Pain In The Bud

Buddy Claps Back At Tennis Star Over ‘Small Cat’ Insult

Feline leaders were outraged after the world tennis number one managed to insult cats, chair umpires and Australians on Friday.

NEW YORK — Buddy the Cat declared men’s tennis number one Daniil Medvedev “a lanky human” after the latter called a chair umpire “a small cat” during a match on Friday.

Medvedev, who is known for his outbursts on the court, suffered a meltdown during his semifinal victory at the Australian Open. The Russian yelled at the chair umpire for allegedly allowing his opponent, Stefanos Tsitsipas, to receive coaching from the stands, which is a no-no in professional tennis.

After the umpire hit Medvedev with a warning, the top-ranked men’s player launched a minute-long tirade.

“Bro, are you mad?” Medvedev yelled to the umpire. “For what? And his father can talk every point? Bro, are you stupid? His father can talk every point!”

When the umpire made it clear he wasn’t sympathetic to Medvedev’s complaints, the frustrated Russian dissed him.

“If you don’t give him a warning, you are — how can I say it? — a small cat!” he said, gesticulating wildly.

It was the second time in as many matches that Medvedev had resorted to insults. Asked why Australian fans booed him during his quarterfinal match against Nick Kyrgios, Medvedev told an interviewer it was because the fans “probably have a low IQ.”

Screenshot_20220129-165424~2 — Above: Medvedev’s meltdown and offensive anti-feline insults

Buddy the Cat assembled a hasty press conference within a few hours. Flanked by the Rev. Al Sharpclaw and other feline community leaders, Buddy accused Medvedev of “blatant antifelinism.”

“There is nothing wrong with being a small cat,” the silver tabby said, pounding his paw on a table for effect. “In fact, Medvedev unknowingly paid the umpire a compliment. But that doesn’t change the fact that he intended it as an insult.”

Buddy, Sharpclaw and other leaders demanded the WTA sanction Medvedev and mandate his participation in species tolerance classes.

In the meantime, the 25-year-old Medvedev has advanced to the Australian Open men’s final, where he’ll face 36-year-old Rafael Nadal on Sunday.

The Mallorcan not only has 20 major titles under his belt, he’s also held in high esteem by the world’s felines, who see a kindred spirit in Nadal’s obsessive-compulsive behavior and tendency to erupt into short bursts of energy expenditure. It’s also long been rumored that Nadal loves boxes.

Fellow tennis star Sebastian Korda named his cat after Nadal. No one has named a cat after Medvedev.

Point/Counterpoint: ‘Breakfast Comes First!’ vs ‘You Don’t Need To Eat Breakfast Right Away!’

Buddy the Cat is back with his famous Point/Counterpoint column. This time, he tells us why we should and should not eat breakfast right away.

Breakfast Comes First! by Buddy the Cat, columnist

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the meal that sets the tone for the rest of the day and gives us the energy we need for important tasks like napping and lounging in the sun.

Sure, I have a bowl full of dry food available if I get hungry overnight and sure, you put down fresh water for me right before going to bed. But that’s not breakfast!

That’s why there should be no dilly-dallying: Before you use the bathroom, before you get the coffee brewing, you should serve me breakfast! In our shared morning routine, human, my breakfast comes first in order of priority.

No exceptions!

You Don’t Need To Eat Breakfast Right Away! by Buddy the Cat, columnist

Did you know there are major health benefits to delaying your breakfast?

That’s right, human! You might think that you need to eat when you wake up in the morning. Your stomach might grumble, reminding you that you haven’t eaten in 10 or 12 hours. You might even smell a neighbor cooking bacon and eggs.

Breakfast-schmekfast! Ignore it!

Humans who delay their breakfast by at least 15 minutes to do other important tasks — like feeding breakfast to their beloved cats — have on average 31 percent more energy and feel more satisfied throughout the day, according to the Buddy Institute for Convenient Statistics.

By delaying your breakfast in order to feed me first, you’re not doing me a favor, you’re doing yourself a favor! In fact, you’re starting the day off right by burning calories as you bring my breakfast to my dining nook and serve me.

Do the right thing: Serve me breakfast first!

Point-Counterpoint presents two essays taking opposing positions on a topic. Join us next week, when Buddy the Cat will debate Buddy the Cat on another important topic.

‘Don’t Let Anyone Tell You That Cats Don’t Bond, That Cats Don’t Love.’

A man writes a stirring tribute to his beloved cat.

We take a break from our usual inanity, humor and Buddy’s mind-bogglingly terrible advice column to call your attention to this beautiful tribute to a special cat.

Tom Wrobleski, an opinion writer for the Staten Island Advance, said a tearful goodbye to his cat, Malkovich, on Jan. 11.

“I’ve cried more for that cat over the last three weeks than I have over some people that I’ve lost in my life,” he writes.

Tom says Malkovich was supposed to be his kids’ cat, but ended up bonding with him:

Mal would meet me at the door when I came home, flopping down and giving me his belly. He followed me into the bathroom. He curled up next to me in bed. He would flop in the hallway upstairs and rub his face on my foot.

Don’t let anyone tell you that cats don’t bond, that cats don’t love, that cats are stand-offish. Mal loved me. And I loved him. He was my buddy. My best boy. The top cat.

He became part of the fabric of our lives. He even grudgingly tolerated Lucy, the neighborhood stray we adopted in 2017.

Mal’s illness snuck up on Wrobleski, as so many cat health problems do because our furry friends are so stoic.

“We thought that Mal was getting a little chubby in recent months. It turns out that he was ill, with fluid gathering in his abdomen,” he wrote. “The news from the vet was dire: Mal had cancer throughout his body. There wasn’t a lot we could do.”

malkovichfiltered — The author’s favorite photo of Malkovich the cat. Credit: Tom Wrobleski

The rest of it is really sad and would have made Buddy and I cry if we weren’t so manly and tough. Wrobleski writes about how much he misses Mal, and how much Mal changed his life during the 11 years he was a part of the family. (They adopted the little guy when he was four years old, and he lived until he was 15.)

His pain at losing the little guy is evident in every word and anecdote.

Be warned, though, that if you’re not as tough as Buddy and I, you probably will shed some tears, which Buddy and I definitely did not do. In fact, immediately after reading Wrobleski’s tribute to Malkovich, Bud and I watched a football game, drank Budweiser and shopped for a good old American pick-up truck while practicing our Sam Elliot voices.

malkovich — Malkovich on the day he was adopted. Credit: Tom Wrobleski

malkovichlastday — Malkovich on his last day, sitting in one of his favorite spots and soaking up the sun for the last time. Credit: Tom Wrobleski

buddy_bed — “I don’t cry about anything…except vacuums, rustling paper bags, truck back-up beepers, dinner, and being locked out of the bathroom. But other than that, I’m fearless and keep a firm leash on my emotions!”

Study: Cat Brains Have Gotten Smaller

Thankfully for our furry friends, smaller brains don’t necessarily correlate to lower intelligence. It’s more about the complexity of neural connections.

Cats have gotten a good deal out of domestication: They’re safer, warmer and protected from almost all threats. They know where their next meal is coming from, and won’t hesitate to meow our ears off if dinner is late.

But one tradeoff doesn’t immediately appear beneficial: Domestic cats have smaller brains than the species they’ve evolved from, African and Eurasian wildcats.

“[D]omestic cats indeed, have smaller cranial volumes (implying smaller brains) relative to both European wildcats (Felis silvestris) and the wild ancestors of domestic cats, the African wildcats (Felis lybica),” the research team wrote.

Wild cats have the largest brains on average, followed by wild-domestic hybrids and domestic cats with the smallest brains of the three.

That’s another strong indicator that domestication is the determining factor in feline brain size, although the researchers point out that they are comparing domestic cats to current wildcats, and not the ancient population of wildcats from which domestic cats evolved beginning some 10,000 years ago with the dawn of agriculture and permanent human settlements.

Wildcats with friendlier and bolder dispositions were the first to approach human settlements, drawn by the rodents who were themselves feasting on human grain supplies. Humans realized that the cats were taking care of their rodent problems but weren’t interested in eating the grain, and a beautiful partnership was born.

superhandsomebuddy1 — “I have a yuge, yuge brain, the best brain. It’s tremendous.”

Smaller brains do not necessarily correlate to lower intelligence, however, and cats aren’t the only species whose brains became smaller after they were domesticated. Dog brains are about 30 percent smaller than the brains of gray wolves, but dogs have adapted spectacularly to living with humans and reading human behavioral cues.

“The dog is successful not because of the size of its whole brain per se, but because domestication has led to subtle brain changes with a stunning result: the ability to live in the world of people,” a Smithsonian Magazine article points out, noting dogs are also adept at getting people to do all sorts of things for them.

If brain size alone resulted in higher levels of intelligence, whales and elephants would rule the Earth.

Instead “the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity,” neuroscientist Kendra Lechtenberg wrote.

The researchers weren’t interested in drawing any major conclusions about feline cognition with the study. They’re more interested in the phenomena of “domestication syndrome,” which causes changes both physical (floppy ears, coat color variation, shorter muzzles) and behavioral. (Less aggression, playfulness.)

The jury’s still out on why exactly those traits emerge, but some studies have attributed it to differences in embryonic development. Unlike many other domestic animals, cats don’t look much different than their wild felis lybica and felis sylvestris counterparts.

The cat study was published on Jan. 26 to Royal Science Open Science, a peer-reviewed open-access journal. The research team was comprised of biologists from the University of Vienna and data curators from the National Museum of Scotland.

Are Schools Forced To Accommodate Kids Who ‘Identify As Cats’?

Two viral stories claim schools are allowing students to “identify” as felines, while one district is accused of providing litter boxes in school bathrooms.

Two curious stories relating to cats have been circulating online this week: In the first story, a substitute teacher claims she was fired because she refused to meow back to a student who “identifies as a cat,” while parents in a Michigan school district were infuriated by a rumor that the district was providing litter boxes to cat-identified students in school bathrooms.

First, the obvious, or perhaps not-so-obvious considering the media attention and outrage surrounding both stories: Neither one is true.

Why did people believe them? Because we’ve gone insane as a society, of course, and basic reality now means different things to different people depending on their political ideologies. If you’re on the left, you might think parents who aren’t sophisticated news consumers are so paranoid about school curricula, they’d believe just about anything. If you’re on the right, you’re might argue that some schools have gone so overboard with political correctness, it’s not a stretch to imagine privileges conferred on the allegedly cat-identified.

For those of us who subscribe to neither ideology, the whole thing is another sad example of the polarization that is destroying the US, the same divisive talk amplified by platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

But that’s beyond the scope of this blog, which is to celebrate cats, have a laugh and occasionally put the spotlight on animal welfare. I don’t want to lose readers by wading into a political landmine field, but most importantly I don’t want anyone to feel unwelcome on this site.

The Michigan incident started when a mom of kids at the Midland School District, about 130 miles northwest of Detroit, spoke at a school board meeting about a rumor — which she took as fact — alleging the school was accommodating “furries” by providing litter boxes in unisex bathrooms.

Lisa Hansen asked other parents to join her to “do some investigating” into the policy

“I’m all for creativity and imagination, but when someone lives in a fantasy world and expects other people to go along with it, I have a problem with that,” Hansen told the Midland school board. “This whole furry thing has just got me. I’m staying calm, but I’m not happy about it, and it’s happened on your watch, and I don’t understand it.”

Here’s the video: (It should start at the relevant section, but if it doesn’t, Hansen speaks at the 32:44 mark)

Hansen’s claims were picked up and reshared by a state GOP chairwoman, Meshawn Maddock, who warned “Parent heroes will TAKE BACK our schools” in a Facebook post.

The school’s superintendent, Michael Sharrow, was forced to do damage control with a public statement, telling parents it’s a “source of disappointment that I felt the necessity to communicate this message to you.”

“There is no truth whatsoever to this false statement/accusation,” Sharrow wrote. “There have never been litter boxes within MPS schools.”

The story about the fired substitute also had its roots in an online video, with a woman who says she’s a teacher relating the story via TikTok. The woman, who uses the handle @crazynamebridgetmichael, said she was taking attendance when a student responded to his name with feline vocalizations.

“I get to the third row and I hear this ‘meow!’ ‘Uhhh, excuse me? Excuse me?'” she said in the TikTok video. “I start looking on the ground, through the fourth row—everything’s good. Go to the fifth row—everybody’s there. Then I hear ‘meow!’ I’m like, ‘Okay, what’s up with that? Who’s doing it?’ And this little girl in the very front row says, ‘You have to meow back at him; he identifies as a cat.’ Are you kidding me?”

The student stormed out of the classroom when she laughed at him, she said, and the school’s administration fired her: “They said ‘We no longer need your services if you can’t identify with all the children in the classroom.'”

The story was picked up by several widely-read sites, included in Tucker Carlson’s daily newsletter, and reshared on prominent Twitter accounts in addition to going viral on Facebook.

PJ Media: The Substitute and the Cat — The story was widely shared on social media and reported by a few dozen online media outlets.

The only problem is it isn’t true. In a follow-up video the teacher admitted she made up the story to “create awareness of what kids are going through at school.” She didn’t elaborate, so it’s not clear if she was criticizing school policies for allowing students to identify as different genders or arguing that kids’ needs aren’t accommodated. Occam’s Razor would indicate she was just chasing clicks.

The one thing that’s certain, however, is that cats don’t deserve to be in the middle of this mess.

Top image: A 20-year-old Norwegian woman who identifies as a cat. The woman says she was “born the wrong species.” “My psychologist told me I can grow out of it, but I doubt it,” she told an interviewer. “I think I will be cat all my life.”