Every cat lover’s camera roll is dominated by photos of our fluffy little overlords. It’s the natural order of things.
I’ve always said Bud’s silent treatment can be worse than his vocal protests when it comes to gauging the intensity of his disapproval.
Howling at me to fetch him a snack? That’s normal. Sitting down two feet away and fixing me with his wide-eyed, accusatory stare as I eat a snack without getting one for him? Now that’s serious.
Andreas Nilsson, the director of a new ad highlighting a recently-introduced Apple feature, clearly understands the hierarchy of feline displeasure:
In the spot, a man uses Apple Intelligence to remove his cat, Garrett, from a photo he just snapped of his wife relaxing and reading a book.
“Look, I deleted Garrett,” he says, holding up the photo and clearly expecting something along the lines of “Wow, that’s a pretty cool feature!”
Instead, she gives him a dry “I always knew you hated Garrett” and goes back to her book.
But Garrett himself doesn’t have to utter a single meow. His reproachful gaze is all the prompting the man needs to undo his mistake with the tap of his screen.
The commercial ends with a slow close-in on Garrett’s face, which has “You’re on thin ice, human!” written all over it.
I like this spot. The creative team took a risk in showing off a new feature in a way that made the characters react negatively, but cat people will love it, and viewers aren’t likely to forget what they saw.
Android users have had something very much like it for quite a while now. Sometimes it really does work the way it does in the commercials, with seamless results, but other images are a bit more difficult to clean up and require some manual tinkering. If Apple’s figured out a way to measurably improve this sort of thing, that’s a pretty big positive for the future of smartphone photography and editing.
In any case, cheers to Nilsson for knowing who holds real power in human-feline households. Now if you’ll excuse me, the king is demanding my attention, no doubt to have me scratch his chin, open a door for him, or serve him second breakfast…
The latest viral cat story offers a lesson in healthy skepticism in today’s news environment.
Viral news accounts on social media and less scrupulous news sites have been buzzing this week about a school lockdown in Moses Lake, Washington, which was reportedly caused by a teacher confusing a particularly fat cat for a puma.
I saw red flags immediately while reading the story. While it did give a specific location, it was suspiciously devoid of other details, and the wording on all the posts and stories was dubiously similar. Additionally, a Google news search doesn’t turn up anything recent from reputable press.
Then there’s the photo, which looks a little too good to be true.
This photo is a Getty stock image and does not depict the domestic cat in the school lockdown story, despite accompanying it in dozens of news posts.
So did a school really go into lockdown after a case of mistaken feline identity?
Yes, but it happened in November of 2023, and the photo of the obese cat making the rounds in stories this week does not depict the cat in question. The original story was published by a local news site on Nov. 22, 2023, and says the school went into lockdown at 10:30 that morning, but was quickly lifted after staff confirmed there was no puma stalking the school grounds.
“…educators soon learned that the mountain lion was in fact, a “fat cat eating a rat,” according to the school memo to parents.
‘While we take all reports seriously, this was the first report we’ve ever had of this nature,’ the school wrote in a statement.
Despite the benign nature of it all, safety measures resumed to safeguard students and staff. Classes resumed as normal after a short period of time. “
As for the photo, the particularly rotund moggie’s image is a stock photo from Getty. It was used in a story about feline obesity in 2017 and an April 2018 story from the New York Daily News about public outrage in Jefferson, Iowa, where the police were shooting feral cats instead of dispatching animal control or working with local shelters.
Since the image is from a photo agency and predates the original story about the Washington school lockdown by at least six years, we can rule it out as an image of the feline mistaken for a mountain lion while settling down to a feast of fresh rat.
A deceptive image used to promote the story on Facebook.
So what happened here, and why are so many news sites and channels reporting this incident as if it just happened, accompanied by a deceptive photo that is not credited to Getty?
It’s classic clickbait. That is to say, some administrator or editor saw the old story picking up traffic or noticed a blip in certain search strings, and republished the story as if it’s new while omitting the original date.
Others noticed and followed suit to get the clicks while the getting’s good, fighting over the scraps that fall from the Zuckerbergian table in the form of ad revenue. The story is simple, sharable, has been paired with an amusing image, and is exactly the sort of thing people love to post and comment on via social media.
It’s a reminder to all of us to be skeptical about what we read, and to never take anything on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok et al at face value. In fact, it’s best to ignore anything on those platforms presented as news or fact. Everyone’s got their own preferences, but here at Casa de Buddy, we like the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Guardian, Associated Press, al Jazeera, the BBC, and aggregators like RealClearPolitics.
That doesn’t mean they’re above reproach or that everything they produce is a sparkling example of journalism, but they’re institutions that operate under the traditional rules, staffed by professionals who take pride in trying to get stories right. I’ll take that any day over a random Facebook account run by some shady guy in Macedonia or Belarus, who will post anything as “news” as long as it brings him clicks and ad revenue.
The makers of Temptations want you to feed your cats more snacks, as if they don’t get enough!
In yet another indication that some people don’t seem to pay attention to their feline masters, the Wall Street Journal reports on Mars and its internal operation “Cattitude,” which as far as I can tell amounts to a few people within the company realizing they haven’t squeezed every last dollar of revenue from people who have cats.
That’s a problem, the company realized, because more people are adopting cats, younger generations are more likely to adopt felines, and anyone who hasn’t had their head in the sand knows the little ones rule the internet with their cuteness.
Through “Cattitude,” which apparently involves everything from executives walking around the office wearing cat ears, to handing out “I Love Cats” decals and consulting with “cat parents” on products, the company says it’s identified a “treat gap” between felines and canines, with dogs as the far more frequent beneficiary of yums:
“Feline insecurity can be self-fulfilling. If you think your cat doesn’t care, you might be less likely to shower them with perks. That may be why dogs get way more treats.
Mars launched a campaign in May that spotlights the “treat gap” by the numbers: Dogs are nearly 32% more likely to get daily treats than cats in dogs-only and cats-only households; in homes with both, 38% of parents said they don’t give the same number of treats.“
The story does not say how the company arrived at those numbers. Probably market research in the form of surveys. Not exactly scientific, as these things go.
This is one of those stories that makes me wonder if these people actually have cats.
From the moment I wake up until the second I settle into bed, Bud shrieks at me for snacks. He won’t even let me stumble into the bathroom before the first shrill reminders. He demands snacks before dinner, after dinner, after he’s had snacks, and sometimes while he’s eating them.
If he could speak English and hold a bull horn, I have no doubt he’d spend the majority of his day blasting the demands into my ears: “MOAR SNACKS, BIG BUDDY! MOAR! MOAR!”
Mars should know this. One of its most popular products, Temptations, turns cats into slobbering addicts. I had to wean the Budster off them, then stupidly bought them again months later and had to wean him off the Temps again because he has a one-track mind when they’re in his bloodstream. Two are not enough. Six are not enough. Ten are not enough.
One time, I left a big tub of the damn things unattended for a minute and he managed to pop the top off by knocking it off the coffee table. When I walked back into the living room, he was dragging his jaw along the floor like a bulldozer, inhaling as many as was felinely possible into his little mouth.
Frantically, I shooed him away and began picking them up, but the damage was done. He threw up a few minutes later. Then he shrieked for more!
He always looks innocent, doesn’t he?
Interestingly, the WSJ notes that if you type “Does my cat” into Google, the first two auto-complete suggestions are “Does my cat love me?” and “Does my cat know I love her?”
And that brings us to a point on which I agree with the people at Mars: cats still aren’t well understood.
Dogs happily slobber over their people. Cats show their love in subtle ways, like proximity, head bunting and momentary contact.
Just like the whole “cats love milk” thing is half myth, half misunderstanding, so is the idea that your cat doesn’t love you unless he’s leaping into your arms to hug you as saccharine orchestral music swells in the background.
While there are always outliers, most cats don’t like being hugged or picked up, and most have hard limits when it comes to the amount of physical affection they’ll tolerate. It’s not because they don’t care for us, but because they’re semi-domesticated carnivores who still retain the skittish tendencies of their wild brethren, and because they get easily overstimulated, among other reasons.
If Mars’ Cattitude is an ongoing thing, I hope the decision-makers in the company come to what I believe are two of the most important conclusions to keep in mind when it comes to cats. Giving them your love means giving them your time and attention, and treating them like the sentient, emotional creatures they are.
The best piece of advice I ever got was to always take your cat’s emotions into consideration.
It really is that simple.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have snacks to dispense.
Buddy confronts his machine arch-nemesis, while NASA celebrates JWST’s third anniversary by imaging the cosmic cat’s paw in detail we’ve never seen before.
To mark its third anniversary, the team behind the James Webb Space Telescope has released an image of the Cat’s Paw nebula, and it’s incredible!
Below is a dramatically scaled down version of the image to make things easier on readers who may have slower connections or tend to visit PITB on mobile devices. The original is 30mb and can be found here.
It really is worth viewing at maximum resolution, where you can see details of the stellar nursery and the thick plumes of ionized gases that comprise the radiant, multi-hued structure of the nebula.
The dark red areas are dense concentrations of gases, the clouds from which stars are born. The blue stars are the cosmic newborns, and if you scroll through the image at maximum resolution, you can see those young stars floating in seas of their golden brethren in interstellar expanses stretching thousands of light years. In this image, we’re looking at an area of our galaxy between about 4,000 and 5,500 light years away.
Here’s the small version:
And here are images that better illustrate why it’s called the Cat’s Paw, with a view oriented in the “correct” way to trigger our brains’ pattern recognition processes, the mechanisms that make us think “Oh yeah, that does look like a cat’s paw!”
“Toe beans” up top, large pad beneath. The Cat’s Paw Nebula.Viewed in different wavelengths to better see the overall structure without the obscuring elements.
We’re fortunate there is no cosmic-scale feline floating out there. Just imagine entire star systems batted around for fun, or a section of the galaxy reserved as a litter box.
I know this can seem overwhelming to some people, while others see images like this and think “What’s the big deal? Haven’t we seen things like this before?”
And the truth is no, we haven’t. That’s the beauty of the James Webb Space Telescope. We’re not only seeing galaxies and structures previously undiscovered, we’re also seeing familiar cosmic locations in detail and resolution that was previously impossible.
In a very real way, we’ve upgraded from standard definition Cosmic TV to the HD version.
The scope is in orbit, at a gravitationally stable position known as Lagrange point 2. In plain English, it’s a special place a million miles from Earth where the gravitational dance between our planet and our sun effectively cancel each other out.
Or, as NASA puts it, Lagrange points are “positions in space where objects sent there tend to stay put.”
It took decades of planning and the engineering talents of thousands of humanity’s best to create the JWST, which is also a spacecraft. The scope was built to travel to L2 without anyone aboard, then unfold itself in a delicate ballet of almost innumerable moving parts. The JWST’s ability to transform, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, is an engineering marvel in and of itself, and that’s before it began providing us with a better view of the cosmos than we’ve ever had in the history of our species.
Header image credit: Texas Tech University Department of Physics and Astronomy
The fury of the Budster
Casa de Buddy has a new vacuum, desperately needed during this hot summer as Bud has been shedding more fur than usual.
I could have made another cat from all the hair the new vac picked up from the area rugs, couches and pillows, but Buddy wasn’t happy.
As PITB readers know, vacuums are high on the list of things Buddy despises. He’ll start hissing the moment he sees one, even if it’s not plugged in. He thinks they are angry nemesis machines created to infiltrate his territory and torment him.
Usually I try to lure the little dude into another room with treats and lock him in for a few minutes while I vacuum, but he was nowhere to be found, so I thought he’d spotted the vac and retreated voluntarily.
Tragically, I was mistaken.
Shortly after I began vacuuming my bedroom, I heard a low growl, then Buddy leaped from his hiding spot under my desk and shrieked his high-pitched, baby-like battle cry as he launched himself at the evil vacuum!
It was comical. His little face was twisted into a mask of rage, his ears were pinned back, and he slapped the hell out of the vac: SLAP SLAP SLAP SLAPPP!!! with his little paws.
Here’s a reimagining of the ghastly incident, since it would be cruel to repeat it just to get photos. It’s Buddy — or the “model” of Buddy I’ve built using dozens of photos — exacting his wrath on the evil machines that disturb his peace:
I turned the vacuum off and tried to calm him down by reassuring him in a soft voice that he was safe. Nothing to be worried about, pal!
But I couldn’t stop laughing, which didn’t help the situation. Little man does not like to be mocked, and I’m convinced he fully understands when I’m laughing at instead of with him.
Ah, well. Next time there will be no assumptions and I’ll get him safely out of harm’s way before using the evil contraption.
It’s the first time a mountain lion has been spotted in New York since 2011. Authorities aren’t sure if the cat is an escaped — and illegal — pet, or if it made an epic journey from the west coast.
For the first time in 14 years, there’s a puma on the loose in New York.
The wild cat was spotted on a Rochester woman’s Ring doorbell camera padding along the sidewalk in front of her home at about 4 am on Wednesday morning.
A representative from the state Department of Environmental Conservation cautiously said the agency is working on confirming the species of cat in the footage.
But the feline’s size, gait and tail are dead giveaways, despite the dark footage and fleeting glimpse: it’s a puma.
In the brief clip, the wild feline walks past a tree, giving the DEC an important context clue. Michael Palermo, a wildlife manager with the department, said his team measured the tree, allowing them to closely estimate the animal’s size by comparing the footage to their measurements.
“If, in fact, it is some large cat, we would want to question, how did it get here? It’s not impossible for a wild cougar to travel to New York; it’s happened before,” Palermo said. “Was it a captive one that may have been legal as a licensed facility, and if so, did it escape? We still need to do some work to verify anything like that.”
While pumas were once native to New York and thrived in the forested mountains of regions like the Catskills (“cat creek” in Dutch), the last verified sighting in New York was in 2011. That cougar crossed through the Empire State after an epic journey from the west coast, a stronghold for the species.
Some people who posted to a Rochester community group on Facebook are already freaking out, and pumas are widely misunderstood, so it’s important to note the facts:
Pumas are not African lions, are not closely related to them and do not behave like them
They’re not aggressive toward people. In fact, they try to stay away from humans and will go out of their way to avoid confrontation
The exceptions are when people threaten a puma’s cubs or corner the animal, giving it no opportunity to escape
Americans are 150 times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a puma. There are only 27 reported cases of people killed by pumas in more than a century. By contrast, an estimated 4,300 to 10,000 Americans have been killed by dogs in that same time span. (Higher estimates include people who did not die immediately from dog bites, and people who died of infections or complications from bites.)
While some people and media reports erroneously call pumas “big cats,” they are not members of the panthera genus. They are felines more closely related to domestic cats and small wildcats. Accordingly, pumas can purr and meow, but they cannot roar
Pumas are also known as mountain lions, cougars, panthers, painters, screamers, catamounts, pangui, onca parda, cuguacuarana, katalgar, chimbica, shunta-haska, fire cats, California lions, ghost cats, and red tigers, among many other names.
In fact, the species has more names than any other animal. That’s because it’s adaptable with a historically wide and varied range. There are some 40 names for pumas in English and more than 80 in Spanish, Portuguese and the languages of indigenous Native American tribes.
The species is officially known as puma concolor, or “puma of one color” thanks to its typically biege fur that, unlike tigers, jaguars, leopards and even house cats, does not have stripes, spots or rosettes.
While it’s extremely unlikely the mystery cougar would pose a threat to people, Rochester police — who have fielded several reports of sightings in recent days — advise locals to keep their pets indoors and to exercise caution while walking their dogs.
Update: The DEC has officially confirmed the cat is a puma, although it was obvious from the footage.
In the meantime, a Rochester man says he saw the wild cat — and people running away from it — on Wednesday night.
Although that sighting has not been substantiated by authorities, it does illustrate the need to educate the public about these animals.
“You know, a mountain lion, it be ‘rawr.’ They be crawling and… serious,” Curtis Jones told WHAM, an ABC affiliate in Rochester.
“I am going to keep this bat right here, man, just in case,” he told a TV reporter. “I am going to protect us, I ain’t going to let nothing happen to us, nothing. OK?”
Let’s hope common sense somehow finds its way into the Facebook algorithm amid all the misinformation as the locals discuss the sightings online.
If you’re from the area, we beg you: please do not attack, shoot or chase after the puma with a baseball bat. The animal does not consider you food, is not a danger to you, and is probably scared and hungry.
That deserves special emphasis if, as the DEC’s staff have said, the puma is more likely an escaped captive than a long-wandering traveler from the western US.
Jones said he saw the puma “slithering” and hear it “rawr,” but it’s worth noting, again, that pumas are members of the genus felinae, meaning they’re genetically and behaviorally much closer to house cats and can meow and purr, but cannot roar. Despite their size, mountain lions are not true “big cats.”
As for Jones, we hope him and his neighbors give the cat a wide berth and let the authorities safely capture it, have a veterinarian evaluate, and figure out where it belongs.
“I don’t play with lions, I don’t play with tigers, bears, nothing in the wild, I don’t play with those, I promise you,” Jones told the station. “I don’t even do rollercoasters. I’m good.”
Pain In The Bud 