A Title I Never Thought I'd Type: On Anti-Bestiality Clauses in Post-Rapture Pet-Care Insurance

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, following up on his previous post about insurers offering to cover care for pets Left Behind when their owners ascend directly to Heaven during the Rapture, adds (emphasis mine)

More pet rapture insurance!

I thank James Hinckley for the pointer. Note that this service, unlike the other, vows not to have sex with your pets. That's what economists call quality competition.

Lawrence Abbott once wrote a very good book on that idea.

It's just a footnote post but you can read it here.

While this must be reassuring to potential policy owners -- no doubt after the Apocalypse remaining authorities will have bigger problems on their hands than investigating the random hybrid insurance-fraud/bestiality ring -- it reminds me of the old pre-food-labeling practice of promising on the package that, for instance, their product contained no insect parts (canned vegetables) or beets (in fruit jams.) The implication of those claims being that if _they_ felt it necessary to say their products were unadulterated their competitor's products necessarily must. (In the 1960s Mad Magazine parodied the practice with an image of some kind of canned food with "contains no shirt starch" in bold text on the label.

I think it's hard to imagine that many would-be Rapturists seriously worry that their pets might be violated by pervert insurers. If you consider that insurers regularly screw human policy-holders the concern might not be that misplaced.

There's also the "he who smelt it dealt it" factor to consider... if a vendor who offers such improbable assurances would you be more or less likely to trust them?


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Submitted by 3150 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-08-25 13:36.

See, you're forgetting that those left behind will be the ungodly ones ... including many sodomites. Apparently bestiality rings will herald the coming of the Beast. And of course the post-Rapture authorities will no doubt *encourage* them in their evil ways.

The first outfit Cowen linked to seems to be for real (they've got an actual payment form). The second one, JesusPets.com, seems a whole lot spoofier:

"The non-fundamentalists left on Earth will be busy rebuilding a civilization with people who don't bomb family planning clinics or protest cancer vaccinations or prevent marriage from being about love or blindly follow maniacal leaders. That's the easy part. The biggest difficulties with all of the fundamentalist Christians out of the picture will be getting our home appliances repaired cheaply and getting easy publicity for provocative art. That's going to be a lot of work, and leave little time to round up starving pets."

Oh, and their website also offers JesusPets boxer shorts. I'm kinda thinking of signing up, since I plan on sticking around post-Rapture and I'd dearly love to have a cat again.

Submitted by 3150 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-08-25 14:50.

I don't have a lot to say, but the reCaptcha thing just seems incredibly appropriate to a post about the Rapture and crazy shit like that:

"contribu- sensing"

Oh yeah, and it may seem daft to put such labels on food, but when you consider that the whole BSE crisis arose because people put manure and minced-up cattle-brains into cattle feed (because nobody had imagined anyone would think to do that, they never explicitly banned it), suddenly there actually came a point where consumer labels saying "Our beef herd guaranteed not to contain bits of previous members of the herd" or some such became necessary!

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