Pain In The Bud

Cat Lady Day: Celebrating The Unsung Heroes Who Improve Life For Felines

From TNR to managing colonies and finding homes for friendly strays, cat ladies never stop working to make life better for our furry friends.

Hat tip to Mollie Hunt for making us aware of Cat Lady Day, an unofficial holiday that is part of an effort to reclaim the concept of the “cat lady” through positive association.

That’s a noble goal, and at PITB we’ve long scoffed at the idea that gender makes a difference in appreciating felines.

Cats are paradoxically regal yet derpy, imperious yet loving, and their antics are always amusing. Those are qualities that can appeal to anyone regardless of gender, nationality, age or cultural background.

But I think we should also use a day like this to thank the innumerable cat ladies in every city, town and village across the country who work tirelessly to improve the lives of strays, ferals and shelter cats.

These are the people who walk the walk, who do the hard work of TNR (trap, neuter, return), managing colonies, and protecting cats without homes from animals and mean-spirited humans.

Cat ladies find homes for friendly strays, keep colony cats fed, and obtain veterinary care for the sick and injured.

More often than not, they provide help out of their own pockets when donations can’t cover all the costs.

Not only is it thankless work most of the time, but misguided bureaucrats sometimes take it upon themselves to make life more difficult for the cat ladies caring for local strays and ferals.

Yet these women persist because they’re driven by one thing — love for our furry friends.

That’s absolutely worth celebrating.

Happy 12th Birthday, Little Buddy!

Let the catnip flow and the good times roll.

This weekend marks 12 years since I took home an energetic, bold, curious, talkative gray tabby kitten.

In some ways it feels like it can’t possibly be 12 years since I adopted the Budster, but it also feels like the little dude has been around forever. He’s such an outsize presence with a huge personality, and he never lets you forget he’s around.

As we celebrate the loudmouthed, opinionated, turkey-loving little guy, here are some of his adventures as chronicled here on PITB:

The time he was named Sexiest Cat Alive by CatPeople magazine.
The time he broke into the tiger enclosure at the Bronx Zoo to hang with his “homies” and was claimed as a cub by a tigress who gave him big, sloppy tongue baths.
The time he traveled to the Amazon to hang out with jaguars and was oddly accepted by them after he shared turkey and showed them how to make more comfortable beds.
The time Sir David Attenborough made a documentary about “the silver-furred Buddy” in “his native habitat, the living room.”
The time he was tricked by a Nigerian scammer, then got revenge by sending a lion to recover his money.
The time he issued his little red book filled with his wisdom, like this nugget: “Observe the human, and its wretched species, always in thrall to an invented concept called time. The time is what you say it is. I say it’s time for a snack.”

Bud must have been born some time in February of 2014, but since I don’t know the day, his adoptiversary is his de facto birthday.

We’ve got a long weekend ahead of us, including a party, a dance contest, a cocktail hour with Bud’s jaguar friends, and of course the grand fireworks display on Sunday night. There will be catnip and turkey for all.

Happy birthday, Bud!

Twix Is Making Bud Look Bad

“Why don’t you have a nice, cuddly cat?”

Twix is sweet.

Twix is a love bug. Twix will hop up onto your lap and purr up a storm while you pet her. Twix is always up for affection.

She even likes being picked up!

So sweet, she makes Bud look like a cantankerous old man cat.

Everyone in my family has now met my brother’s cat, and it’s dawned on them that not every member of the species felis catus will smack you in the face if you scratch their head too many times or offer affection when they don’t want it.

Bud will. Twix won’t.

Yes, Bud is mercurial. Yes, Bud can be a massive jerk. But he’s my jerk.

And my nieces? They love Twix.

They want to love Bud, but he often makes himself scarce when they’re around and he’s wary of them despite the fact that they’re a bit older now and no longer the lumbering, fine-motor-skills-lacking little humans they once were.

I’ll never forget the day when I saw my oldier niece bicycle kick the family dog, Cosmo, like Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat. She was very young, but still: rapid-fire kicks to the face!

Cosmo growled, Cosmo retreated, but Cosmo never fought back. He was too good for that.

But Bud? He lashed out at the girls once, several years ago now, and they haven’t forgotten about it.

Still, I look at the bright side. Twix has shown the girls that cats can be cuddly and sweet and loving. They’ve got their Twix, and I’ve got my imperious, scheming, turkey-obsessed Buddy.

“Come on, dude, I’ve only attacked like 17 people and occasionally engage in some light mauling.”

In Tehran A Woman And Her Cat, Both Terrified, Try To Survive The War

American news networks show us crowds chanting “Death to America!” but the majority of Iranians are just like us.

As our president threatens to erase civilizations, tells the Pope what Christianity is about, and shares AI images of himself as Jesus, it’s important to remember what’s happening in Iran is a real war with real victims, something easy to lose sight of amid all the absurdity.

A first-person account in al Jazeera reminds us of the human and animal suffering caused by war. Even when people aren’t physically impacted, the mental strain of living in a city under attack is considerable, and their poor animals have no idea what’s going on.

One thing you’ll rarely see on American networks is an acknowledgement that the vast majority of Iranians are just like us.

Before the war, they had open access to an uncensored internet. Despite the oppressive theocratic government, it’s easy for Iranians to get TV networks from outside their country. The Iranian regime was never as adept at controlling information as some of its contemporaries.

The people of Iran are overwhelmingly secular, fully aware of what’s happening, and they have long been sick of their government.

The aftermath of a US airstrike on a school in Minab, Iran, that killed 120 young girls and 156 people overall. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

For them it must be a Farenheit 451 moment, watching footage of the bombing while explosions rumble around them. Survival is down to luck. The missile you see streaking toward your city on TV could be the one that hits your apartment building.

To remind us of what’s happening where the bombs are landing, here’s Sana, a 27-year-old woman from Tehran, describing the first night of the war:

“Seven or eight more explosions followed. They were bombing near Mehrabad airport, close to us. I genuinely thought I was going to die.

When I finally went back upstairs, my cat was hiding in the wardrobe, trembling. My family and boyfriend had been calling and texting, without response, for hours, watching the news reports about strikes near the airport and imagining the worst.“

I recommend reading the rest, if for nothing else than to be reminded that Sana is so normal, so much like us.

Header image of Tehran under attack at night via Wikimedia Commons

Want Your Cat To Eat More? Give Them Variety, Study Says

Like us, cats get bored with the same stuff all the time.

One good piece of advice I got before adopting was to introduce the kitten to as many different flavors and textures of food as possible.

That way you won’t have a picky cat and you won’t find yourself in a scramble if the one variety of cat food your feline master will eat is discontinued or becomes difficult to get. That became a major problem during and after the pandemic, when disrupted supply chains and shortages of packing materials meant you never knew what you’d find on store shelves.

But there’s another good reason to do it: variety keeps your cat happy.

Even if your cat has a favorite food, too much exposure to that food will have diminishing returns, a research team from Japan’s Iwate University found.

But it’s not just the type of meat, texture or brand. Smell is hugely important to cats, and the study found they have much bigger appetites when presented with a novel food odor.

This is helpful not only to help us make sure our little buddies eat, but also because most of us don’t think about olfactory stimulation with cats. We build them cat condos and catios, we provide scratchers, we rotate toys. But how often do we give our cats the opportunity to enjoy new smells?

One of Buddy’s favorite things to do is sniff around the apartment building. I wait until late at night when it’s quiet and let him walk the hallways, stopping at each door to sniff. (I always remain a few feet away because it makes him feel safe, and because I can scoop him up and bring him back if he gets frightened.)

He loves it, and I don’t do it enough. After reading this, I’ll make sure little dude gets his sniffing tour more regularly.