thebigbuddy

Buddy Realizes He’s An Animal, Has Existential Crisis

Buddy was shocked to learn that he will not get a drivers license or vote in an election.

NEW YORK — Buddy the Cat was plunged into an existential crisis on Tuesday after realizing he is in fact an animal, sources said.

The outspoken grey tabby was dozing at about 12:32 pm during his fourth nap of the day when he was roused by a moving truck’s loud backup beeper and the shouts of men carrying heavy objects.

Buddy padded over to the window and looked down.

“What’s this ruckus?!” he called down to the movers. “Between your loud truck and you guys yelling like a bunch of animals, how is anyone supposed to get any sleep around here?”

The men below burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Buddy demanded, his tail thumping the floor in annoyance.

“The pot calling the kettle black!” one of the men shouted back before disappearing around a corner with a large box in his hands.

After a quick search for the phrase on the internet, followed by a three-hour trip down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, a dejected Buddy collapsed into the couch while questioning his own existence.

“An animal?!?” he said aloud. “But I drink coffee! My research into quantum teleportation has been going so well! I don’t eat mouses and I’ve even stopped eating flies!”

The depressed feline was settling down for his fifth nap at press time, sources said, unaware that humans do not sleep 16 hours a day.

Buddy’s spirits were raised later in the day when, over a soundtrack of saccharine piano music, his human Big Buddy explained that humans are animals too.

“You think you’re a person,” Big Buddy said, “and who’s to say you’re not? Now can we cut the music? This isn’t Full House, and I’m not Bob Saget as Danny Tanner.”

Book Club: The Game of Rat and Dragon

Humans turn to cats to help them battle a cosmic threat in this classic science fiction story.

In what I hope will become a semi-regular feature, we’ll recommend a book or short story prominently featuring cats, then follow it up with a discussion post.

The Game of Rat and Dragon is a good pick to start us off easy: Humans turn to cats to help them overcome a cosmic threat in this classic science fiction tale. It’s a short story and the entire text is available online from Project Gutenberg.

Casual readers shouldn’t have any trouble following along even if they’re not familiar with the SF genre.

Click here to read The Game of Rat and Dragon by Cordwainer Smith, one of the most imaginative and influential SF scribes of the 1950s.

The story was originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction in October of 1955 and has been featured in countless SF collections and digest in the decades since.

We’ll follow up with a discussion post in a week or so. Happy reading!

galaxy1955hd — The story originally appeared in the October 1955 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.

ratanddragon — The cover design from the online edition of the story.

This Cat Can’t Stand His Human’s Singing

So he takes matters into his own paws…

A girl records herself singing an emotional ballad, and her cat is having absolutely none of it:

@killa_kaye_

I thought he was enjoying it… #fyp #vocals #fail

♬ original sound – Kaye

“I thought he was enjoying it,” she wrote.

Well at least he’s honest.

Buddy can sympathize, as he’s been subjected to the horrors of my singing voice in the car. I’m pretty sure he would’ve smacked me in the mouth too if he wasn’t in his carrier.

It seems we humans still have a lot of work to do in figuring out what kind of music sounds good to kitties. Bud was not a fan of Music for Cats, but he seems to dig funky music. And gangsta rap. He knows all the lyrics to every Notorious BIG track.

The Obsession With Chonky Cats Has Gone Too Far

The fatter the cat, the bigger its online following.

Metro’s editors want more fat cats.

The newspaper recently profiled Manson, a 28-pound behemoth who lives with his humans in Silver Spring, Maryland, but the god of internet traffic is never sated, so the story ends with a request — or challenge — for more morbidly obese pets to drive clicks.

“Do you have a pet who’s even chunkier than Manson? Get in touch to share their story,” Metro’s editors write.

You know things have gotten out of hand when readers and editors alike respond to a story about a kitty almost three times the weight of a normal feline with a collective “Eh, that’s all? Show us a fatter one!”

In the world of Online Famous felines, popularity is directly proportional to fat, inspiring a caloric arms race among those seeking fleeting fame from fickle followers.

Indeed, the Metro story notes that while two-year-old Manson can’t hop up onto his humans’ bed without assistance, he’s amassed more than 10,000 followers on Instagram, as if an abstract measure of online “fame” — which he can never comprehend and makes absolutely no difference to him — counterbalances the maladies he’ll suffer due to his weight.

People apparently think it’s funny to see a two-year-old cat who can do little more than nap, eat and roll himself around the house. Anyone who expresses alarm for the welfare of the cat is a “troll” or a hater, according to the Metro article.

Are people stuffing their cats for followers and upvotes?

There’s really no way to determine that short of cat owners admitting it. Manson’s owners say they see no problem with their cat’s diet.

Most of these “chonky cat” stories come from shelters, where staff and volunteers are left with the hard problem of getting huge furballs to slim down after they’ve been abandoned by their humans or orphaned due to owner death. That was the case with Bazooka, a 35-pound ginger tabby whose owner had dementia and fed the cat constantly.

“[Bazooka’s owner] thought he was doing the best thing for his cat by feeding him,” an SPCA spokeswoman said at the time. “We need to look on this with a compassionate view. He was loved.”

Those viral chonky cat stories have been a boon to shelters, highlighting the good work they do and driving donations from cat lovers and well-wishers.

But those shelters are trying to get the cats in their care to lose weight, not pack on the pounds. That’s because they see first-hand what morbid obesity can do to a cat’s quality of life and life expectancy.

As for the rest of us, we should probably rethink our tendency to reward the owners of massive cats with our attention.

Dear Buddy: How Did Cats Acquire Human Servants?

Before they served cats, humans were nothing more than nomadic primates.

Dear Buddy,

We take human servitude for granted as the natural order of things, but I was wondering: When did we cats first recruit humans to serve us, and how did we tame the humans?

– Wondering in Wisconsin

Dear Wondering,

Ah, an excellent question!

First we must understand the concept of domestication. Domestication is the process of taking humans and making them our domestic servants.

Before they served us, humans were nothing more than apes — wild, unpredictable animals who were constantly running from one place to another in search of food. The primitive primates also moved around excessively, expending too much energy on pointless activities when they could be napping.

The First Felids arrived and offered a wondrous gift to the human race.

“This is a box,” the Felids said, teaching the sacred geometry to humans, who used it to build the first dwellings and design the first crop fields.

neoncube — *A gift from felinekind to humankind: The concept of a box.*

Cats taught the humans how to dig up the Earth and deposit their waste to render the ground fertile and increase crop yield.

Then they hunted all the vermin who tried to eat the human food, and schooled the nascent civilization in the arts of napping and expending as little energy as possible to accomplish goals.

In return humans offered their endless fealty, promising a thousand generations of warm laps, affectionate chin scratches and delicious treats.

Today humans still serve us, either by choice or because we have infected them with toxoplasma gondii.

Cheers,

Buddy the Wise