Pain In The Bud

Russell Crowe Pays Tribute To His Late Cat Cinders

The Gladiator actor was training for a new role when he found a mewing kitten just off a path near his home in rural Australia.

Russell Crowe was training for the 2005 movie Cinderella Man, in which he plays boxer James J. Braddock, when he “took the bunch of blokes who had been beating me up for their pay check” — his trainers and fellow actors playing boxers in the movie — on a mountain bike ride in rural Australia.

After cresting a “particularly punishing hill” and stopping for a sip of water, Crowe wrote, he heard plaintive mews coming from the trees off the rural Australian trail.

“Underneath the swirl of sounds I heard something out of place. Was that a meow? I started to look around me. I heard it again. I took a few steps of the track into the rain forest. Thick with ferns and vines. One more step and then I saw it. A kitten…”

The baby cat was abandoned, and Crowe says he thinks the cat might have been dumped by a driver who passed the bicyclists a few minutes earlier.

“I looked back down the track and the boys were gaining on me,” he wrote. “I put the kitten in my backpack and rode on.”

cinders — Cinders as an adult. Credit: Russell Crowe

After returning to camp, Crowe took the kitten out of his pack, showed it to his friends and told them he was going to give it to his mother, who had been talking about adopting a cat.

“There’s something reassuring in a bunch of big sweaty boxers going crazy over a kitten,” Crowe wrote. “We flew down the hill in a tight group and arrived back at my farm together where I presented my mother with this tiny baby kitten. She was floored. So happy.”

That was in 2003. Cinders lived for 17 years and died on June 9. Crowe shared the story of finding and adopting the beloved cat in a Twitter thread.

Crowe, who was living with his mother while training for the movie, said he was originally opposed to getting a cat because felines are “the notorious enemy of bird life.”

When he found Cinders, he wrote, he felt “this was the universe telling me to respect my mother and give her what she wanted.”

“She had never grown to be fully trusting of humans, but, she loved my mum and my mum loved her.”

Russell Crowe in Gladiator — Russell Crowe is perhaps best known for his role as the Roman general Maximus in Ridley Scott’s 2000 epic “Gladiator.”

Is It Animal Abuse To Give Your Cat Ice Cream?

A viral video shows a cat reacting dramatically after a few licks of ice cream.

“Journalism” in 2020: A video goes viral, people react on Twitter, and news sites run stories about what the twits wrote.

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a viral video of a human giving his cat some ice cream, which has prompted accusations of animal abuse:

Is that brain freeze, as alleged by quite a few people online, or a dramatic reaction to something unlike Mr. Kitty has never tasted before?

It’s a tiny amount for a tiny creature for sure, but the reaction could be kitty’s way of saying “Dayummm! That is the tastiest yums I’ve ever tasted in the history of tasting yums!!”

Apparently this is a thing, a cat video genre unto itself. After watching the below video, I concede it does look like brain freeze. As you can see, however, most of the cats immediately go back for more:

One thing we do know is most cats are lactose intolerant, so dairy products in general are not good for them. (Kittens should nurse from their mothers, and orphaned kittens should be given kitten-specific formula, which can be found in pet stores and most grocery stores. Milk from cows or other animals doesn’t sit well with their digestive systems.)

Giving your cat ice cream probably isn’t a good idea unless it’s dairy-free and a rare treat. I’ve never given ice cream to my cat, and giving it to him for a cheap laugh would be a betrayal of trust.

But is it animal abuse? What do you think?

Can You Find The Cat In This Photo? VI

A sneaky feline lurks in this photo of an editor’s living room.

Today’s “Can you find the kitty?” comes to us courtesy of Kate Hinds, a cat servant and planning editor at WNYC public radio.

Hinds snapped a shot of her living room, showing a large bookshelf, a TV, lots and lots of books, plants, knick-knacks…and a sneaky little cat.

This one’s a bit more difficult than it looks. Can you locate the hiding kitteh?

91BCBCE1-4454-404E-A28A-30A0B86EC85C — Credit: Kate Hinds

Previously:

Notorious Mob Cat Capo Escapes Animal Control

Fat Tony Purrtellini, a capo in the Cattazio crime family, made the jailbreak with the help of Harry Mewdini.

NEW YORK — One of the east coast’s most ruthless mafioso cats was sprung from the big house on Saturday, officials from animal control confirmed.

Fat Tony Purrtellini, a capo in the Cattazio crime family, escaped in the chaos following a prison brawl between felines and a group of Chihuahuas, witnesses said.

“It was absolute bedlam,” said Fuzzy, a British shorthair who witnessed the scene. “A rowdy group of Los Gatos were talking all sorts of rubbish and told the Chihuahuas they would be knifed if they didn’t stop yapping, but that only made the Chihuahuas yap even louder. Then Fat Tony tossed fuel on the fire by telling the Gatos that the Chihuahuas barked at their mums.”

The chaotic scene was compounded by the Chihuahuas’ loose relationship with reality, a source at animal control said.

”Chihuahuas think they’re the size of Great Danes,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Someone really needs to give those dogs a mirror.”

As the Gatos rained blows on the pint-size dogs and the dogs retaliated by biting the cats’ tails, Fat Tony Purrtellini was spirited away by a mysterious hooded figure.

“It were Harry Mewdini, I’m sure of it,” one inmate said with hushed reverence. “I’ll never forget that face.”

Mewdini is singlehandedly responsible for at least two dozen jailbreaks, federal authorities say. The mysterious cat was originally a magician who worked birthday parties on the Chuck-E-Cheese circuit, wowing kittens by escaping Schroedinger’s box and making balloon mice until he caught the eye of the Cattazio crime family, which had several members serving time and saw promise in Mewdini’s skills.

Gangsta Cat — “You lookin’ at me?” Fat Tony Purrtellini, capo of the Cattazio Crime Family, is known for ruthless drive-by urinatings.

The impact of Fat Tony’s escape was already felt on the street, where Gatos crews were posting extra look-outs and beefing up security because of the portly feline’s reputation for ruthless drive-by sprayings.

Others were stocking up on Purrtellini’s favorite snacks — including soppressata, mortadella, capicola and prosciutto — to bribe the infamous meowbster.

“You let your guard down for one minute,” said a nip dealer who refused to give his name for fear of reprisals, “and that’s when Fat Tony rolls up with his crew. We’re all terrified of getting soaked.”

Man Divorces Queen Of All Crazy Cat Ladies

With his bed “constantly defiled” by cat poop, the husband slept on a mat.

A judge in Singapore has granted a divorce to a 70-year-old man who was driven to desperation by his wife’s obsession with cats.

His wife says she was visited in a dream by her late mother, who told her to be kind to cats, for it was the only way she would “cross into paradise.”

The woman took the dream seriously, feeding strays and taking them home.

“This feline collection created quite a nuisance,” Judge Sheik Mustafa said. “The cats roamed around the home freely. They were not toilet-trained and would urinate and defecate indiscriminately.”

hoardingcats2 — A photo taken in the home of a 62-year-old woman who had 125 cats and three rabbits in her home. Credit: Montgomery County (Maryland) Animal Control

Things got worse as the fecal output increased in proportion to the number of cats the woman adopted. Neighbors called police to complain about the “stench of cat faeces and urine emanating from the matrimonial home.”

The woman’s husband was running out of patience too: With his bed “constantly defiled” by cat poop, he started sleeping on a mat.

Cops warned the woman to curtail her cat collection, per Singapore’s Today, but she kept collecting them like Pokemon. In 2003 — six years after his wife’s allegedly prophetic dream — the man called police again and begged them to do something, but the cops said it was a domestic dispute and declined to arrest his wife or otherwise interfere beyond giving her another warning.

The final straw? The man was sleeping on his mat one night in 2007 when he woke up soaked to find one of the cats urinating on his face.

He left the couple’s two-story terrace home permanently and moved in with his brother-in-law, who presumably knew his sister had gone off the deep end and was sympathetic to her husband’s plight.

hoarder3 — Animal hoarding is a serious problem, with the cats and dogs often living in horrid conditions. Credit: Animal Planet

The cats weren’t the only issue in the marriage: The husband alleges the wife estranged him from their children, and the wife helped herself to half her husband’s retirement pension, reasoning that she was entitled to it even though they’d been separated for years.

The wife had also been embroiled in a legal battle with a domestic servant. The maid, who helped care for the army of cats, said she wasn’t paid. The woman in turn accused the maid of killing 40 of her cats. The judge sided with the maid.

Neither party was named in legal documents from Singaporean courts. Mustafa issued his decision on May 21.

After years of fighting the divorce to avoid having to split or sell the home they owned, the wife finally agreed to a divorce settlement, ending their 45-year marriage, with Mustafa ruling that “on a balance of probabilities, the husband has proved his case.”

“I considered the possibility of reconciliation. I find that there is none. The parties’ attitudes are utterly not compromising; the husband is insistent on ending the marriage, and the wife is in vehement refusal to end the marriage,” Mustafa said. “The couple have been consciously estranged from each other for 15 years. That is a long period of time by any measure. There is no ember of love or affection left to rekindle.”

Image credits: [1], [2], [3]