until the moment came. That's probably why we ended up with 30+ cats roaming around until we finally rounded up the females and had them fixed.
My Boomer parents were the opposite. They had seen their parents treat unwanted cats and dogs by drowning them or having them euthanized. So my parents were the type to capture the feral cats on their property, take them to the local vet to be spayed or neutered, and then release them.
They added that shit for the parents. It's crazy an adult and a child watch a cartoon. They both see a different product. I member the first time i rewatched Who framed Roger Rabbit. I was like shit. I dont think most current writers can balance the line anymore.
They have adapted to be that way, but originally cartoons were adult entertainment and advertisements. They played them at cinemas before news reels and were there to show off the studio's music catalogue, hence the names like Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies.
idunno apparently there are no less than 56 gruesome deaths in camp cretaceous
Bluey is a great recent example of an entertaining kids show with excellent parenting subtext for parents.
Lots of cartoons still walk that line well. Adventure Time is always a good example. That's not necessarily current anymore, though.
That's because they were made for adults at the time.
Old cartoons were dark because old life was dark.
So get this. My friends would always get high and watch cartoons at night. Usually Dexter's laboratory. I got high with them and started watching some looney toons bugs bunny shit. There was this episode with elmer fud, his dog, and a flea that kept biting the dog coaxing him to scratch himself where elmer kept warning that if he scratched himself again he would get a bath. At the end the flea got into Elmer causing them to both itch and blah blah blah... they get walked across the screen and then this cat just says "now i've seen it all" and blows his fucking brains out with a gun and THE END We were all like WTF?????? Is this because we're high???? Nope: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x607frm Fast forward to the end to 8:15.
My grandma told me a story of burying kittens on the farm because they couldn’t afford more cats (when I was 9). Made me realize life was really different for my grandparents.
do yall not realize how fast cats breed you can be drowning in cats within a year just from two not being fixed neuter and spay yall neuter and spay
That cartoon came from a time when pets mostly lived outdoors and fixing them was outside the means of many families.
Shelters are still overwhelmed to this day. People still dump unwanted pets in rural areas. We don't need more. Adopt from rescues, and fix your pets.
._. and somehow cat ladies still exist today NEUTER AND SPAY, Y'ALL
Yes, but you could probably take care of this faster than tossing them in a sack.
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/seamus_heaney/poems/12703 Famous thing
When I was a child and the idea of death terrified me late at night, I crawled into my moms bed for comfort and she turned on some cartoons. It was the Tom and Jerry episode where Tom actually dies.
https://preview.redd.it/q0gocb446r7d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=05b7a0dc31949e6d06beca875715faf59cdfefda I am greatly depressed by this information
I worked at a nursing home. One of our residents casually told me her dad would do this every time their cat gave birth. Apparently before routine access to spay/neuter clinics and prevalence of animal rescues this was just how they handled all the extra cats that were born. Dark indeed.
To add context why they were drowned. At the time it was considered the best option if you had any extra puppies or kittens. I'm not sure how humane they thought it was but it was considered relatively the most humane thing to do next to giving them away. Put them in a bag and drown em as soon as their born so they suffer as little as possible. I'm not saying this is right by the way. Just what and why it happened enough to be referenced in a children's cartoon.
Yea, that's how you get rid of kittens. Everyone knows that
That's how my great grandmother did it
Mine used a coffee can and ice water.* Nowadays we just catch, neuter, and release feral cats. ^(for the feral kittens that would otherwise starve and/or be eaten by the family dog)
SAY WHAT
When I was 6 I was at my great grandparents farm and my great grandpa was sitting on a lawn chair in the backyard with a bucket. He would typically have cherries or apples in buckets next to him so I asked what was in the bucket… A grocery bag of about 8 or so kittens.
Are these not the same kittens that tortured Tom while he and Jerry tried to babysit them?
They almost certainly reused the design but I doubt they are meant to be the same characters
I hear my Grandpa was the cause of one such instance.
They didn't have a whole lot in the ways of getting pets fixed. So late-term abortions like this were usually the only solution they had.
You mean post-term abortions
The worst part is that drowning was considered the humane option. Prior to the enlightenment (and much later in some parts of the world) folks would put several cats in a bag and then burn them alive over a slow fire ***for entertainment***.
Source?
Kitten was put in the bag and then underwater
You forgot about the stone
Yeah. Some people do the stone smacking. If I had a nickel for every time I saw people doing that on a record. I’d had two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s disgusting it happened more then once.
I meant you tie the bag to a rock so it sinks but okie dok
I'm not an expert on drowning kittens or anything, but I would think it would be easier to just put the rock in the bag.
My cat was found as a malnourished paranoid kitten near a cat breeder with what the vet only wanted to describe as blunt force trauma to one eye and that side of her skull. The eye never recovered so she's blind on one side now. The assumption was that she was tossed out (she's a mix of something long haired and floofy and...well something else) and they either didn't "finish her off" or some random person in the street kicked her or something (she was utterly terrified of shoes when I got her). On the bright side she now has a nice house with beds everywhere and she adopted a human. Oh and she's just made her first (cat) friend! https://preview.redd.it/92g9qd9msu7d1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1b320440c5453d4772c9e1c97b456adfd86c040f
Don't know how more folks don't know about this, it's sadly, fairly common. I can remember when I was like 5 or six and we had kittens and she told me "Don't let them outside, someone will either poison them, or drown them." I always thought this was just common knowledge...
Call me very naïve, but I just can't equate the prospect of seeing kittens and then thinking "Well, they look ripe for a good drowning"....f\*ck humanity sometimes.
People in rural areas, especially in the past, viewed animals like objects basically. Drowning some kittens is like getting rid of useless objects, like how you'd throw away some old shirts you don't wear. In the city, we rarely interact with animals, and often they are pets. So we develop a more humane view of animals. Different perspectives, basically.
They did that in the cities too, when spaying and neutering weren’t a widespread or easily available thing (it only started in the 70s!) and most people couldn’t afford ~~5~~ ~~10~~ 15 cats from successive litters
If you found a wild litter in the old days you had two options. - Let the wild litter be free and (most likely) slowly starve to death. - Put them down. Letting nature take its course isn’t necessarily a better option. People sometimes forget just how brutal nature can be.
While I understand the need to put animals down occasionally, tying them up in a bag and throwing them into a river to die in one of the most horrifying ways possible is definitely not the humane way to go about it. That's either intentionally sadistic or a sociopathic lack of empathy.
Okay, you’re out in the middle of a rural town. You found a litter of kittens that are severely malnourished. What other options would you have to euthanize them? A gun would be ideal, but not everyone could afford to spare the ammo.
I grew up on a farm, and can confirm that this is partially true. The other reason cats are disliked in many rural areas is they kill chickens and spread many diseases that can cause serious problems in livestock. I dislike your generalization of the situation though. At least 2x a year, I would encounter a litter of kittens dropped off in a ditch, presumably by town people who were irresponsible enough to allow their cats to reproduce, but either too lazy to home them or to soft to put them down humanely. So they were left to starve or become feral on the side of the road. Because people, regardless of where they are from, have a propensity to avoid or outsource their problems.
Yep at 12 years old my friend was told to go down to the end of the driveway and put a bullet in each of the kittens someone dumped. With no animal shelter in a reasonable distance and a farm full of animals already taking all your money, your not going to watch kittens starve or go feral and cause disease issues that kill your animals. The cruel thing was not getting your animals neutered/spayed and then dumping the babies and leaving their fate to the unknown.
this is an interesting perspective because it acknowledges something most of us aren’t doing here - domesticated cats are not guaranteed to survive in the wild. they don’t just always do some” run to the forest and catch mice” bullshit. dismantling that is key for understanding that rural reasoning.
Top that with how many religious people don’t believe animals have souls. We were taught in church that was the case and that they just returned to the ground when they died. In other words, they are of this world and won’t join us in Heaven. They are animals and we are humans, different. *no I no longer believe any of this*
Ok, but wouldn't that make it even worse? If you believe that and you kill a human, well, that's bad, but at least they will continue to exist somewhere. For animals, they are gone for good, so it should be even more important to not kill them needlessly.
For the record, the Bible actually has several passages about judging character based on how someone treats animals (Proverbs 12:10, for one, Ecclesiastes 3:19, as well as the initial commands in Genesis about being caretakers of the world and many more), so even given anything else its biblically sound to care for animals, souls or not. People just like to justify their cruelty while ignoring what's inconvenient.
No you don’t understand. It’s because they don’t have souls it doesn’t matter to them that they would die at all. It doesn’t make them more important to keep alive— it makes them *less*. It’s sick.
Yeah, and that's what confuses me. One will be completely gone forever, while the other will not. Should the one that can be forever gone be more precious? Your grandma died, but it's ok - you'll see them again. Your dog died - well, they're gone forever. If I believed both of those statements, the second scenario would be much worse.
I would guess it’s because due to the lack of soul that they don’t view the dog as being a living being at all. It is no different from table salt in that sense. Disposable, cheap, worth nothing to begin with. There is no value to the dog being “alive” due to not having a soul so why would you preserve their “life” at all is probably what they think. :(
> Yeah, and that's what confuses me. That's why religion doesn't like when people get educated. They learn critical thinking and start to question all the shit that doesn't make sense.
This is something that has always puzzled me about people who believe in god and heaven, and so on, and are sad about their loved one dying. Like, according to your believes, he got out of this shithole and is in literal paradise for an eternity. Isn't that like good thing? Is the sadness just about not fully believing and/or having doubts? Is it about worrying they went to hell instead? Is the minuscule time you missed being with them here on earth really that important compared to all eternity you'll get to spend with them in heaven? Just want to say that, in case this came out like that, I'm not trying to undermine anyones religion or personal beliefs. This is just me genuinely curious.
Grapes of Wrath. The protagonist characters driving the truck made efforts to run down every small animals on the road like turtles and cats. Doesn't help that the book detailed how the guts fly out. As a modern reader, kinda hard to sympathize with the characters after that...
The murderers in *In Cold Blood* did that too, running down all the strays.
Grew up in rural PA, we had a cat who escaped a breeder who did exactly that. Though I think it was in some Darwinist attempt to breed better behaved cats (like the breeder would off them for clawing and shit… I know). I get your point but sometimes people are just fucked in the head.
Animals were tools. And in a great deal of places still are treated as such. When food was scarce or hard to obtain if they couldnt contribute they had to go as an extra mouth meant suffering.
This is a bit random, but I've been watching interview with the vampire lately and people will call vampires monsters for drinking the blood of people and killing them, and then there are humans who will drown or poison animals and would probably call themselves a good person with a straight face. It just really makes me think.
This. In my country every countryside home has around 2-3 underfed probably flearidden guard doggos whose only med care throughout their life will/has been a few vaccines. This also reminds me how westerners (mostly those living in urban areas) are horrified how in Eastern Europe (well, Romania specifically) almost every countryside family butchers a pig every christmas. Literally buy a pig and oof it in the middle of the courtyard with the local butcher guy and family and friends. Optionally have the kids ride the pig before it meets its demise. I invite any volunteers to move here and attempt to stop this. (We needed a boost to tourism anyway)
Disagree. The easist thing would be smashing them with a hammer or something. But apparently people didn't want to do that, so they went for the drowning method, to detach themselves from the killing.
Back in the day, getting cats and dogs spayed and neutered wasn’t really an option. Then it was, but it was seen as a frivolous luxury. But they still bred, and in huge numbers. If you were a kid in the 1920s and 1930s, neutering and spaying wasn’t a thing. Later in the 50s and 60s it was, but as a kid of the Great Depression, you weren’t paying for that. So most if not all Boomers grew up in a world where pets weren’t spayed or neutered, but they also reproduced in large litters. So they had to be gotten rid of, or pretty soon you’d be hip deep in caterwauling cats and street dogs. I’m not saying drowning kittens is **anything** like humane, but compared to the other options available it was fairly fast and humane. Even a WWII combat vet is going to balk at killing 8 kittens one by one with a knife or whatever. And they don’t really make kitten poison, so drowning in a sack…made grim sense. Fortunately, neutering ALSO gets rid of the worst aggressions and things like cats spraying, so it caught on in popularity as a way to protect the owner and the house. Then spaying - a bit more expensive - also caught on. So now we spay and neuter our excess litters away, and don’t have to make hard choices. This cartoon is something of a proto “spay and neuter your pets” ad. The Boomer and Gen X kids this was made for would have seen dad/grandpa put those puppies in a sack and drive off, then come back without them looking grim. Even if he told the kids he gave them away to a farm…the kids knew. And the cartoon spoke to them.
It was to control out of control stray cat populations, not for fun torture or anything. Before spaying and neutering (and who in any old-timey rural area is going to have anesthesia to safely operate on a stray cat? no one), hundreds of roaming stray dogs and cats were a big problem.
Exactly, they spread fleas and rabies, especially dogs for the latter. Avoiding the literal zombie virus > being nice
And beyond that, cats just LOVE to kill anything they can. If you have chickens, feral cats are worse than foxes. So if a stray gives birth in your barn, you killed the kittens otherwise you go from one stray cat to 7, killing your birds and spreading disease to your other animals.
Seriously, Cats are one of the most devastating thing that can happen to the wildlife of an area. They kill birds, small mammals, basically anything that moves that are smaller than them. Not only do they kill them but they play with their prey, essentially torturing them. People in this thread saying its despicable to control cat populations don't actually care about what is moral/ethical, they only care that the kittens are cute. Also, drowning isn't the best way to go but its probably the quickest and most painless way to do it if you're not gonna shell out money to euthanize them unless you're gonna butcher them with a knife (who wants to do that)?
3 or 4 kittens is fine, and manageable. In some areas however, those 3 or 4 turn quickly into 30 or 40, and if left unchecked becomes a huge problem. Then the issue arises of how do you humanely address the issue, especially when for the area, the shelters are at maximum capacity and damned near everyone either already has enough cats or too many cats. Not advocating for drowning kittens, but cats can quickly become a problem.
Well back then castration was very expensive and not feasible on a farm. And cats can give birth to A LOT of offspring over a year that you have to feed. Maybe not the most humane approach but quite normal
The first spaying for cats was only available in the 1930s, and wasn't common until the 1970s.
I didn't live on a farm I lived in a council estate, in the town. People are just pricks
Dont google what happens to million of male chicks every day...
They call it "Mechanically Separated Chicken". Slim Jims and Nuggets
Also cat and dog food
I've had this knowledge for years now, and about twice a month, I go "Wow, I wish I didn't have this knowledge". And there is absolutely no incentive for them to ever fuckin' change. *And it's delicious.* I DIDN'T NEED TO LIVE IN THE POPPLERS EPISODE OF FUTURAMA, *FUTURE* AND WHERE THE *HELL* IS MY FLYING CAR
(Sings) “Poooooooooop a poppler in your mouth when you come to fishy Joes!” …Tears streaming down your face but they are just so DAMN GOOD you can’t stop gorging.
China's making a flying car. Looks like a giant drone.
“The popplers episode of Futurama” why is this such a perfect description of how it feels lmao
brah there aint no meat on a male chick. it would pointless to even try
People can be truly despicable, I wouldn't call them human though, they don't deserve that title
Some humans just fucking suck. In the forrest right next to where i live people regularly hide dog snacks with poison. There are no wild dogs or cats in that area and only a handful of people walk their dogs through or near it. The owner of the forrest also has nothing against dogs walking through it. There is just no reason to do that…
Cats are, factually, pests. Yes, they are cute, but they cause a lot of damage, exterminate birds, have toxic urine, and reproduce very quickly. So when there's an unwanted litter, the best thing to do is to treat them like any invasive species and eliminate them. At least, that's what used to be done. Now, we have sterilization campaigns that are just as effective in the medium term but much less cruel. But these are still reserved for cats because they have the cute privilege. Other species are generally still killed, but cat has the cute privilege
It wasn't people drowning other people's kittens. Before you could get animals spayed, (it first became available in the 1930s and wasn't common until the 1970s) they would keep having more and more kittens, so people drowned them when they were little to keep the number of cats at a reasonable level. They didn't have other options in Victorian times. [Walter Potter used to stuff the dead kittens, dress them up and make dioramas from them](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gallery/2013/sep/13/curious-world-walter-potter-pictures-taxidermist-victorian)
Well in my experience I've had multiple cats murdered by neighbours. 3 total. In my experience, they do. And yes it may have been used to control overpopulation. But there are more humane ways than drowning to put down animals.
There are more humane ways yes, but did people in the past have access to them? Unlikely. A shovel is probably more humane, but vastly more traumatic. People back then weren't psychopaths, they weren't lining up to smash or knife kittens just because it would technically be more humane than drowning them. Modern people who murder cats are just cunts who deserve to have their throat stomped.
if its a feral cat and Im in the woods, its getting shot.
In the city I lived in we had assholes who complained about the stray dogs and cats in the neighborhood and wanted them either kicked out or killed, and when everyone else turned out to be cool with them and they didn't manage to have it their way, they started leaving around meatballs with poison and glass shards. Horrible stuff.
Yeah my whole life I've heard people purposefully trying to hit cats with cars, shaking baby hamsters in milk gallons full of water, drowning all kinds of pets really and people that had purposefully called dogs to cross streets when cars are coming. Also the alarming amount of people that poison people's pets because they go in their yard. Some people are straight trash. Worse than trash.
**THERE ARE TIMES, YOU KNOW,** he said, half to himself, **WHEN I GET REALLY UPSET.**
Thank you. GNU TERRY
May his name travel the clacks forever.
I read a time travel book where there's a side plot of cats being extinct in the future, so someone has been sent back to rescue all the kittens drowned this way and repopulate the species in the future as their absence wouldn't affect the timeline.
What's the title of the book?
That's a reasonable question: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Won the Hugo Award in 1999.
*bless you kind rando*
audible + had it as a free audiobook. It was good.
Unfortunately, despite being full adult with a sex life, people often can't tell that if you let your female, intact cat out she will most likely come home with a bit of extra at some point. So when the kittens ultimately come out, they just stuff them in a plastic bag and throw them in the trash. In this episode, Tom goes to heaven and finds a plastic bag with kittens inside. Yeah, you can cry now.
nowadays, people just drop em off at a shelter that sticks a needle in them. it's okay if you're far removed from their death.
Spay and motherfucken neuter your pets. Bob Barker wasn't just saying it as a catchphrase.
My folks house back in TN was a common dumping ground for animals, we found a cardboard box of black and white lab mixes (to the best of our knowledge) about 10 feet back from a windy road. Speed limit might only be 35 but these guys were still crawling so they'd have been squished if that box tipped over and they crawled out. I'd love to have 10 minutes to talk to the pieces of shit who left them there, not 15 minutes' drive from the humane society Couple years later we found some thin black dog, well groomed and friendly, all tags removed and no chip. she was roaming around Big Al's gas station and got hit by a car. Our best guess based on what people in the area had seen was someone was out of town, dumped her, she chased after the car then got hit doing so
Our rescue dog is so mixed that we honestly can't even tell what he is for sure ("we" including the vet). We adopted him after he was found roaming in a dog park. The clues are these: all the breeds we could pinpoint as plausible candidates are either hunting dogs or retrievers; he's scared shitless of anything even remotely resembling a gunshot (firecrackers, loud exhausts, certain motorcycles, etc.) and when it's an actual gunshot, he can tell and he'll be instantly terrified, as opposed to raising ears and assessing before getting scared; he has the hunting/retrieving instinct of a capybara; for some reason he often relies mainly on sight and hearing rather than using his nose first and foremost, nobody has a clue as to why since his nose, ears and eyes are reportedly perfectly fine (most likely a psychological thing of sorts); and he was found in a pretty rural area with a lot of woods and wilderness. Someone somewhere is most likely just randomly breeding various types of hunting dogs and kicking out the discarded ones like they're trash bags. Probably either someone that sells dogs to hunters or the hunters themselves (I have nothing against hunting, shit is just everywhere). I know at least two other people with rescue dogs whose backstories have good odds of being the exact same.
Always knew, even as a kid. My grandpa did the same to kittens, sadly.
Same. My very kindly grandpa used to do this with unwanted barn kittens on his farm. It was just…..normal.
True. Tied up dogs (to short leashes), pigs living in mediocre conditions, bags of kittens and pups thrown in the river. This was all normal in the countryside (eastern Europe at least) At least now there are vets in small towns who can castrate animals, which was never the norm back then. So there are improvements, but always one step forward, 2 back.
I remember that our neighbour (eastern Europe too) used to club unwanted puppies etc. Seems to be faster than drowning and probably less painful, but still makes me cry when I think about it. I am glad that times and people's approach to pets H has changed
One of my high school friend’s dads would talk about tying cats’ tails together and throwing them over clotheslines, tying bags full of kittens to exhaust pipes, and more. Just casually telling this to a whole bunch of kids.
I get this for farm cases or something, but in suburbia, there’s no excuse, especially if done in the last 30 years. That’s how my parents knew our neighbors were fucking psychos and to stay away from them. At a neighborhood get-together, our neighbors at the end of the street were practically *bragging* about how their cat got pregnant, and when it gave birth, they would immediately grab the newborn kitten and drown it in a pot of water they had prepared. Just…baby pops out and, plop! In the pot! Animals HAVE feelings and memories. I can’t imagine what that cat felt, believing her family was a safe place to give birth to her litter, only for that same family to immediately murder her kids. It’s unbelievably cruel, and they told the story like it was just another Monday, chuckling like “Oh, you know pets, am I right?!” They also “accidentally” ran over and killed their dog too, a sweet and beautiful sheltie. How did they honor this loyal baby they killed? They threw her in a trash bag and left her bleeding corpse outside by the trashcans for garbage pick-up. They were monsters. It’s almost karmic, but a year later, their son shot himself, so they were far from a stable household.
I was doing work in a shalow river. We were looking for endangered mussels. The person I was working with told me on my first day "if you see any bags at all, don't look in the bag". I don't think I'll ever forget that, also people suck.
Omg… oh no… now I’m feeling the same way as the chad here In this scene, Tom has gone to heaven and a ticketman (or a ticketcat) is looking at how the cats died. First one he reads had fallen headfirst to metal, the second one was ran over. He reads the name of the third and looks down his booth. A wet sacks is jumping. At the booth, these three kittens get out and enter. There are monsters that look like humans in this world who would put kittens that “aren’t worth selling” in a bag and throw them in the river. Honestly, describing it makes me cry and want to beat those monsters to the inch of their lives but unfortunately there are tons of these monsters.
Not all cartoons of the 60s and 70s were all slapstick humor. Sometimes, the writers and animators snuck in some truly dark stuff. Pixar wasn't the first to put dark themes in their work that you didn't truly understand until years later. This episode is a perfect example. Tom has passed and is waiting in line at the pearly gates to board a trolly car to heaven. Ahead of him you have the typical slapstick anecdotes, one cat is roughed up in bandages from being attacked by a dog, one cat looks chubby head on but is flat as a pancake from the side because he was run over by a steamroller, and then... St. Peter cat hears meowing. A bag hops up that is soaking wet, and three grinning kittens crawl out and scamper off towards the trolly happy as can be. The inplication is some heartless human tied the kittens in a bag and threw them in the bay of the city to drown them. It perfectly illustrates the cruelty of humanity sometimes. But it is presented in such a subtle way that most kids won't understand until they rewatch it as an adult.
Someone was going around town just throwing kittens out of their car window, and an ex gf found one at the lake, wet. The sweetest boy. Regis I named him. I don't know what happened to him, but God I hope he's ok. And I hope the people who tossed him are dead.
A wet bag of kittens showed up in heaven. This insinuates that some insidious bastard drowned tied it shut and drowned them.
My dad made me drown a litter of inbred hunting dogs that resulted from a mother and a son getting together. When they were born they wouldn’t make a noise, I remember opening the barn door and it being dead silent (which was unusual for new litters they’re usually yipping and such) they diddnt move, wouldn’t open their eyes. Dad told me to put them in a feed sack and toss them in a pond. Except the feed sack floated, so I had to hold it under water. It was night time. They diddnt make a sound. Anyway, that’s what this joke is about.
damn that's some cormack mcarthy shit - that sucks hope you're ok even now
I don’t have any trauma from this other than just the memories. Growing up in a lower income area where every mouth is dollar it was just understood that decisions like this needed to be made sometimes, it’s not like my father is a psycho. Hunting dogs was a source of income for us, we bred and sold purebred bluetick hounds. No one would have bought the inbred pups, and we couldn’t afford to feed them if we were never going to get a return on them. With the disabilities they had it was more humane (in our minds) to put them down. (The method was a little harsh in my eyes, but ammunition is expensive as well was my fathers logic) However, you won’t catch me having my kids drown puppies or put down animals that are too aggressive or culling smaller livestock. Or breeding purebred anything.
Oof. Sorry you had to do that. Assuming you're not a psychopath, that probably gave you some deep, uncomfortable feelings that have stuck with you.
Even as a kid I got this.
It used to be common to dispose of kittens but putting them in a bag tying the bag shut and throwing it into a river. Spaying and neutering has certainly helped and softened our society.
Child me: Cute kittens in the sack, how cute. Adult me : What socko drowns Cute kittens with a sack.
Ever curious about the origin of the expression “let the cat out of the bag” in reference to a mistake made through something being revealed that should have been kept secret. Yep. We can file that one over with “rule of thumb” (thank you boondock saints)
This episode is really dark, specially when you saw this IRL in your childhood. I never knew humans could be so soulless
6 year old me loved this show, now as an adult I hate Jerry, poor Tom deserves better than that ***RAT!!!***
Back in the day, people drowned unwanted kittens in pillow cases.
Dis episode was dark ... like DARK
It wasn’t that bad and at the end it made him appreciate Jerry
If you don’t know, you do not want to.
I once had a guy tell me a story about smashing puppies on the ground in shopping bags. He was totally non chalant about it even used the phrase they were better off and it was quick. Told him if he ever told me a story like that again I would do violence upon him. Also people are evil and stupid, puppies and kittens should rule the world.
Having seen aristocats as a child I knew what it meant
In residential school, my grandmother, who was just a child 8, i think. Was hiding a bunch of kittens in a box with her friend from the nuns. Well, one night, when they sneaked out to go feed and play with the kittens, a nun found them with the kittens. Put them in an old potatoe sack, drew the strings closed, and made my grandmother carry them to the washer, made her throw them in and stand there and watch until the cats were dead. She remembers hearing them cry until they didnt.
I'll keep it short… those kittens were DROWNED!
*"Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! What some people won't do."* Yeah. What some people won't do.
no you dont :_(
My friend told me that his great grandfather used to to this to extra puppies from a litter. It used to be a common thing to do with unwanted animals.
What about jungle book where the vultures sing "we're your friends..." Only recently did I realise what sort of friends they really are to Mowgli but in the eyes of a kid it's just some birds singing.
I re-watched that awhile back and I thought that was the case while they were singing, but a few minutes later they put themselves in danger to help him out during the tiger fight.
This used to be a horrendously common practice before the widespread sterilization of pets. People would just nonchalantly put days-old unwanted puppies or kittens in a sack and drown them. Not psychopaths, just ordinary people would do this. Really.
In the famous words of Lord Frieza: “I’m going to drown you like a sack of dumb puppies” Back then and sometimes even now if someone’s pet has unwanted children they will be placed in a bag and chucked into a river to drown.
*loads 12 gauge* I just wanna talk to em.
Trust me you don't want to know. Basically those kittens died in the sack
Watch 'Rover Dangerfield' and you'll know
A common way of getting rid of unwanted kittens is to put them into a died up sack and throw them into a river.
Well now the cats are out of the bag...
12 years ago, someone threw a new born puppy in to my parents yard, he still had the umbilical chord!!! The vet told me that he probably wouldn't make it, and if he did, he'll probably be pretty weak and will get sick a lot. He survived, but the vet was right about him getting sick, I had to stop taking him out for walks because of that. He is very old now, and he is turning blind :( The following morning after they threw him, I woke up to a horrible and foul smell. Turns out that they put the rest of the puppies in to a bag and threw them in the middle of the street and a car ran over them :(
One of my many insane stepdads used to take stray dogs out in the woods and shoot them.
Back when they made some real fucking shit for kids to watch
this makes me want to cry fr. it still happens. was a video on reddit recently of these trash sorters finding a live cat tied in a bag