Pet Care for “Left Behind” Animals After the Rapture

You can’t make this stuff up. Fundamentalist Dispensationalists are teaming up with athiests to take care of their pets after the Rapture leaves the pets (and the atheists) behind (h/t Bloomberg Businessweek):

Many people in the U.S.—perhaps 20 million to 40 million—believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture.* In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?

Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.

Promoted on the Web as “the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World,” the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. “If you love your pets, I can’t understand how you could not consider this,” he says.

[…]

Todd Strandberg, who founded a biblical prophecy Web site called raptureready.com that draws 250,000 unique visitors a month, agrees that Fido and Mittens are doomed. “Pets don’t have souls, so they’ll remain on Earth. I don’t see how they can be taken with you,” he says. “A lot of persons are concerned about their pets, but I don’t know if they should necessarily trust atheists to take care of them.”

This paradox poses a challenge for Centre. He must reassure the Rapture crowd that his pet rescuers are wicked enough to be left behind but good enough to take proper care of the abandoned pets.

*Actually, they believe that there will be the Rapture, followed by the Second Coming. But that’s not the point of the story. See here for an incredibly complex timeline explaining when all sorts of never-mentioned-in-the-Bible Biblical prophesies will be fulfilled (like “The Green Movement becomes the catalyst for a humanistic socialist pagan new world order that opposes all fundamental religions” and “When worldwide high speed Internet access is available to everyone on earth through subliminal vibrations through the earth or bounced off the Ionosphere or satellites or some other technology that will make the Beast electronic system possible through embedded chips within people. When every one will have real time video information about what is going on in Jerusalem.”).