Pain In The Bud

Lebowski Cat Named ‘Dude’ Makes Bowling Alley Home, Plus: A Nightmare Vet Visit

A bowling burglar turned out to be a cute tuxedo cat looking for a warm, safe home.

Yianni Mavrakis already has a full plate as the owner-operator of two bowling alleys, so when the alarm at one of the locations kept going off in the middle of the night, he wasn’t a happy camper.

Each tripped alarm resulted in a response by police, and Mavrakis had to physically check the premises for signs of intruders in the Chicago-area business.

Eventually he found the culprit — a stray tuxedo cat he named “Dude,” after the beloved, bowling-obsessed protagonist played by Jeff Bridges in the 1998 crime comedy The Big Lebowski.

After it became clear a huge space with lots of moving machine parts and noisy crowds was no place for a feline, Mavrakis took the little guy home, where he now has a much quieter, more calm territory to call his own.

Like his film counterpart, the Dude abides. Someone get that cat some bowling shoes and a White Russian!

A viral nightmare vet visit

A woman named India, who goes by the TikTok screen name “the_unhinged_queen” says her cat returned terrified and soiling herself after one of those “we have to bring your cat to the back” moments during a trip to the veterinarian’s office.

India related the story on TikTok and says the vet’s staff acted like all was normal despite the distress the kitty was in, except for calling her cat “difficult.”

“She was covered in urine, soaking wet. They plopped her in my lap, and she’s crying,” India said in a video she recorded about the ordeal.

Back at home, the distressed British Shorthair was dragging her back leg and was in pain. India says the veterinarian called later to apologize and conceded maybe the techs had pulled her cat’s leg “farther than what, maybe, was comfortable for her.”

An examination by a second veterinarian, India said, concluded the vet techs had pulled the cat’s leg out of its socket.

This is a one-source story based on a TikTok short, published by an online site that is often credulous, so caution is warranted. Grain of salt and all that.

Still, it reminded me of my own anxiety when two vet techs couldn’t handle Bud during a visit and did the whole “we’ve gotta bring him to the back” bit.

Unlike India, who insisted her cat is sweet and gentle, I gave ample warning to the vet techs.

“Don’t worry, we deal with cats like that all the time,” one of them said.

“I don’t think you do,” I told her, urging them both to be careful.

When he mauled one of them and the tech acted surprised, I gave her an apologetic shrug. I did try to warn her.

Then they announced they needed to bring him “to the back,” which was an examination room where, I presumed, they had equipment to constrain “difficult” cats.

I sat there wincing as I heard the carnage despite the closed door. In true Buddinese fashion, it sounded like an enraged Elmo murdering half the residents of Sesame Street. I imagined dismembered Muppets and humans retreating with deep scratches on their arms as I heard Bud’s kittenish howls of indignation.

When they brought Bud back to me in his carrier he had a look that said “Chumps think they can poke me with needles? Hah!”

But the thing is, it’s a matter of trust because you really don’t know what they’re doing back there. You’re at a veterinary practice, which means you’re dealing with people who chose to work with animals. That should mean they wouldn’t harm anyone’s beloved pet, but sometimes that’s not true.

It’s a good reminder for us to check that our feline overlords are okay after vet visits, even if we’re sure the vet staff is trustworthy. If a cat is in obvious distress it means the pain must be unbearable, but it’s precisely because cats are great at hiding their pain that we should be on the lookout for signs of something wrong.

Reviews For New ‘Warrior Cats’ Game Are Brutal

Based on the mega-popular book franchise, expectations were high for Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest.

When reviewers accuse you of ruining childhood memories and start invoking all-time pop culture lows like Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, you know you’re in trouble.

I winced when I opened Steam on Friday and saw the newly-released Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest had an abysmal “Mostly Negative” aggregate score on Steam. Since then the reviews have marginally improved, if you can call it improvement, with only 47 percent of players recommending the game for a “Mixed” rating, but most of the muted enthusiasm comes from the game’s intellectual property, not its production values, game loop or mechanics.

One reviewer called the narrative “diabolically bad,” saying the game’s story writers apparently paid little attention to the bestselling books it’s based on. Almost every review mentioned disappointment with the game’s cat-creation system, with Warrior Cats limiting users to a series of pre-determined names and strange coat colors that supposedly correspond to your character’s capabilities.

That means if players want to make their own cats in the game, they’re out of luck, and they have to choose between a cat who they favor aesthetically and one who has the attributes they want.

A group of six animated cats, each with distinct designs and colors, arranged in a turn-based game setting. The cats are displaying their names and health points at the bottom of the image, with a colorful grassy background featuring rocks and plants. — A screenshot showing the game’s turn-based combat system, which superficially resembles the systems used in games like Clair Obscure and old-school JRPGs.

“I would’ve hated this as a kid as much as I do now. Playing Warriors on the playground by myself was more fun than this,” one reviewer wrote. “At least I had my imagination. Here, you have a buggy game with completely unintuitive mechanics, randomly generated clan cats that don’t matter to the story or to your story, tiny field mice that attack you, a lack of swimming ability in Riverclan, repetitive fight mechanics, invisible walls abound in an open world, and a storyline that is beyond paper thin. I wrote Warriors dialogue on Proboards when I was 8 that [were] better than anything in this game.”

“[S]uch a slog to get through; awful camera controls, repetitive quests, and a nonsensical story,” another wrote. The ending for the player’s chosen clan was “so absurd and out of nowhere I was dying from laughter from how bad it was.”

It’s worth noting that most of the negative reviews were from players who spent significant time in the game, enough to provide a fair assessment of what the game has to offer. The reviews PITB sampled were from players who had mostly between seven and 14 hours in-game.

Not everyone was down on the game. Most, including those who didn’t like the story or mechanics, praised the visuals, and a sizable minority of players wrote about how much they enjoyed playing a game set in a universe that was important in their childhood. Nostalgia did a lot of the heavy lifting in positive reviews.

Reviews from game critics were also mixed, although it’s worth noting there aren’t enough reviews for a consensus on Metacritic yet.

A white cat walking through a shallow stream in a lush, misty forest. — The visuals got a lot of love from reviewers, who praised the heavily stylized art direction and the environments, which include familiar locations from the books.

Steam shows the amount of in-game time under reviews so other players can get a sense of how much the individual reviewers stuck with games. The reviews show time played as of the moment of the review and total time played, so you can also see if a positive review preceded repeated plays. In a narrative game like Warrior Cats, 10 to 15 hours’ worth of content is about expected for a playthrough, while players in some games – open world exploration, survival, strategy, multiplayer – can amass hundreds of hours or more over years, attesting to a game’s replay value and the amount of content included.

Steam review aggregates are broken down into Overwhelmingly Positive for games praised by 95 percent of players or more, Very Positive for games reviewed favorably by at least 80 percent of players, Positive for games that have the same ratio of favorable reviews but fewer total reviews, Mostly Positive for games favored by 70 to 79 percent of players, and Mixed for games that meet the approval of between 40 and 69 percent.

The worst are Negative, Very Negative and Overwhelmingly Negative, reserved for games that are total disasters without redeeming qualities. Those games are often unfinished, abandoned by their developers, or are blatant cash-grabs.

‘I Just Beat Your Cat Again. She Can’t Walk. We’re Done.’

This Caturday we look at how pets fare in domestic violence situations, plus a study about obesity in meat-eating and “vegan cats.”

The headline is a quote from a text a man allegedly sent to his girlfriend after abusing her cat so badly that the poor kitty had to be euthanized.

The story is grotesque, tragic, and sadly not uncommon. Between 75 and 89 percent of domestic violence victims who have pets report that their partners threatened, abused or killed their companion animals, according to research from the ASPCA and SafeHouse, a non-profit that provides direct support to victims of domestic violence.

In the incident referenced above, an Indianapolis man was arrested and charged with killing a domestic animal and torturing or mutilating an animal, both felonies. The suspect, Rashawn Bentley, originally tried to stage the violence as the result of a break-in, but was undone by his own menacing texts to his girlfriend as well as photos of the injured cat, according to the local NBC affiliate, WTHR.

Just so it’s abundantly clear how we feel about this issue: if you abuse, harm or kill a cat, you’re not a man. You’re a weak, despicable, cowardly facsimile of a man whose “flex” is taking your frustrations out on an innocent animal one twentieth your size.

You should be arrested, charged with the most severe penalties under the law – even if they’re not commensurate with the horror of the crime you’ve committed – and imprisoned for years. The other inmates should know you killed a cat. You should be removed from society, because if you think taking life is an acceptable way to vent your frustrations, there’s something clearly wrong with your brain and you are a danger to animal and human alike.

Close-up of a curious orange kitten with large, expressive eyes resting on a bed. — Credit: Mayara Caroline Mombelli/Pexels

Of course the majority of these attacks, especially targeting cats, are committed by men, but women aren’t off the hook here either. Some women do try to harm significant others by killing or abusing their cats, in straight relationships and relationships between women.

Ignore that study on supposedly healthy ‘vegan cats’

Headlines about a new study in Frontiers In Animal Science are trumpeting the supposed benefits of vegan diets for cats, who are obligate carnivores.

The media stories style the effort as a large-scale study involving more than 1,300 participants.

In reality it was an online survey that recruited cat caretakers from Facebook and recorded their subjective opinions about the health of their cats.

Everything, including reported weight, mobility, questions about potential physical problems, times fed per day, sex and neuter status, et al, was filtered through the self-selected respondents, not pulled from veterinary records. The respondents weren’t given reference illustrations or standardized criteria from which to base their subjective assessment of their cats’ weight.

There’s no way to determine if the people who participated were being honest, keeping records, guesstimating or just having a bit of fun.

To be clear, most of our criticism here is directed at the way online publications reported the results, not necessarily the authors of the survey, who chose a much more dry, cautious headline: “Impacts of a vegan diet on body weight and related health disorders in 1,305 cats: an exploratory cross-sectional survey.”

Obviously, even a jazzed-up version of that honest headline would never be used by click-chasing modern media.

Google search results showing articles about a study on lower rates of overweight among vegan-fed cats. — Notice the bottom right headline, which misinterprets a statistical analysis for “odds” of being overweight.

Ninety percent of the people who responded were female, and 71 percent were from the UK, according to the published paper.

Then the authors kneaded the data with the usual opaquely-named practices: “exploratory regression analysis” (a data-mining technique), regression models (AI-assisted statistical technique that involves comparing existing data with the result you predicted/hope to see), sensitivity analysis (changing variables to assess their impact on the overall findings), and so on.

When all was said and done, 4.1 percent of the meat-eating cats and 3.1 percent of the vegan cats were over their ideal weights, in their humans’ estimation. Meat-eating cats were also more likely to be underweight (2.3 percent) compared to vegan cats (0.8 percent).

The conclusion? The findings were “non-significant,” the researchers wrote, along with the obligatory call for more research on the topic.

We should also point out that in addition to their classification as obligate carnivores, cats require specific proteins and nutrients (taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamins A and B12) from meat-based diets that they cannot synthesize themselves and are not found in plant-based protein. “Vegan cat food” must have those proteins and nutrients added. If cats are deprived of them, they suffer slow, painful declines that result in organ shutdown and death.

Because of their evolutionary history, cats aren’t as adept at breaking down plant-based starches and their bodies don’t produce enough of a specific enzyme (amylase) that breaks down starch and complex carbohydrates.

Human ideas of morality aren’t applicable to cats. Feed them meat.

Open comments Caturday! Although not mentioned in the headlines, today’s the day for open comments: anything off-topic, marriage proposals or modeling contracts for Buddy, updates on your own cats, suggestions on stories to cover and whatever else is on your mind. Happy Caturday!

Header image credit: Pexels

Woman’s Ankles Mauled After She Falls Into Zoo’s Buddy Exhibit

Witnesses described the harrowing encounter as a woman fell into the silver-furred Buddy exhibit at the Bronx Zoo this week.

NEW YORK – Corey Anderson couldn’t watch as the woman tumbled into the zoo habitat.

The Manhattan man had taken his kids to the zoo and the little ones were pointing excitedly at the silver-furred Buddy exhibit when a woman climbed the barrier to get a better look, slipped and fell into the enclosure with the tiny apex predator.

“I grabbed my kids, shielded their eyes and had just turned away,” Anderson recalled with a shudder. “The sounds…it was horrific. It sounded like an enraged Elmo demolishing a plate of wings.”

Smartphone footage shot by other guests confirmed the grisly sequence. The woman landed awkwardly but was apparently unhurt as she stood and began to dust herself off, unaware of the intimidating shadow creeping up on her from behind.

“Absolute mayhem,” is the way Franz Muller described it. “Die mächtige katze! Das grauen! I have never seen ankles bleed as much as I have on this day!”

After initially shocking the uninvited guest with a swipe at her bare skin, the silver-furred Buddy proferred a single paw as if expecting something from the woman, “but when it became clear she was empty-handed, the Buddy flew into a rage and launched himself at her lower extremities,” Muller said.

Zookeepers arrived quickly amid the screams of shocked guests and held up a vacuum in warning, the footage shows. When the silver-furred Buddy hissed but showed no signs of retreating, one of the zookeepers flipped the power switch.

“The Buddy stopped, hackles raised, then bolted for the safety of his den,” said another witness, Eleni Xanthopoulou.

A scene featuring two men in period clothing sitting in a dimly lit bar, with a tabby cat prominently in the foreground. — The silver-furred Buddy with Lyle, center, and Sir Malcolm Murray, president of the zoo’s board of trustees.

The victim, a 32-year-old interior designer, was rushed to an emergency medical clinic, where she was treated for “multiple lacerations to the ankles, feet and lower legs,” police said.

Bronx Zoo Officials said the silver-furred Buddy would not be punished for the attack.

“He did nothing wrong,” head carnivore keeper Ferdinand Lyle said as he cradled the deadly cat. “He’s such a good boy. Who’s a good boy? You are, aren’t you? Yes, yes, a good boy!”

The Bathroom Without A Cat?!?! Unthinkable!

I’ve learned that traveling with cats isn’t too bad if you prepare yourself and your feline overlord(s).

This is Big Buddy with a live dispatch from the Hyatt Garden Inn, where Little Buddy has spent much of the past 24 hours hiding under a hotel room bed.

Sources say he poked his little head out overnight to deliver a few “Mrrrrps,” finally emerging this morning to eat and use his litter box.

But seriously, two things I wasn’t prepared for: Bud being almost completely silent, and the ability to use the bathroom without a loud, talkative cat screeching at me! I’d forgotten what it was like.

In case you missed the earlier posts, we’re here for two nights because of a bathroom renovation. I weighed whether it was better to leave Bud alone with contractors coming in and out and lots of noise, or to bring him with me. I still think I did the right thing in bringing him here, even though he was not amused in the slightest about being brought to a strange place for reasons he doesn’t understand.

Eating for the first time since leaving home.

Still, as long as I’m here with him he’s cool, and yesterday I sat down next to his hiding place and spoke to him in a reassuring voice, telling him what a brave little dude he is.

Today’s been much better and I’m reasonably sure that he’ll spend most of tonight alternating between sleeping on top of me and standing on my head, shrieking for snacks.

This has been illuminating and now I know what to expect if I have to bring him to a hotel or somewhere else overnight in the future. I appreciate the earlier advice of PITB readers, and have found the process of staying in a pet-friendly hotel painless. I left the “Do Not Disturb” tag on the door to avoid a potential Bud freak-out over a stranger walking in.

It’s also interesting to see just how attached cats can be to their familiar territory, and how age changes that dynamic. Young Bud would be like “Where are we going, dude?” But I’ve seriously slacked on bringing him places, especially since the pandemic. Combined with his age (he’s 12 now and not the fearless feline he used to be), the difference is pronounced.

Update, Wednesday 10/21/2026: We’re home. The contractors are still at work but tell us we’ll have a functional bathroom by late this afternoon. Bud’s glad to be home. Still, this validates my decision to take him with me to the hotel the last two days. He’s huddled in my bedroom where I have the door closed so he doesn’t freak out over the sight of strangers working in the Buddesian Domicile, the sounds of drills and powered saws, and the temporary mess.

As expected he’s looking to me for cues on how to react, so as long as I’m here with him and I’m calm, he’s not freaking out. I’m proud of him for handling the temporary transition out of his territory and the major disturbance to his routine. By tonight all will be normal.