After a gut punch of a week, I’m once again reminded of how fortunate I am to have the Budster.
Taken early Friday evening. No filters or meowscles added. Just Buddy laying back in my his chair:
The little dude has been here for me during a seriously weird and messed up time, once again reminding me how lucky I am to have him.
Guard dog? That wasn’t in the job description!
No one will ever accuse Nash of being a great guard dog.
The golden retriever made headlines this week after security cameras showed the friendly pup responded to a home intruder by grabbing a chew toy and, tail wagging excitedly, trying to make friends with the man.
Dante Rowley was on a trip when he received an alert from his home security system in San Diego that someone had entered his home. As he tapped into the secure feed, he and his fiance watched from Chicago as Nash cautiously observed the intruder ingress through a second-floor window, then decided the man was there to play with him.
The man quickly made himself at home, taking off his shirt and shoes before opening the fridge and helping himself to its contents. He even belched in satisfaction before sitting down to eat another snack, apparently a small carton of yogurt.
Rowley alerted police and San Diego officers arrived within minutes, but the footage shows that even as the intruder began to take nervous glances through the front windows, Nash kept trying to play with him, bringing him a variety of toys.
Nash wasn’t done making friends. When the police entered through the front door, the amicable pooch greeted them enthusiastically as well, and tried to enlist the officers in some fun and games.
“Nash,” Rowley admitted, “is the worst guard dog.”
“Usually, when he sees new people, he runs over and jumps all over them and is just on them 24-7,” he told the New York Times.
Dogs like Nash don’t “do a background check” before deciding to play with people, Cornell veterinary professor Katherine Houpt told the newspaper.
“The dog wanted someone to play with, and the burglar is as good as anyone,” she said. “It’s a breed that’s often friendly and, apparently, the owners made sure he was socialized with people. So he doesn’t think something awful is going to come in the door, but something fun, a playmate.”
Buddy the Cat reviewed the footage after he was asked to share his expert opinion and sniffed derisively as he watched Nash attempting to make friends with the intruder.
“Useless mutt!” the imperious gray tabby said. “Look at him! I’d be like ‘Listen, burglar man, I’m a tiger and I’m gonna, like, maul you and stuff if you don’t get outta my domicile immediately!’ Then obviously he would be really scared and would run because I’m intimidating and meowscular.”
The suspect, John Cline, 57, was arrested and charged with first-degree burglary, a felony. It wasn’t immediately clear if he’d retained an attorney.
Header image credit: Pexels
He pitched his story to me as a scam men needed to be aware of, avoiding the words “mail order bride.”
I’m not quite sure how it came up in a Google News alert for cat-related stories, but I just found this article from Marie Claire, an excerpt from a book called Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter that details the way an American woman found out her mom was a Russian mail-order bride.
The woman’s response toward her mother is lacking in compassion, but I don’t know her family dynamics and the title of her book indicates she is at least aware of how she comes off. The one thing I do recognize is the longing to feel normal as the child of an immigrant in an America where normal is a form of social currency. Having the “weird parent” who talks funny, has a “strange” name and unfamiliar customs exposes you to all sorts of torture from other kids, who can be inventively cruel.
The story also reminds me of one of the most bizarre interviews I’d ever conducted during my time as a newspaper reporter.
The guy on the other end of the line pitched it to me as a story about how he was scammed by a foreign temptress, as something other American men should watch out for. I agreed to meet him and hear his story.
He was a mid-level bureaucrat in state government who invited me into a conference room during his lunch break. He was hygienically challenged with visible dandruff, heavy acne, a rumpled button-down shirt and the kind of tie worn by men who view professional sartorial standards as an unavoidable nuisance.
At one point during our conversation he dug a finger into his nose and retrieved a gummy piece of snot. I looked away, embarrassed, but it didn’t even seem to register in his mind.
I’m not sure exactly when I realized he was describing his experience with a mail-order bride, but I will never forget his heavy sigh as he reached into a pocket and retrieved a worn catalog featuring Russian women in their 30s and 40s.
I’d never seen anything like it. The best way I can describe it is somewhere between the print version of a dating site and a grocery store’s weekly circular, with photos of Ukrainian and Russian women dressed to the nines and wearing heavy makeup above their listed stats, requirements for a husband and parody-worthy relationship tropes: enjoying long walks on the beach, sunsets, that sort of thing.
(Above: Not the actual catalog, but it was similar to this.)
“Here,” the man said, pushing the catalog across the table. “You can keep this for your story.”
He paused, took the catalog back, turned to the page featuring his ex-wife, then tore it out carefully before folding it reverently and slipping it into the front breast pocket of his shirt.
I didn’t know what to say as he sat there with a single tear running down his cheek and sniffled. The catalog sat there in front of me and I hesitated to touch it, remembering where this man’s finger had had been a few minutes earlier.
He explained how he had traveled to Moscow with a cohort of American men, then spent the first night on speed dates in a hotel ballroom with women who were desperate to get out of the country, chatting with them under the watchful eyes of burly men with names like Yuri and Artyom.
The second night was spent with a smaller group of women after each of the American men had narrowed down their choices, again chaperoned by taciturn Russian men. The third night was a date with each man’s final pick before agreements were made, contracts signed and the men returned home with a future delivery date for their new wives, as if they’d ordered them off Amazon.
It quickly became clear that the man I was speaking to did not view women as human beings and had little experience with them. He complained about infrequent sex, how much it was costing him to feed and clothe his new bride and her daughter, feeling disrespected, and the many ways in which his fantasy was demolished by reality.
It didn’t take long for his new Russian bride to split. A few months, if I recall. The man went to work one day, came home and found his wife and her daughter gone.
When I got back to the newsroom, my editor stopped me.
“How’d it go with the scam story?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him the depressing truth and said it just wasn’t particularly compelling or newsworthy. I spiked the potential story from my calendar, tossed the mail order bride catalog in a bin far from my desk when no one was looking, and made a beeline for the bathroom to scrub the hell out of my hands.
With its kitten-like features and striking rosettes, the Tilcayo tiger cat managed to evade scientists thanks in part to its remote range.
Say hello to Leopardus tilcayo, also known as the Tilcayo tiger cat.
The small, slender feline is the first new species of cat discovered in 103 years following the Uruguayan pampas cat in 1923. Found in Bolivia’s Yungas forest, also known as the cloud forest for its high elevation and lush vegetation, the Tilcayo tiger cat is smaller than domestic felines, weighing in at about six pounds on average.
Although it’s part of the genus leopardus and it’s colloquially known as a tiger cat, its coat pattern features rosettes that more closely resemble those of jaguars with the latter felid’s broken patterns and spots inside the rosettes. By contrast, leopard rosettes do not have randomly placed spots.
The new feline is closely related to the other “tiger cats” of the Americas, including the ocelot, oncilla, kodkod, pampas cat and margay.
Notably, it is not a subspecies split from another cat, but an entirely new species to scientists. DNA tests confirmed its status as a separate species. It eluded discovery for so long in part because of its remote location in forests at high elevation.
Paola Nogales Ascarrunz, co-author of the study in the journal Current Biology, said a discovery like this is extremely unusual. The discovery of Leopardus tilcayo was formally announced to the world on Thursday when the paper was published. The same paper noted a new subspecies of tiger cat, the Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo, but the Tilcayo tiger cat is the big news.
“This time, it’s a cat. That’s really novel. And it hasn’t happened in 100 years,” Ascarrunz said. “No one else had named it. No one else had described it.”
The first time Ascarrunz saw the Tilcayo tiger cat while volunteering at a wildlife rehabilitation center in Bolivia, she “thought it was a kitten,” she said.
Biologists are still learning about the Tilcayo tiger cat. They’ve only closely examined two members of the species and have camera trail footage of several others. They don’t yet have an estimate of how many individuals live in the Yungas forest.
Unfortunately, study co-author Tadeu de Oliveira noted, all of South America’s tiger cats “are in habitats that are vanishing fast.”
Eduardo Eizirik, an evolutionary biologist at Brazil’s Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, said the new discovery emphasizes the importance of preserving the Earth’s remaining wild places as humanity encroaches from every angle.
“Showing the general public that even in a flagship group such as cats … there are still new species to be discovered may transmit an important message,” Eizirik said. “There are many undiscovered species out there in the world, and they are at risk of disappearing before we even discover them.”
“I went to jail! They locked me up for this s–t! I did not steal the f—ing cat,” said the woman accused of stealing a kitten from a Park Slope bodega.
Someone had stolen Jabal and Park Slope wasn’t having it.
The three-month-old kitten went missing on Sept. 10 and when his human, 8th St. Mini Mart owner Imad “Jimmy” Innab, checked the store’s surveillance cameras, he saw a man and a woman grab the white-and-cream moggie from the sidewalk in front of the store as he was opening up. The last images of Jabal showed the kitten struggling in the man’s grip as the couple walked away with him.
Customers, including one who called the kitten “the patron saint of Jimmy’s store,” were incensed and immediately sprang into action. On a Park Slope subreddit, neighbors shared information and identified the couple, while customers plastered the neighborhood with missing flyers featuring Jabal’s image.
As for Innab, he offered a $500 reward and said he’d take the kitten back “no questions asked” as well as decline to press charges if the couple brought him back.
For a few days it looked like Jabal wouldn’t be seen again. Locals online feared the worst, that Jabal may have been sold to people who operate dog fighting rings (where cats are used as “practice” for the aggressively trained mutts) or abandoned someplace dangerous.
But neighbors recognized the woman, who has since been identified as 58-year-old Mary Sierra, and urged her to bring the cat back. On Monday Innab received a call from Sierra, who claimed she thought Jabal was a stray and promised to return him.
Sierra’s son-in-law brought the kitten to the local precinct. Later that morning an NYPD officer came to the store holding Jabal and returned him to Innab.
“I cried,” Innab told The Gothamist, explaining that Jabal was a gift from a friend after his previous mouser and pet, Victoria, died at 17 years old. “ I put him down, and he started to sniff his bed, and his chair, and all of his toys.”
As for Sierra, she was arrested and charged with petty larceny, criminal possession of stolen property and companion animal stealing, the New York Post reported. The first two are misdemeanors under New York penal law, while the latter is a violation under the state’s Agriculture and Markets Law, which is a throwback to the days when most animal-related disputes concerned farmers and disagreements over ownership of livestock. Most US states have not updated those laws in more than a century despite drastic changes to the culture around companion animals and the ways Americans value their pets.
It’s not clear why Sierra’s companion, the man seen holding the cat in the surveillance footage, was not charged.
Sierra, who spoke to the Post after she was released pending a later court date, said she was going to “sue them for accusing me of stealing,” although it wasn’t clear if she meant she would sue the police, Innab or locals who identified her online from the surveillance video.
“I’m an animal lover. I got three rescue dogs,” she said. “I went to jail yesterday for this s—t. I went to jail! They locked me up, they locked me up for this s—t. I did not steal the f—ing cat.”
It wasn’t immediately clear when Sierra is due back in court.
Innab said he will no longer allow Jabal, which means “mountain” in Arabic, to roam outside the bodega and plans to get him a new collar and microchip.
Innab, 60, has operated the store for 40 years and is well known in the community. He was distraught when Jabal was taken, and credits his neighbors and friends for making sure the kitten was returned to him. The community’s reaction underscores the relationship neighbors have with local bodega owners and their cats, many of whom have become famous thanks to popular social media accounts documenting the friendly mousers.
“Clearly he’s become symbolic of something much larger,” one neighbor told the New York City ABC affiliate, WABC. “And the community did rally because it seemed such an unnecessary event.”
