Enormous caveat: Judging from this article, Lyft appears to be unwilling to give even a shadow of an idea of how the cat came to be lost outside. Like everybody else, I can only assume the driver abandoned it.<p>That said: I feel out of touch, reading all the comments on Ars to the effect of "the driver should do some soul-searching". The harshest take I've seen is a single comment suggesting that they should be fired. But this is animal abuse. It is the theft (effectively, after they realized what happened) and discarding of a stranger's beloved pet. It might have never been found. It might have died. This is not even to mention the psychological damages. The driver should face jail time.<p>When I think about a person doing this, I feel hatred. I can't help it, and I don't say that lightly - I can <i>understand</i> why people do all sorts of horrific things. But this is in the realm where I can't even imagine what it is like to have the mental framework to choose this course of action (not to say that it is <i>more immoral</i> than my unspoken examples of "horrific" things - of course not - but rather that it is <i>more inexplicable</i>, i.e. <i>less human-seeming</i>). Short of some extenuating circumstance that Lyft is inexplicably withholding, I have a hard time considering this behavior as anything other than a sign of simple incompatibility with society.
The process for determining whether a driver is willing to transport a pet is asinine. Just add something to the app so the passenger can indicate that they have a pet, whether it is in a carrier, its approximate size, etc. and let the driver decide whether to take the job.<p>These services are already borderline questionable given all of the problems and the increased prices now that they aren't trying to put taxis out of business. The moment one must deal with someone at the company to beg for a refund or deal with any of the other problems the equation becomes pretty one-sided.
From a Gizmodo article:<p>> Tux was located by Lyft’s own investigators days later just a little over a mile up the road from where she was last seen, as announced by the company in a tweet this morning. [1]<p>It really sounds like the driver drove away and threw the cat out of the car as a form of retaliation.<p>[1] <a href="https://gizmodo.com/tux-the-cat-found-after-lyft-driver-sped-off-with-her-1850891640" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://gizmodo.com/tux-the-cat-found-after-lyft-driver-sped...</a>
I hope Lyft fires the driver. There's no excuse for dumping someone's pet on the side of the road like trash. The barrier to entry for these apps must be real low.
Not to be trite and <i>dismiss</i> the severity of this, buuuuuuut -<p>I never close the car door until I've got all my things.<p>Not that I have the chance to check, but - I figure this both signals to the driver that I'm not done yet, and, somewhat prevents them from just driving away - they <i>could</i>, but then they'd have an open door while driving, and people generally don't do that.
I dont understand this "Lyft team" the article keeps on mentioning. Is this a team of Lyft employees? A team of unrelated people who organized to solve the "Lyft issue"? Lyft investigators?
WTF is wrong with that driver? How could he be so uncaring like that? All it would take is a drive back with the cat, he must have knowingly just dumped it somewhere and drove off. He should definitely get removed from the platform for that.
<i>Cat found after Lyft fiasco dragged on for days</i><p>Definitely a fiasco, but it didn't really drag on for days. The cat was stolen and dumped on Saturday afternoon and was found by investigators hired by Lyft Monday at around 1AM. Less than a day and half to resolve.
Wild. A good highlight of, to me, perhaps the most glaring bit of BS when it comes to our cell phones et al -- the idea that just about <i>anything</i> in association with the tech could get lost or stolen.<p>These things are near perfect tracking devices, yet things like this happen; or even siller, Apple et al pretending that they couldn't (easily-but-at-a-loss-of-revenue) more-or-less never have any such thing as "a stolen iPhone."