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National Cat Day Is Tomorrow! PLUS: ‘Cat Man’ Meows 55 Times In Court

A man in Argentina, accused of a grisly double murder, was thrown out of court after meowing incessantly during a pre-trial hearing.

National Cat Day is tomorrow, Oct. 29!

While the day was founded in 2005 by an animal welfare advocate and the ASPCA to raise public awareness about the number of shelter cats who need homes, it’s expanded into an opportunity for people to show their cats off online and do something special for them. The day’s founders also recommend a range of ways to celebrate from adopting a new cat, to volunteering at a local shelter, to pampering your own feline.

I’ll be celebrating by giving Bud some catnip and a special treat, and spending extra time playing with him. After he’s tired out, he’ll probably enjoy one of his favorite activities — climbing on top of me and taking a nap.

The Cat Man Cometh

A man accused of brutally murdering his mother and aunt was thrown out of court on Tuesday for repeatedly meowing.

Nicolas Gil Pereg meowed when Judge Laura Guajardo asked him his name and ID number at the beginning of the court hearing, then kept on going, vocalizing a total of 55 times and ignoring a warning from the judge before she lost her patience and had him tossed.

“Mr. Gil Pereg, before the entry of the jury I warned you that if you wanted to remain in the courtroom, you should do so in silence, with respect and decorum,” Guarjardo said in a surreal scene, as the disheveled man continued meowing.

The so-called “cat man” allegedly killed his mom and aunt when they flew in from Israel to visit him in 2019, according to local media reports. Gil Pereg, who lived in a dilapidated home with 37 cats and several dogs, is accused of burying their bodies in shallow graves less than four feet deep on his own property, then reporting them missing to local authorities.

He’s performed his unimpressive approximation of a meow in earlier court trials, and asked to be moved from prison to a psychiatric unit. In addition, he petitioned the judge to allow him to have his cats with him in psychiatric care.

During earlier hearings, he stripped his clothes off and urinated in front of the judge, according to the Daily Mail. Before the murders, he had assumed the name Floda Reltih — Adolf Hitler backwards — for an indeterminate period of time, reports say.

Gil Pereg’s attorneys argue he’s not sane, but so far there’s no indication the court is buying it. A 2020 evaluation by criminal psychologists described Gil Pereg as a “hostile, evasive, challenging, ironic and confrontational person.” The accused murderer is manipulative, the forensic psychologists said, and only expresses emotions toward his pets.

The prosecutor warned the trial’s six jurors “not to be fooled” by the eccentric man’s behavior, saying his calculated actions after the murders show he fully understood “the criminality of his actions.”

NYC Mayoral Candidate Has 16 Cats

Both major party mayoral candidates in NYC are longtime animal welfare advocates.

We normally avoid politics on this blog except for the occasional light-hearted satire imagining Buddy as a comically inept president of the Americats, but we’ll make an exception for the New York City mayoral race, which features two animal-loving major party candidates.

Eric Adams, a Democrat, is a former NYPD captain, Brooklyn borough president and vegan who has supported TNR programs in Brooklyn, pushed for more animal-friendly housing in the city and hosted adoption events in his home borough, according to the Humane Society’s Legislative Fund.

Curtis Sliwa is best known nationally as the founder of the unarmed crime prevention group the Guardian Angels, and in New York as a host on the city’s biggest talk radio station. (He’s been on hiatus since launching his mayoral campaign to comply with election law.)

He survived an attempted mafia hit in 1992, jumping out of a cab after he was shot several times by Gotti family enforcers, and he’s a dedicated cat lover, sharing his home with 16 rescues. Most of Sliwa’s cats have disabilities or were pulled from local shelter kill lists. Not all of them are permanent, and the Sliwas consider themselves long-term fosters until they can find the right homes for special needs cats. Last year they were able to place 10 kitties in good homes.

Still, the felines come first in their 87th Street apartment.

“Guess what? It’s the cats who rule the roost,” Sliwa told a New York Post cameraman in June. “We take whatever room is left after the cats carve out their territory.”

Cat furniture dominates the studio apartment Sliwa shares with his wife, Nancy, who told the Post she’s considering adopting more furballs, including a special-needs rescue who is blind. (They had 15 cats at the time and have adopted one more since then.)

Turning to her husband, she quipped: “We might have to lose your half of the closet.”

The couple share litter box duties and clean the multiple boxes in their home at least three times a day, they told the Post.

NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa plays with his cats.

At the end of Tuesday’s televised mayoral debate, when asked which qualities they admire in their opponents, both Sliwa and Adams praised each other for their work with animals.

The city and its surrounding environs lean heavily blue. Sixty-eight percent of registered voters in the five boroughs are registered Democrats, and Adams holds a commanding 36-point lead according to the latest poll.

Like all Republicans who set their sights on the mayor’s job, Sliwa knew it was going to be an uphill battle even though New Yorkers have tired of the current mayor, Democrat Bill DeBlasio. Sliwa hopes one of his central campaign promises — to enact a no-kill policy across the city’s shelter system — will resonate with voters across the aisle.

Republicans who have won in the past have been centrist, like former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, or nominally Republican, like businessman turned politician Michael Bloomberg. The latter enjoyed widespread name recognition before he turned to politics and supplemented his campaign hauls with his own considerable resources.

Still, the Guardian Angels founder sees Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s Upper East Side home, as a potentially fantastic cat house.

“I’ve been in Gracie Mansion before,” Sliwa told New York magazine. “There is easily room in there for 60 cats.”

The Cat Houses of Istanbul: ‘Everybody Accepts Cats Must Have Their Own Life Spaces In The City’

Thanks to a young architect’s impulse, cat houses — miniature shelters for strays and ferals — are now common all throughout Turkey.

We’ve written quite a bit about Turkey and how it serves as a model for co-existence and fondness between humans and cats, as well as other animals.

In Turkey — and especially in ancient Istanbul, the most populous city in Europe — cats are fed, welcomed into homes and shops, and taken care of by the entire community. Pets are still a thing there, but Istanbul’s stray population is the best cared-for in the world. They have their own parks, they’re protected by the people, and they’re even given miniature shelters which famously dot the city of 15 million.

“The whimsical structures — more like miniature apartment buildings than single-kitty houses — can be found in parks, outside shops and cafes, abutting private homes, and on university campuses, providing shelter for the city’s estimated 125,000 strays,” Reason to Be Cheerful’s staff wrote.

Cat house Turkey
A custom-built wooden cat house in Turkey.

The practice of creating shelters for strays and ferals began in 2008, when a young architect named Didem Gokgoz would pass strays in Istanbul’s Mistik Park as she walked to and from work every day.

“Every day I passed the park and saw them looking for a place to get some warmth during the winter, and I felt desperate,” Gokgoz said.

At first she began making small shelters from recyclable materials, but the compact structures weren’t always tolerated in parks and other places where people felt they were an eyesore, so after meeting with the city’s mayor, Gokgoz engaged in an experiment: She built larger, more aesthetically acceptable permanent structures in the park, including one that looks like a large catio with a sloping, house-like roof, draped in greenery and nondescript among the park’s other features.

Mistik Park cat house
The Mistik Park cat houses are protected by a catio-like structure. Only volunteers can use the human-size door, while small cat-size openings allow felines access. Credit: Transitions.

The project was a success, and soon she found herself with requests to build more. But they aren’t just built and installed: Each cat house is run by about a dozen volunteers who keep track of the local cats, feed them, get them spayed/neutered and see to their other needs.

Almost 14 years later, cat houses have become a permanent fixture not only in Istanbul, but in other Turkish cities as well.

“It became something normal; individuals make requests for cat houses,” Gokgoz told the Turkish journalism site Transitions. “That was our main goal, and we’ve reached it. Today, everybody accepts that cats must have their own life spaces in the city.”

Istanbul cat houses
Credit: Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality

Sunday Cat Round-Up: Sanctuary Welcomes Baby Snow Leopard, ‘Two-Face’ Cat Goes Viral

A sanctuary wants help naming a rare snow leopard cub, and the founders of dating app Tabby will pitch to Shark Tank later this month.

When Venus’ human posted photos of her to Instagram, people thought the half-black, half-ginger cat was photoshopped. A video of the unique kitty debunked that rumor, showing the heterochromatic, multitone cat in all her glory. Now Venus is a star, amassing tens of millions of views on Instagram and TikTok:

@venustwofacecat

#twofacecat #notphotoshop #bornthisway #heterochromia #catsoftiktok #tiktokcats #petsoftiktok #nocap 🖤 🧡+💚💙

♬ All Eyes On Me – Bo Burnham

Welcome baby!

Snow leopards Laila and Yarko of the UK’s Big Cat Sanctuary are the proud parents of a newborn cub, and the sanctuary wants the public to help name the little guy, whom they’re calling Little Cub in the meantime.

“He appears to be developing and growing beautifully and is becoming more active day by day. Laila is an experienced mother and is just as attentive and devoted with this little one as she has been before,” Big Cat Sanctuary curator Briony Smith wrote.

Although Little Cub was born on Sept. 15, his birth was not announced until Oct. 21 in the video below:

Tabby founders pitch to Shark Tank

Remember Tabby, the cat dating app that Bud insisted was “fake news” because he can’t even fathom the possibility of sharing his kingdom with another cat?

The app’s founders will pitch to the big fish of Shark Tank on Friday, Oct. 29, looking for investments in return for a stake in their company.

Somehow I don’t see Mark Cuban or Lori Greiner as cat lovers, but Mr. Wonderful strikes me as the kind of guy who has a chonkster at home and secretly dotes on her, as he doesn’t want to harm his image as a ruthless businessman. (Edit: I searched around to see if O’Leary really is a cat lover, and while he described himself as a “non-cat guy,” he reached a deal with cat DNA company basepaws back in 2019, so clearly he understands businesses related to our feline overlords are good investments.)

Mr. Wonderful
Kevin O’Leary, aka Mr. Wonderful

Dear Buddy: Why Do Cats Follow Their Humans Around?

Buddy dispels the myth that cats follow their people around, as if they would stoop so low!

Dear Buddy,

Why do cats always follow their humans around? I mean, you guys might not want us to pet you all the time, but you sure do go everywhere we go.

Human in Honolulu

Dear Human,

This is a common misconception, one of those myths about cats like the one that says we love milk or we like it when you talk to us in baby voices.

The sad reality is that you follow us around but you don’t want to admit it, so you come up with elaborate fictions about our habits. My human believes I weave around his legs to rub against them after he wakes up, which is absurd. Clearly he steps in my path and I have to swerve, causing incidental contact. I would prefer not to, but he makes it impossible.

Or how about the myth that we like to bother you guys in the bathroom? Big Buddy knows that every day at certain times I like to put my paws under the bathroom door and cry. I mean, I do it all the time and he knows it, so he decides to use the bathroom at those times and tricks himself into believing that somehow I go into hysterics if I’m not actually inside the bathroom with him.

Do you see how delusional you people are?

What kind of crazy people say “I know my cat is going to knead and purr in this spot in the next 5 to 10 minutes, so I’m going to sit here and force him to knead on me”?

I think you guys need to get help.

Buddy