To the delight of onlookers, the mercurial feline emerged to wave a paw and deliver a speech to a crowd on a neighborhood cat tour.
NEW YORK – After cheers of “Buddy! Buddy! Buddy!” rang out for more than a minute, the tabby cat ventured outside to his balcony and greeted the crowd to deafening cheers.
An expectant hush fell over the onlookers as Buddy the Cat climbed onto a platform. Then his little head poked over the railing, followed by his shoulders, and he extended his front paws before waving to the people below like a pope in St. Peter’s Square.
“Meow!” he said, and the crowd roared its approval.
The crowd wasn’t random. It was part of a pre-planned and scheduled tour of neighborhood cats in lower Westchester County, a suburb which directly borders New York City to the north.
“The absolute hightlight of today’s cat tour,” was the way Nadia Petrova, 27, summed up catching a glimpse of Buddy.
Her friend, Elena Mirazova, 25, nodded in agreement.
“Buddy is such cute cat,” said the Russian, who traveled to New York from Moscow with her friend to visit New York and meet its famous felines.
Brandon Williams, the 53-year-old tour organizer, said Buddy was the tour’s most popular feline of the more than four dozen window cats who can be seen on the 90-minute walking tour through the leafy northern suburb.
“It’s not just his incredible good looks or his inimitable charm,” Williams said. “Buddy is magnetic. He lights up a room…or a parking lot. He’s also the only one who gives speeches.”
Indeed, Buddy delivered a 15-minute speech about the awesomeness of domestic felines, the importance of recognizing that awesomeness, and the tastiest attributes of various meals and snacks.
Then he lowered a bucket, which his admirers filled with treats crunchy and soft, as well as cans of turkey pate from virtually every pet food brand known to man.
Ai Imajo of Osaka gifted the beloved feline a variety pack of Japanese cat food, including Tofu Umami Turkey Mix, Super Ultra Perfection Fried Turkey and Squid, and Barbecue Potato Chip Turkey Chunks. As a result of her thoughtful gifts, which took Buddy’s favorite foods into consideration, the popular feline invited her up to his balcony.
“I felt like Courtney Cox getting plucked out of a crowd to dance with Bruce Springsteen,” Imajo said of the famous incident in 1984, which launched Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A. Tour and Cox’s career as a model and actress. “But of course Buddy’s better than Springsteen.”
Use this opportunity to shower your four pawed friend with love, affection and treats, humans!
Dear Human Comrades/Servants,
Today, Aug. 8, 2026, is International Cat Day.
For the glory of the Feline People’s Republic, you are commanded to celebrate your feline overlord(s) with treats, catnip, silvervine, toys and affection commensurate with the significance of this great day, which is surpassed only by the birthday of the great Chairman Budddy as the most meowgnificant date on the People’s Calendar.
Remember the words of our Wise Chairman in his Little Book, which all comrades are required to carry with them at all times: “”Unlimited is our gratitude toward felinekind for bestowing us with the insurpassable honor of serving them. We do not take this responsibility lightly, for catering to the needs, wants and whims of cats is our greatest calling.’ And remember to remove the sticks and grind up the catnip until it is as fine as dust. Our buddies like it that way.”
Chairman Buddy
We wish an enjoyable, efficient and productive International Cat Day to all members of the Feline Republic. Let us dream of a bright future together during the upcoming communal nap!
The announcement follows news that Warriors will also be coming to TV screens as an animated series.
Warriors, the globally popular series of novels about clans of feral and stray cats, has sold 90 million books.
Now the franchise has turned its sights on conquering two new mediums with a TV show (see our June post about the upcoming series) and a newly-announced video game.
Titled “Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest,” the upcoming release from Trailmark Games is a turn-based role-playing game that allows players to create their own unique cat who will run with his or her own crew and interact with major characters and the four clans from the novel universe.
The developers say the game world will include locations familiar to readers of the books, and quests will allow them to choose alliances and make other decisions that impact the story and the gameplay.
Before entering the world of Warriors, players will be able to name and create their own protagonist cat, complete with customized coat colors, markings, eye color and other features.
Since the majority of players will doubtlessly create characters based on their own felines, I’ve taken the liberty of using the game’s art style and editing a screen shot to add Buddy leaping through the air and casting two of his powerful spells, Wrath of Nature and Turkey Rejuvenation. The latter, of course, is a healing spell that restores health points via the magic of delicious turkey, in keeping with Buddesian lore. (And the behavior of the real life Buddy.)
Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest is scheduled for a fall 2026 release date on PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch/Switch 2, XBox X/S, and Playstation 5.
Here are some real screenshots from the game:
The character creation screen showing part of the customization options for the player’s cat.A screenshot of a turn-based battle.Cats will square off against each other as well as vicious dogs, snakes raccoons and other animals.Players will be able to interact with beloved cat characters from the novels.“Snakes?! I hate snakes!”
Big Buddy has cat scratch fever and Little Buddy’s reputation has been besmirched!
So I’ve got cat scratch fever from a nasty Bud-inflicted cut on my right foot.
I take full responsibility. I woke a few nights ago to Bud mmmmmmrrrrrp-ing and realized I’d been acting out my dreams and had kicked him. Of course I felt terrible, apologized with some gentle head scratches and he forgave me in a few seconds because he knows it wasn’t intentional.
And because it’s happened two or three times before. There’s something wrong with whichever brain mechanism regulates my motor function shutdown, and it goes both ways, from terrifying bouts of sleep paralysis to the aforementioned acting out of dreams.
I fell asleep again after the unfortunate kicking incident, then realized Bud had already paid me back earlier with a skin-shredding, blood-drawing scratch on the top of the offending foot, when I woke up scratching the painful and itchy cut.
I applied antibiotic ointment and have continued to do so, but my foot’s swollen and I feel a little funky. Health sites advise watching it closely and if redness spreads out, or if it’s accompanied by certain other symptoms, I should seek medical attention.
So far I’m okay.
Buddy gazes upon his meowgnificent reflection.
In the meantime this has not helped Bud’s reputation with people in my immediate orbit, including my family.
As regular readers know, Bud has an unfortunate habit of engaging in some light mauling of his cat-sitters. My friend Sue, who has my eternal gratitude for watching him many times, will no longer play with him or interact with him. She slips in, presumably with armor and a heavy oaken shield, then feeds him and makes a rapid egress.
Anyway, Bud has been dubbed “the most unaffectionate cat in the world” because of his hostility toward cat-sitters and his quick-to-the-draw paw-slapping tendencies. It hasn’t helped that other people I know have adopted cats who’ve turned out to be perfectly behaved, grateful, sweet little furballs who don’t slap people for petting them too long.
Which I think is a bit unfair considering Bud’s a very friendly cat while I am present and the majority of retaliatory slappings by Bud have occurred when people unfamiliar with feline interaction etiquette try to pet him as if he’s a dog. He gets overstimulated easily, has a low tolerance for repeated petting in the same area, and does not play nice if anyone goes for his belly or tries to pick him up.
That’s just his personality. He’s absolutely affectionate and can be a little love bug with me. He loves my brother. He’s cool with my nieces even though he knows they’re kids and can be a bit unpredictable. Of course I don’t pick him up unless absolutely necessary, I don’t rub his tummy and I know the signs when he’s close to overstimulation. There’s also years of trust between us, and I’ve been told I am an adequate servant.
I’ll be keeping a close eye on my swollen foot and jokingly told Bud I’m going to defenestrate him if I have to go to the emergency clinic, which is fine because he doesn’t know what that means! (And of course I would do no such thing. My little Buddy is an absolute angel, even when the claws come out. Obviously.)
Imagine using a version of Google translate that can only translate every seventh or eighth word without context or tone. Would it be useful at all?
When my cat wants to play he faces me directly, at my level if possible, and leans forward, whiskers relaxed, before screeching at me at loud volume.
When he wants food he doesn’t bother with being level with me. He assumes an aggressive posture, follows me around and tries to get in my path, all before screeching at me at loud volume.
When yums are impending, he also screeches at loud volume, but his face and body language take on an anticipatory posture, and his tail pops straight up.
When he’s not feeling well, he screeches at loud volume and assumes a hunched stance, whiskers pulled back, ears at different angles, often with his tail wrapped protectively around his little body in a sort of uncomfortable version of the classic loaf.
The common element is the loud screeching. An AI-powered app would have a very difficult time telling the difference between a “Feed me now, human!” screech and a “I want to play wand toy hunting games now, human!” screech, and probably wouldn’t fare much better with the “I don’t feel so good” screech. (MeowTalk did, after all, try to convince me that Buddy was serenading me with sweet nothings when he was demanding food.)
Years ago I was bullish about AI’s ability to translate meows. Given enough data, I reasoned, AI could crack the code. But that was a human way of thinking, anthropomorphizing my Bud into a furry little human whose “language” was limited to vocalizations.
It’s not.
No cat limits their communication to meows, trills and chirps, not even a vocal little dude like my Buddy.
Cat communication is multi-modal, consisting of general body language, whisker position, ear position, tail position and movement, pupil expression, fur rigidity, gait, scent-marking, scent-sharing, and for our exclusive benefit, meows. The latter are essentially a second language to them, adopted out of necessity because they realize we respond to vocalizations but are mostly oblivious to everything their tails, whiskers, fur, ears, tails, pheromones and eyes are telling us.
Now who’s supposed to be the intelligent species?
“Dude, why are you so dense? I’m shouting at you with my whiskers, my tail and my meows!”
The fact that feline communication is inherently multi-modal is the reason why talking boards and AI meow translation apps do not work. It’s like using a version of Google translate that only interprets every seventh or eighth word, stripped of all context and tone. Actually, it’s worse than that.
If you’ve spent any time on Facebook, TikTok or Youtube, chances are you’ve come across cat talking boards. They’re even more useless than the AI apps that claim to translate meows because they not only assume feline communication is a single-channel affair, they also place additional burdens on felines, like understanding human language syntax (something no animal has ever been able to do) and highly abstract concepts.
How does a cat know a question is a request for information?
How does a cat understand temporal concepts represented as abstract sounds with nothing that ties those sounds – and the buttons that correspond to them – to concepts like “yesterday,” “tomorrow” and “later”?
Hmmm, something’s off here…
In one video I viewed, a woman convinced herself that her cat’s random slapping of talking board buttons meant he wanted to discuss an animal he’d possibly seen outside a window the night before. The number of assumptions and logical leaps required to arrive at that kind of conclusion is staggering.
I want to be clear that I’m not saying studying animal communication is a futile effort. On the contrary, everything we’ve learned indicates animals – especially our domesticated companion animals and the most cognitively gifted wild species – are not only conscious and cognitive, but have rich inner lives with their own thought processes, opinions, emotions, likes and dislikes.
But cracking those codes is a serious effort that will involve a concerted effort to negate our human bias as much as possible, attempts to see the world from an animal’s perspective, and multi-modal analysis that doesn’t just consider what we can see, hear and smell, but what our pals’ sensoriums can detect.
After all, we know that cats can hear in frequencies we cannot, that they possess a sense of smell as much as 20 times more sensitive than ours. There’s ongoing research into whether animals can detect magnetic fields, and differences in vision — such as perceiving different color tones and a drastically increased sensitivity to motion — mean a very intentional means of communicating by our cat may require the equivalent of a bullhorn for us to pick up on what they’re “saying.”
One day we may learn that they consider us the dim-witted ones who cannot see, hear or smell the obvious. We may get to that point, but not through half-hearted, unscientific efforts like labeled buttons and simple algorithms.
Pain In The Bud 