The famous feline embraces the role of a beloved tiger in a reboot of the Academy Award-winning film. Critics praised the casting, noting Buddy’s strong resemblance to Richard Parker.
LOS ANGELES — Buddy the Cat will star as the main antagonist in an upcoming remake of Life of Pi, Variety reported on Monday.
The silver tabby cat will pad into the role of Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger who finds himself sharing a small boat with a teenage boy named Pi after they survive a storm that sinks their ship.
Alone, hungry and scared, Pi and Richard Parker must learn to trust each other as they drift west with no land in sight.
In one memorable scene from the 2012 original, a gluttonous Richard Parker hoards hundreds of fish while refusing to share with Pi.
“A lot of people think Richard’s being greedy,” Buddy said, “but put yourself in his paws. You can’t get turkey out there. Pi isn’t exactly volunteering to open cans of the good stuff. It’s a cat eat fish world.”
(Above: Buddy the Cat as Richard Parker is “indistinguishable” from the original character, the movie’s casting director says.)
One of the most memorable sequences involves the duo drifting toward an island paradise under the stars as the ocean glows a bioluminiscent blue. The scene takes on a trippy quality as boy and tiger hallucinate tasty, juicy fish paddling lazily through the night air.
“As an actor, you embrace the challenge of imagining all these scrumptious, decadent fish and, you know, your stomach just rumbles,” Buddy told an interviewer.
The silver tabby said the film is helping him grow as an actor.
“When my agent sent me the script, I thought ‘Life of Pie?’ You know, I like pie. Shepherd’s pie, chicken pot pie, paella, steak and guiness pie,” he said. “So to prepare for the role, I ate a lot of pie.”
Crumbs was rescued from a bad situation where people fed him without regard for his health. Now he’s got a lot of work ahead of him as his new caretakers help him lose weight so he can walk on his own again.
Crumbs, the morbidly obese tabby who was rescued from the basement of a Russian hospital last week, is already putting in the work to melt pounds.
That means he’s enduring two things most cats hate — exercise and water. You’ll recall from our earlier post that Crumbs weighs 38 pounds and cannot walk under his own power, so his new caretakers at Matroskin animal rescue in Perm, Russia, have him on a special waterproof treadmill where he gets the benefit of buoyancy while he gets his steps in.
The big guy is not a happy camper in the video, but he’s doing his best.
I’ve heard horror stories about the hospitals in Russia and Ukraine, so if it sounds strange that the staff at a hospital would feed cookies, soup and other inappropriate food to a cat, well, let’s just say it’s not the kind of environment most of us picture when we think “hospital.” (Which is another reason to be grateful for living in the west, where we have it much better than most of us generally realize.)
Non-native English speaking staff at the Hindustan Times may have confused Whiskas the cat food brand with whiskey, the alcoholic beverage, or there may have been a translation error.
Interestingly, a Hindustan Times story about Crumbs claims the hospital employees served whiskey to the obese cat in addition to the junk food, a claim repeated in the headline and article.
That would add another wrinkle to an already ridiculous story, but thankfully it’s not true. Your intrepid friends here at PITB checked the original text and with the help of translation software, determined it used the Russian word for “Whiskas,” as in the cat food, not whiskey. (It probably goes without saying, but never give alcohol to your cat. As little as a teaspoon of whiskey could be fatal.)
So if there’s some small comfort here, it’s that the people who fed Crumbs for so long weren’t completely ignorant to his needs, and it appears he got at least some species-appropriate food.
Crumbs shortly after he was rescued. Credit: Matroskin animal shelter
The abandoned cat found his way to the basement of a hospital in Russia, where staff members provided him with inappropriate food — and way too much of it.
Animal rescuers in Russia have their work cut out for them after taking in a mega-chonky cat weighing 38 pounds.
The orange tabby, named Crumbs by his rescuers because he leaves none in his wake, is so overweight he can’t walk and has been placed on a strict diet to meet his first goal of becoming ambulatory.
After that, his rescuers said, the real work begins as they try to get Crumbs down to about 10 pounds, which they believe is a healthy weight for a cat of his original size.
Crumbs with one of his rescuers who is helping the morbidly obese feline shed pounds.
Staff at Matroskin Shelter in Perm told Russian media that Crumbs was abandoned by his owners and was living in the basement of a hospital in the city.
It wasn’t clear if Crumbs was already obese when he was surrendered, but hospital staff were not providing him with the kind of protein-rich meat cats need to stay healthy. Instead, they plied him with cookies and calorie-dense soups, apparently putting no limits on his food consumption.
“Kroshik’s story is an extremely rare case when someone loved a cat so much that they fed him to such a state,” shelter volunteers said.
Crumbs is in for a shock as he adjusts to his new diet, but the more difficult challenge may be the treadmill sessions that await once he’s able to move under his own power.
Barsik suffered the indignity of being labeled “The Fattest Cat In New York” and even made the front cover of the New York Post, but the former chonkster and his new human had the last laugh:
The problem of overweight cats has received more attention in recent years, with veterinarians warning people not to intentionally overfeed their cats. Unfortunately, some people have taken to fattening up their felines for the sake of social media success, looking to copy others whose extraordinarily “chonky” cats have earned equally massive online followings.
In Poland, Gacek the cat was removed from his street-side tiny house and taken indoors because visitors to the city of Szczecin would not stop feeding the overweight celebrity chonkster, despite signs pleading with them to stop. (It also didn’t help that people tried to steal Gacek after he became internationally famous.)
Above: After Gacek went viral for being the top-rated attraction in his home city of Szczecin, Poland, a steady stream of admirers made the pilgrimage to see him in person, offering tribute in the form of snacks.
Here at Casa de Buddy, I had to put His Grace on a diet because he was pushing about 12 1/2 to 13 pounds, up from his natural weight of about 10 or 11 pounds. That might not seem like much, but Bud isn’t a very large cat despite his belief that he’s a hulking tiger. Two pounds is as much as 20 percent of his ideal body weight.
As you might imagine, the little guy was not happy about his significantly reduced snack allotment and made sure to communicate that to me loudly and often.
“I am NOT chubby, I am meowscular!”
There have also been success stories. Barsik, once dubbed “The Fattest Cat In New York” after tipping the scales at an astonishing 41 pounds, made a second round of headlines after he shed a significant portion of his weight. Nowadays he’s looking happy and healthy as he’s able to run and jump like a cat should.
It’s easy to mistake house cats for larger wildcats when photos and videos are blurry and lack familiar items to establish a sense of scale. The same phenomenon is responsible for UFO sightings and cryptid creatures like the Loch Ness Monster.
Recently several reports have been making a big deal about blurry videos of black cats, claiming they’re “black mountain lions” or “black panthers” roaming in places like Missouri and Louisiana.
The footage of the first video was shot in Missouri, where pumas once ranged, were extirpated in the 20th century, and have returned in small numbers in recent decades. Like most photos and videos of cryptid or unidentified animals, this one is blurry, taken from a distance, and lacks any object near the animal to provide a sense of scale. The second video is simply a black house cat with her kitten in rural Louisiana.
Our brains are pattern recognition machines and when the information we’re looking for — be it spatial, detail or contextual data — isn’t present, our minds tend to fill in the gaps. That’s the reason why we see faces in clouds, creatures in shadows, men on the moon and the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches. (The technical term for “perception imposing meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus” is “pareidolia,” from the Greek for “instead of” and “image.”)
Compounding the problem is the fact that the word “panther” is one of the most confusing of felid descriptors, a word that vaguely refers to physically large cats but doesn’t refer to any particular species, coat pattern or color.
Big cats can be voids too, like this stunning black jaguar in Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Above: A jaguar, a leopard, a puma (mountain lion) and a melanistic jaguar. Although jaguars and leopards look nearly identical, jaguars are stocker with thicker limbs and have blotches inside their rosettes, while leopards do not.
The word panther can refer to a puma, a jaguar or a leopard, but only the latter two species can have melanistic (black) coats.
Contrary to popular belief, even a black cat’s fur is not entirely black — you can still see the rosettes and spots of their coat patterns up close and in certain light conditions.
This jaguar’s rosettes and spots are visible in direct light. Jaguars in the wild are rarely seen so close or in “perfect” conditions, making it difficult to see coat markings of melanistic members of the species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
However, jaguars don’t range in Missouri, leopards are not native to the Americas, and if someone indeed spotted one of the very rare pumas in Missouri, it could not be black because melanistic pumas do not exist.
Mountain lions (Puma concolor in taxonomic nomenclature) are physically large and are the second-biggest cats by size and weight in the western hemisphere after jaguars, but they are not technically “big cats” because they are not part of the pantherinae subfamily. Pumas cannot roar like big cats, but they’re capable of the classic wildcat “scream,” and they can even meow like small cats.
By process of elimination — and the cat’s physical shape — we can conclude the Missouri video shows a house cat that looks larger because there’s nothing nearby to give us a sense of scale.
This piece of a grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 on eBay in 2004 because bidders believed the Virgin Mary’s face miraculously appeared on it. Credit: eBay
It may seem unlikely that someone confuses a house cat, which weighs an average of 10 pounds, with a puma, which weighs on average more than 100 pounds, with the largest males pushing 220 pounds.
But it happens all the time even in close encounters, like the incident this summer in which a man riding a dirt bike swore he was ambushed by a puma only for DNA to establish beyond doubt that his attacker was a domestic kitty. For what it’s worth, he still swears it was a mountain lion.
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Feeding strays is now punishable by a $150 fine in an Ohio town, the latest municipality whose elected leaders chose to ignore expert guidelines on managing feline populations.
Every time the stray cat issue comes up, local town boards and city councils act as if they need to reinvent the wheel.
Imagining that they are the first to deal with this extremely common problem, they make decisions from positions of ignorance, dismissing the concerns of people who actually work with cats. Or they “do the research” and come up with their own ineffective policies instead of simply looking at what other towns and cities have tried in the past.
At least that way, you know what works and what doesn’t, and how much your decision’s going to cost taxpayers.
But that would be the smart thing to do, which is why our local elected leaders don’t do it. Instead they pull stunts like the village board of Mogadore, Ohio, a town of 3,700 about 10 miles east of Akron.
The Mogadore board just passed a law that makes feeding strays and ferals punishable by a fine of up to $150, as if that will stop cats from finding food and breeding.
Tellingly, Mogadore’s elected leaders say their ordinance applies to “wild, stray, or un-owned” cats, which means they don’t understand they’re all the same species.
Apparently neither do the reporters at WOIO, a local news station in Cleveland. A story from the station is confidently incorrect in telling readers “[d]omestic cats that have become wild, meaning live outdoors, roam free, and rarely interact with humans, are also considered feral.”
Credit: Sami Aksu/Pexels
Felis catus is a domestic animal. By definition a domestic cat is not wild and cannot become wild. Evolution cannot happen to a single animal.
While evolution is a constant process, speciation — wolves becoming dogs, wildcats becoming house cats, wild boar becoming docile farm pigs — is a species-wide shift that takes at leasta few hundred years but often much longer, “from human-observable timescales to tens of millions of years” depending on the species.
The whole process results in changes at the genetic level. The transition from wildcats to domestic cats, for example, involved changing only 13 genes.
This is not rocket science, it’s basic stuff we all learned in high school science classes.
But that’s almost beside the point.
Fining people for feeding stray cats, including caretakers who voluntarily manage cat colonies, will not solve the problem. It doesn’t work. It has never worked in any town anywhere in the world.
It also creates a needlessly adversarial relationship with the passionate people doing the hard work of managing the feline population, often thanklessly and at their own expense. Why make enemies of them when they’re doing a public service?
Mogadore’s village board had a representative from Alley Cat Allies and people from local rescues on hand to inform them that fines don’t work, and to offer the humane and effective option of trap, neuter, return. TNR may not be perfect, but it’s better than anything else people have tried.
Mogadore’s board and mayor ignored the experts and went ahead with their plan to fine people instead.
They’re not alone. This happens thousands of times across the US, Europe, Australia and most other places where domestic cats live. Japan and Turkey take a more humane approach, and they’re better for it. But here in the US, we often deal with issues by ignoring precedent and engaging in wishful thinking.
If the residents of Mogadore are lucky, their elected officials will realize their mistake sooner rather than later.
Stray and feral cats already have a difficult existence without ill-advised laws making it illegal to care for them. Credit: Mehmet Fatih Bayram/Pexels
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