Today is a Festivus for the rest of us! Get out tbe Festivus pole and prepare for the Feats of Strength and the Airing of Grievances!
Happy Festivus!
December 23 marks the famously anti-consumerist holiday, and this year is the 27th Festivus since it became a national holiday thanks to the Seinfeld episode “The Strike,” which aired on Dec. 18, 1997.
Before that, it was the invention and personal holiday of Daniel O’Keefe, a Reader’s Digest editor. His son Dan, a writer for Seinfeld, introduced Festivus to the rest of us by making it a focal point of the episode.
Festivus is enthusiastically celebrated at la casa de Buddy, providing Little Buddy the opportunity to engage in the Airing of Grievances and, as is tradition, tell everyone how they’ve disappointed him over the past year.
Buddy the Cat with George, Elaine, Jerry and Kramer in the season five episode “The Litter Box.” In the episode, Buddy, Kramer and Kramer’s friend Bob Saccamano scheme to charge felines entry to the beach, billing it as a “luxury litter box.”
With that, we’ll turn it over to Little Buddy’s list of Grievances. No one is spared.
Big Buddy: For being insufficiently devastated when I got sick a few months ago. I expected more tears. Do better next time.
PITB readers: It has recently come to my attention that some of you are laughing at me, not with me. This disturbing news has caused me to question whether you’re being honest when you send correspondence praising my ripped physique or insisting I should be president of the Americats again.
The Internet: For not making me as famous as I should be.
Big Buddy: For being a vegetarian and not having extra turkey in the house!
Big Buddy and PITB readers (again) for tolerating stories about non-cat species and cats who aren’t Buddy! Who cares about owls in Central Park and chonky cats in Poland? This is littlebuddythecat.com NOT fatpolishcats.com!
Unaware they were being recorded, elected leaders in a small Texas city let their imaginations run wild in a closed-door meeting about dealing with feral cat colonies.
One proposed mass poisoning to take out as many as 50 cats at a time. Another, perhaps fancying himself a mafia hit man, envisioned taking care of the city’s cat “problem” execution-style with a “.22 round to the back of the head.”
A third proposed dumping the bodies of the dead cats in an area the city already uses to dispose of unwanted animals.
“We have a location on this property that’s called deer heaven,” the committee member told colleagues at the Nov. 6 meeting. “I’m sure it could be kitty cat heaven too.”
Now the city council and wildlife advisory council of Granite Shoals, a city of about 5,100 in central Texas, are trying to explain themselves to an infuriated public, the local Humane Society and their own police, who rebuked them in a public statement that asserted their plans are illegal.
State and local laws “do not allow any cruelty to animals, including feral cats in our community,” police chief John Ortis wrote in a letter to the public.
The Hill Country Humane Society took the extraordinary step of “terminating its relationship” with the city, calling the committee’s plans “blatantly unethical and illegal” in a statement posted on Facebook.
“This recording reveals that not only was there an attempt to develop a plan to inhumanely shoot captured cats and dispose of their carcasses, but there was open discussion between members of the committee and the City Manager about the need to conceal such activities from the general public,” the Humane Society wrote.
Staff at the Humane Society said they’ll still take in stray cats from the city, but they’ve ended their official partnership.
A stray cat. Credit: Aleksandr Nadyojin/Pexels
Todd Holland, the committee chair, denied that his members wanted to keep details of their plans from the public and told local newspaper the Daily Trib that the committee was merely trying to work out the “intricate details” of how to handle a population of about 400 cats. It’s not clear how the city arrived at that number, and there’s been no mention of an official effort to get an accurate tally.
“It’s not like we’re a bunch of cowboys running wild,” Holland said.
But in the recording, committee members clearly discussed hiding details from the public, and the Daily Trib noted that the committee used the word “remove” interchangeably with “euthanize” in written materials detailing the plan, perhaps to soften the language or obscure the fact that the proposed solution was to kill the cats.
Granite Shoals Mayor Ron Munos called the recording “disturbing” and said the committee’s plan will not be put into practice.
“The city is not doing this,” he told the Daily Trib. “We’re not going out and killing cats.”
Here at PITB we feel like a broken record regularly referring back to the junk studies blaming cats for killing billions of birds annually, but the reason we do is because those studies have real-life consequences.
Ill-advised, unethical and illegal plans to eradicate stray cats wouldn’t be explored at municipal and county levels if elected leaders weren’t told that trap, neuter, return (TNR) programs do not work and that outdoor cats pose the most significant thread to local wildlife.
In plain terms there’s been a concerted effort to paint domestic cats as dangerous, ruthless killing machines, the media hasn’t treated the claims with skepticism, and the result is a whole lot of cruelty and misery inflicted on innocent animals.
City councils, wildlife biologists, park rangers and others are not armed with the facts when they rely on those studies, and the result is bad policy and decision-making.
Stories like this one out of Texas have become more frequent over the past few years, and we suspect things will get a lot worse for cats without injecting some much-needed sanity and evidence-based solutions to counter the tidal wave of misinformation.
Six cats get in on the holiday spirit and tell us all about their participation in the seasonal festivities!
It’s a magical time of year when people spread cheer, give gifts, throw parties and generally act festive, often with the help of alcoholic beverages.
But Christmas, Hannukah and New Year’s aren’t just for humans! Felines are invited to join the festivities too. We found six kittens who look adorable wearing their ugly Christmas sweaters and asked them how their holidays are going so far:
Shadow
“‘Wear the sweater,’ she said. ‘It’ll look cute,’ she said. ‘People will love seeing you on our Christmas card!’ she said. I shall have my revenge soon enough.”
Bubbles
“I was told there would be snacks. If I don’t start seeing some Temptations soon, the claws are gonna come out!”
Creamy
“That eggnog stuff looks interesting. Pour a bowl for me, would you, human?”
Big Al
“They said I’d get coal in my stocking if I didn’t put the sweater on. Would Santa truly be so cruel?”
Timmy
“If you humans have to drink alcohol just to tolerate each other’s company, how do you think I feel? Crack out the catnip this instant!”
Nala
“I count 86 objects that could be swatted off that tree. You humans would do well to remember that.”
Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl has become a New York celebrity since he escaped his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo early in 2023.
He’s been spotted flying through the concrete canyons of midtown, perched on fire escapes on the upper east side and ridding New York of its vermin — but he’s not your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.
He’s Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl and New Yorkers have been rooting for him ever since he escaped from a small enclosure in Central Park Zoo and decided the entire park and its environs would be his domain.
Since then, Flaco has evaded capture, put aside concerns that he’d be able to survive in the big city and shocked the hell out of New Yorkers who have seen the curious little guy’s face pressed against the glass of their apartment windows, watching them intently.
“I audibly gasped,” 24-year-old Matt Sweeney told the Wall Street Journal after he realized something or someone was watching him through the window of his upper west side apartment.
“It absolutely scared the you-know-what out of me,” 31-year-old actress Reilly Richardson told the paper after she woke up one morning to find the peeping predator watching her from outside. “It’s New York City. It’s the last thing you expect to see.”
Flaco escaped Central Park Zoo in February after his enclosure, where he lived for 12 years, had been “vandalized,” according to zoo staff. It turns out someone sliced an opening in the mesh, giving Flaco an out which he quickly took advantage of.
For the next few months zookeepers chased him around Central Park, trying to lure him back with food and the recorded sounds of other owls, but Flaco wasn’t having it. In the meantime he became a celebrity, New York’s version of the famous mountain lion P-22, with crowds of birders and curious onlookers assembling to watch and photograph him.
Credit: New Yorker Robin Herbst-Paparne, who spotted Flaco outside her apartment. Via WSJ
Social media accounts tracking the raptor’s movements sprung up online, and all the attention became too much. Even though zookeepers gave up on returning him to his enclosure, Flaco apparently decided he was done being watched and became the watcher.
Since then he’s popped up all over Manhattan, delighting New Yorkers and giving others a scare as they noticed the two-foot owl tracking them from a fire escape or a window perch. In early November he left the comfy confines of Central Park — possibly spurred by the crowds and commotion of the annual NYC Marathon — and began exploring the city proper, popping up in random places each day.
Initially people were worried Flaco, who had spent his entire life in captivity, wouldn’t be able to feed himself. The owl quickly put those concerns to rest as he proved adept at feasting on New York’s abundant rodents, earning himself the nickname “New York’s Rat Czar” at a time when Mayor Eric Adams has declared war on the vermin.
Experts are divided on why Flaco is spending so much time watching people. As the only known Eurasian eagle owl living “wild” in North America, the little guy may be looking for a mate. They say he won’t find one of his species, but he could find an unpaired female of another species if he’s lucky.
Others say Flaco, who was raised by humans and isn’t afraid of our species, may believe a human could be his mate. That’s another way his predicament mirrors that of P-22, who settled in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park and became a local celebrity, but was cut off from potential mates by busy highways and miles of human-inhabited land.
Nan Knighton, whose apartment faces Central Park, snapped this shot of Flaco outside her apartment.
Regardless, people in New York are enchanted by the unusual resident and delighted to see him. Nan Knighton, who took the above photo (via WSJ) told the paper she had an intense encounter with Flaco. After realizing a pair of intense eyes were tracking her inside her home, she made friends with the curious owl:
He stuck around for three hours.
“I talked to him,” says Knighton, recalling telling Flaco he’s beautiful and gorgeous, and that she couldn’t believe she was speaking to an owl. When she walked into another room, Flaco’s head swiveled to follow her.
Flaco stayed quiet until Knighton got within 6 inches of his face. “He just let out this little tiny hiss,” she says. “It was kind of like, ‘OK, I like you, but I don’t want to be beak to beak.’”
She turned her back to the owl to write something down. When she looked back, Flaco was gone.
Flaco proved too smart for zookeepers who tried to entice him with traps like the one above. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Bella and Luna retain their spots as the most popular names for female cats, while male cats are commonly named Leo, Milo, Simba and Oliver.
The top cat and dog names for 2023 have been released, and Rover lists the usual suspects for the New York area.
The top female names for felines include Luna, Pepper, Lily, Coco and Bella, while the boys were Leo, Oliver, Milo, Jack and Henry.
There is no Buddy to be found even amongst the dogs, whose list included Charlie, Max, Teddy and Oliver, while females included Lucy and Rosie in addition to the ever-popular Bella and Luna.
I have a niece named Lucy and a nephew named Milo, neither of whom are old enough yet to understand their names are more popular with four-legged little ones than humans.
Nationally, Luna and Bella occupy the two top spots for female cats, followed by classics like Nala, Kitty and Cleo, while the most popular male cats in the US are Oliver and Leo, with names like Simba, Ollie and Jasper rounding out the top 10.
Again, not a Buddy to be found among the most popular male cat names.
This is obviously because the name Buddy is so special it is only conferred upon the most meowgnificent, meowscular and meowsterful felines. (Is he still looking over my shoulder?)
Who’s ready to rock? After a nice nap, of course!
Interestingly, nostalgic names from the 80s and 90s are trending, with people naming their female dogs and cats Alanis (Morisette), Ginger Spice, Avril (Levigne), Richard Gere and Leonardo DogCaprio among other monikers.
I don’t know if I could see myself naming a cat after a 90s band, musician or actor. I think, in these situations, it’s always best to imagine what happens if your furry friend gets lost and you have to walk around the neighborhood calling them by name.
“Come ‘ere, Weezer!”
“Where are you, little RZA? Who makes dope beats? You make dope beats, yes you do!”
“Time for din-din, Ol’ Dirty Bastard!”
“Where’s my widdle Rage Against the Machine? Aren’t you just a precious Red Hot Chili Pepper!”
If you feel like a jerk calling a name out, it’s probably best to go with something else. Which is one reason why Bud isn’t Brutus the Bone Cruncher or Supreme Warlord Felinius Decimus Maximus.
Rover compiles its annual lists of most popular names from its user database, which includes millions of pets registered by their proud humans…and not enough Buddies.
Pain In The Bud 