Pain In The Bud

Reason #138 To Keep Your Cats Indoors: Mountain Lions

Just to clear up any misunderstandings — and hopefully stave off more of those “Would a tiger and a house cat be good friends?” questions — cats aren’t down with each other just because they’re cats.

You won’t see a jaguar high-fiving a jaguarundi like “Sup bro? Hunt anything delicious lately?”

And you sure as hell won’t see your cat shooting the shit with a puma on your back porch, trading war stories about taking down prey.

Nope. To the puma, your cat is the prey.

That’s what happened early on Thursday morning in Boulder Creek, California, where footage from a Ring doorbell cam shows a puma — also known as a mountain lion or cougar — hovering over something partially obscured by a planter. There’s a flash of domestic kitty eyes for the briefest instant, then more noise followed by the puma walking away with the cat in its jaws.

Cougar/Puma — Despite their large size, cougars are not considered “big cats” and are not aggressive toward humans. Source: CBS2NY

Sue Ann Sheely, whose camera caught the attack, said it’s the second time she’s seen a local cat fall victim to a cougar. She sent the footage to a local news station so her neighbors will finally wise up and bring their cats indoors.

Like coyotes, pumas aren’t breeding in greater numbers or suddenly intruding on human territory: We’re the intruders, chipping away at the wild cat’s habitat with each new housing development and strip mall we build. The majestic-looking cats die in unusually high numbers when roads cut through their ranges, and simply brushing up against a human neighborhood is often enough to get them shot.

With fractured habitats and fewer prey animals to hunt, pumas will sometimes turn to domestic animals as prey. Attacks on humans are exceedingly rare, and pumas normally do their best to steer clear of humans.

Previously, we’ve looked at other reasons to keep your cat indoors: Reason #127 To Keep Your Cats Indoors: Bad Guys, Reason #246 To Keep Your Cats Indoors: Coyotes, and Reason #001 To Keep Your Cats Indoors: Traffic.

Jaguarundi — The jaguarundi may be small, but it doesn’t mess around. Credit: CostaRicaJourneys

Best Buddies: Cat Holds Bowl So His Recovering Friend Can Eat

A recently-neutered cat gets an assist from his kitty friend.

Moofie the cat, who was just neutered, couldn’t get to his food bowl because of the Elizabethan collar which was placed around his neck to stop him from aggravating the incision.

Cat parent Brianna K. Leroux placed Moofie’s bowl on top of his cat carrier, but that caused another problem: The bowl would fall off the carrier as Moofie ate.

Moofie’s best feline buddy, Simba, came to the rescue. In the video below, you can see Simba holding Moofie’s bowl so the on-the-mend little guy can eat in peace:

Meet Dúi The Happy “Cat-Dog”!

A puppy with cat-like features has taken the internet by storm. He’s a happy little dude.

The cat-dog of Vietnam. The derpiest fuzzball. Good boy.

Those are just some of the names lavished on Dúi, a young puppy whose half-canine, half-feline looks are turning heads across the globe.

Dúi hails from “a mountain province in Vietnam,” owners Hai Anh and Tuan told Metro UK. The Hanoi-based owners bought the now 2 1/2-month-old puppy and saw him rise to instant viral fame thanks to his unique looks.

Dúi is a mixed-breed dog, half Dingo Indochina (as opposed to the Australian variety) and half Bac Ha, a breed indigenous to the area.

‘He is a happy and sweet pup, he loves to play with other dogs, even big dogs and so sweet with humans,” Tuan told the newspaper.

Looking at these photos, happy seems like an understatement!

Can You Spot The Leopard In This Photo?

There really is a leopard in this photo, I swear!

Most people know leopard spots afford the big cats excellent camouflage, but this is ridiculous. There’s a leopard in this photo. Can you see it?

The viral photo has been making the rounds online over the past 24 hours. If you can’t find the leopard, don’t feel bad: I stared at the damn thing for 10 minutes until I cheated and looked up the answer.

Unfortunately it looks like the highest-resolution version of the photo that exists on the web is only 1280×720, so we don’t get the benefit of HD. Either way, this cat has an impressive ability to blend into its surroundings.

A search turns up quite a few similar photos, like this one of a snow leopard:

See it yet?

How about now?

Like all big cats, leopards are disappearing from the wild due to habitat destruction, hunting and cub-poaching.

This Music Calms Cats, But It Scares The Hell Out of Buddy

Our usually-brave (lol) hero didn’t take well to feline-centric tunes.

In case you didn’t know, music written specifically for cats is a thing.

I’d heard about it a while back, and the project seemed impressive: “Music for Cats” composer David Teie is a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra, and he worked with animal behaviorists and veterinarians to come up with kitty-soothing sound textures and test the music’s efficacy on cats visiting the veterinarian.

A 2019 study in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery concluded “Music for Cats” could help our furry friends relax and ease their stress. Keeping in mind an earlier study that suggested cats prefer “feline-centric sounds,” Teie incorporated audio of events cats associate with happy times, like kittens suckling milk from their mothers.

Using Buddy as my test subject, I went to Youtube, selected the track Cozmo’s Air from “Music for Cats” and sat back, expecting Bud to start nodding his furry head at any moment.

Instead his ears pricked up, did their radar-dish swivel toward the speakers, and his eyes went wide. As the song gained volume and intensity, Bud’s ears and whiskers snapped back and he let out a clearly anxious “yerrrrrrrrrrppp!” I tried to calm him down, to no avail, and a second track didn’t improve things.

He wasn’t having it.

scaredcat2 — This pretty much sums up Buddy’s reaction to cat music. Credit: Creative Commons

Teie’s cat music is back in the news with the release of the Kickstarter-backed Music for Cats 2, and there are quite a few imitators on Youtube hawking their own supposedly cat-soothing musical efforts. (Though your cat might think she’s in Guantanamo Bay if you subject her to six-hour videos of “cat lullabies.”)

Should I test some of the new music on Buddy to see if he responds more favorably? And for our fellow readers and cat servants, have you played any of this stuff for your cats? If you have, how’d it work out?