Pain In The Bud

Do You ‘Pspsps’ To Your Furry Friend? Plus: An Obit For Miles The Cat

Do you use “pspsps” to get your cat’s attention?

Apparently a lot of people use the “pspsps” thing to get their cats’ attention, and Mental Floss has a new story proposing some theories about why people use it and why cats respond.

The first and most obvious is that felines hear higher frequencies than humans, and they’re especially tuned into those frequencies because their usual prey — including rodents and birds — not only make noises in the higher ranges, they make noise us humans can’t hear, but felid ears are primed to pick up.

Mental Floss’s Ellen Gutoskey also points out that it could be “a truncation of ‘Here, pussy, pussy, pussy’—popularized in part by ‘Pussy, Pussy, Pussy,’ a 1930s song by the Light Crust Doughboys. In fact, the tempo is fast enough that it almost sounds like they’re singing ‘Pspsps.”

I think she could be onto something there unless the “pspsps” sound is universal, but truthfully I have no clue whether people in other countries, or outside the English-speaking world, use it to call their cats. I don’t and never really needed to. Bud comes when called a good 85 percent of the time, and if he doesn’t I usually assume it’s for good reason, like he’s having a nice nap or he has no current use for his servant.

Miles the cat

The Guardian’s Hannah James Parkinson writes about adopting Miles, the shelter’s most skittish cat who had been passed over time and again until she came along.

Earning Miles’ trust wasn’t easy, but Parkinson did it with time, patience and love, and eventually Miles became her little buddy and even came out of his shell enough to make friends with another neighborhood cat.

milesthecat — Credit: Hannah Jane Parkinson

Unfortunately Miles got hurt, infected and died while he was outside overnight. Parkinson doesn’t say if the little guy got hit by a car, but the description of his initial injury is consistent with it.

The indoor vs outdoor thing is a thorny issue. I saw it as a more black-and-white problem until hearing from several readers who live in places like farmland or very quiet neighborhoods where the chance of a cat getting hit is small.

I don’t begrudge anyone making what they think is the best choice for their cat(s), except maybe for Australians and New Zealanders. Seriously, guys, bring those cats in before sadistic “hunters” get them in their crosshairs or they nibble on the poisoned meat that both governments like to use to “manage” the cat population. Neither country seems overly concerned with pet cats getting caught up in their zealous extirpation campaigns, and when birders are this riled up it’s best not to take chances anyway. If your cat isn’t spending time outdoors, it can’t be blamed for killing local wildlife.

I love dogs, but…

The Daily Mail has a horrific story about a pair of unleashed rottweilers that followed a woman into her home as she was carrying groceries and mauled her two pet cats to death in front of her traumatized children.

The attack happened around noon on Aug. 30 in a small town in the UK’s Western Midlands. The dogs came bounding in and snatched one of the cats off the kitchen counter, then mauled the other. The ginger tabby died immediately, either from shock or his severe injuries, while the other lived long enough to make it to the vet, who said the little tuxedo couldn’t be saved.

The woman told the newspaper her kids are having nightmares about the attack, while the police response was underwhelming to say the least, especially because the cats weren’t the only animals attacked by the roaming rottweilers.

“We were called to Raglan Way, Chelmsley Wood (on August 30) to reports of two dogs attacking another dog. The injured dog was taken to the vets to be treated,” a police spokesman told the paper. “The owners of the two dogs were spoken to and were taken back home to be secured by the owners. We have asked neighbourhood officers to speak to the dog’s owners regarding securing the animal, and will consider any further steps that need to be taken to ensure public safety.”

The owners of the dogs “were spoken to.” Wow. Let no one say the West Midlands Police don’t have a sense of scale. Perhaps if it happens again they’ll send a stern letter.

I hope the resulting media stories, and the beginning of the attack caught on a home security camera, lead to enough pressure that the police take the incident seriously and the owners of the dogs have to face consequences. There’s nothing prohibitive about talking to them. The only way irresponsible people are going to leash their dogs, especially dogs capable of this kind of thing, is if the consequences for not doing so are sufficiently prohibitive to make them think twice.

Finally, here’s a video of a cute baby kookaburra to balance out all that horribleness:

Buddy Blasts Yankees, Blames Poor Season On Reduction In Snack Allotment

A shockingly poor season from the Yankees has led to a reduction in celebratory treat-sharing, leaving poor Buddy in danger of starving!

NEW YORK — Buddy the Cat took aim at the New York Yankees on Sunday, blaming the team’s players and front office for a noticeable drop-off in celebratory treat dispensing as the team has struggled.

“Reprehensible” is how the gray tabby described the 2023 campaign by baseball’s most storied franchise, baring his teeth in disgust at the bitterly disappointing performance of the club.

“Last season Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs, which was a record both for the American League and the Yankees and more importantly occasioned the dispensing of celebratory treats for me every time the ball landed beyond the outfield wall. But this year? Judge was injured for half the season, the rest of these guys couldn’t hit a ball off a tee and I am unacceptably bereft of frequent yums.”

Buddy told reporters his patience was exhausted before the All Star break as the team wallowed in mediocrity, but things really took a turn for the worse in recent weeks when the Yankees dropped nine consecutive series and often failed to muster a single run.

“These bums have had games where they go 2 for 31 with 17 strikeouts!” the exasperated feline meowed. “They’re facing back of the rotation guys and striking out like pick-up artists at a bar! How’s a cat supposed to snack in these conditions?!”

Yankees cat — Another poor feline deprived of yums due to the Yankees’ poor play.

As the season spiraled out of control the Yankees found themselves as many as six games below .500, endangering a streak of more than 30 consecutive winning seasons and, more importantly, starving poor Buddy.

The result of their futility, he explained, was a disgruntled human who had far fewer occasions to celebrate and share his excitement by fetching snacks from the treat cabinet.

The futility of the Yankees has been especially difficult for Buddy as he watches cats whose humans are fans of the Atlanta Braves “feast like vikings in Valhalla.”

“I got so desperate, I started to sound like [Yankees manager] Aaron Boone,” Buddy admitted. “[Yankees designated hitter Giancarlo] Stanton would whiff on a slider two feet off the plate and I’d say ‘Well that was a pretty solid at bat, pal, what do you say we break out the crunchies?’ But he just looked at me with disgust.”

The feline, known for his various schemes to obtain more food, said he’s been trying to get his human interested in other sports in a desperate bid to earn more snacks.

“There’s that guy down in Miami, Messy something, in that sport where they kick a ball around,” he said. “Why can’t Big Buddy get into that? Those guys win a lot.”

With the baseball season in its last weeks and a playoff berth looking extremely unlikely, Buddy said he’s got even more riding on the upcoming New York Knicks season.

“Jalen Brunson has been a wonder for exceeeding my snack quota,” he told reporters. “Every time he hits a clutch three, chewy and crunchy treats rain down from the sky. When the Knicks won their first round playoff series, snacks flowed like a river! I need that team to be even better this year, otherwise I’m going to be skin and bones.”

‘Study’ Claiming Vegan Cats Are Healthier Is A Mockery Of Science

A new paper claims cats are healthier when fed human diets, but the “study” is activism masquerading as science.

We have a science problem in this country.

Tens of millions of adults are scientifically illiterate and cannot articulate a simple definition of the scientific method.

That includes the usual suspects, the people who don’t understand the difference between anecdotes and hard data and say things like “Evolution’s just a theory” or “I don’t believe in science” as if it’s an ideology or religion. It also includes people who like to declare they’re “into science” as if it’s a band or a genre of cinema, and often post articles from sites like “I F—-ing Love Science,” which routinely mistakes natural phenomena like stars, interstellar space and the animal life for “science.”

To quote Sam Kriss’ wonderful essay on the subject: “‘Science’ comes to metonymically refer to the natural world, the object of science; it’s like describing a crime as ‘the police,’ or the ocean as ‘drinking.'”

Science is a formalized method for studying the natural world. That’s it. No more, no less. It isn’t natural phenomena itself, it isn’t something that requires faith. It’s meant to be challenged, with each piece of knowledge hard-won as the scientific community collectively chips away at the vast edifice of things we don’t understand.

The lack of scientific literacy is an indictment of the American education system, but the science and journalism communities are also big contributors. A flawed academic publishing system encourages researchers to make grandiose claims in abstracts and press releases to increase the chances their work will get positive coverage in the press. Few journalists are more scientifically literate than the general population, so they report dubious claims credulously and present individual studies as the final word on subjects instead of tentative first steps in contributing to the corpus of human knowledge.

We see this all the time with reporting on the environmental impact of felines, but it’s certainly not limited to that subject. How many times have you seen your local news anchors or newspapers tout studies saying coffee is healthy, only to report the next week that a new study says coffee isn’t healthy after all?

“Those scientists can’t make up their minds,” they’ll say with a forced chuckle before handing the broadcast over to the weatherman, oblivious to their own failure to provide context.

The effort to rebrand cats as vegans

A new “study,” given prominent play today by major news outlets like Newsweek and aggregators like Drudge, is a classic example of misleading claims given the veneer of scientific authority. The paper claims vegan cats are “healthier” than their meat-eating counterparts. The study — which is actually a survey — says no such thing, and its authors are surely aware that the way it’s been packaged for media consumption will cause confusion, but they’ve gone ahead with it anyway.

The research involved asking 1,369 cat owners to fill out surveys about their cats, the cats’ diets, and their veterinary health histories.

Of those surveyed, there were 123 reported “vegan cats” in their households (about nine percent of the total), and while the abstract and media pitches claim the surveys show vegan cats are healthier, the differences are statistically insignificant. The sample size is too small to draw any conclusions from, and the fact that the details are self-reported means the “data” is worthless: People who put their cats on vegan diets despite knowing felines are obligate carnivores have a vested interest in defending their decision. They’re not impartial, and their survey answers aren’t either. (The paper acknowledges that 91 percent of the respondents are female, and 65 percent are vegans, vegetarians or pescatarians themselves. Those are admirable choices for a human diet, but not for a cat.)

Relying on self-reported “data” also means the research team doesn’t actually know the true veterinary histories of the cats in question, nor does it know anything about the nutrient content of the vegan “cat food” given to the 123 cats who have been deprived of meat. It also cannot account for possibilities like the so-called vegan cats slipping out at night to hunt rodents.

a close up shot of a cat eating — Credit: Engin Akyurt/Pexels

That’s especially important because of “vegan cat food’s” dubious history. Evolution, the brand that popularized the concept, is owned and operated by a man named Eric Weisman, who has been prosecuted and repeatedly sanctioned for misrepresenting himself as a physician, veterinarian and scientist — and continues to misrepresent himself.

Weisman, a chiropractor by trade, racked up a long list of violations in his chosen field before his chiropractor license was pulled, then was charged and convicted criminally for, among other things, practicing veterinary medicine and regular medicine without a license. Weisman’s list of offenses include “treating” cancer patients, “treating” and misdiagnosing animals, and posing as a physician for years, including in advertisements and literature related to his pet food and fake veterinary practices.

Weisman is still calling himself a physician in violation of his plea agreement, and he’s still selling “vegan cat food.” Would anyone in their right mind weigh the claims of that man against the tens of thousands of veterinarians and pet nutritionists who are horrified at the idea of restricting cats to vegan diets?

(In case you’re tempted to think chiropractors are legitimate to begin with, you should know that chiropractor was founded by a lifelong quack who claimed its methods were taught to him by the ghost of a physician, which allegedly appeared to him during a seance. Chiropractor’s founder dodged accountability for years by claiming his practice was a “religion.” The fact that it’s now a $15 billion industry despite its origins, and decades of research that has found no benefit to the practice, illustrates how eager people are to believe just about anything.)

The consequences of bad science

Not only will the “study” and press coverage of it mislead people into believing its claims, it’s another black mark on the scientific community. Trust is hard-won, easily lost, and for better or worse the misdeeds of a few scientists reflects on the entire field.

Others will simply believe it, especially when major news outlets like Newsweek report the results without question, without acknowledging that it’s a lazy effort masquerading as science by a research team that already knew what result it wanted before handing out the surveys. (The “study” was funded by ProVeg, an NGO that promotes plant-based consumption and is involved in the development of plant-based foods.)

Lastly and most tragically, cats will suffer for it. Cats who are denied meat suffer slow and agonizing deaths, with health problems accumulating due to the lack of certain proteins until they go blind, become chronically malnourished and eventually suffer organ failure.

And for what?

Because some people believe human morals apply to cats?

Because, despite all common sense, they think they can change a species that has been dependent on meat for so long in their evolutionary history that their bodies literally cannot synthesize certain proteins and cannot extract nutrients from most plant material?

How would we like it if we were dependent on giants to feed us, and those giants decided we could and should live on a diet of marshmallows? We’d suffer horribly and we’d die, but at least we’d know why.

Cats don’t have that luxury. They depend on us to do right by them, and when we adopt them it’s our basic responsibility to keep them healthy and well-fed. Let’s not fail our little friends by pretending human ethics is applicable to a species that can’t understand it, or consent to participating in it.

Australia ‘Declares War’ On Cats, Plans To Eradicate Ferals And Strays

Australia announced the plan after a new report called cats the greatest driver of extinction in the country.

While their neighbors in New Zealand called for “woah on feeral kets” earlier this year, Australia is planning its own nationwide effort to wipe out free-roaming cats in an attempt to prevent the extinction of local wildlife.

The “war” announcement, made on Wednesday by Australia’s Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, comes on the heels of a report that calls “invasive animals” like cats the primary force behind species extinction in most of the world, including Australia. The report was released by a group of academics from 143 countries who make up the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which advises the UN and sovereign states on wildlife policy.

Plibersek singled out felines in a press conference announcing the plan.

“They played a role in Australia’s two latest extinctions … they are one of the main reasons Australia is the mammal extinction capital of the world,” she said.

In addition to targeting felines on the mainland, Plibersek said Australia’s government would attempt to completely purge Christmas and French islands of their cat populations.

I have not had the opportunity to read an advance of the report, which was just released, and it will require careful reading as well as additional research before I’d feel comfortable commenting on the claims. That said, the numbers bandied about in press accounts (which claim cats kill more than 2.6 billion animals a year in Australia) are similar to the claims we’ve heard before, so unless there’s original research here and not a rehash of the same meta-analyses frequently cited in stories about cats and their impact on biodiversity, it doesn’t change the simple fact that it’s bad policy to act without reliable data.

I’m talking about an actual effort to count the feral and stray cat population in defined areas, as the Washington, D.C. Cat Count did using trail cameras, monitors and other methods. Obviously that can’t be applied to an entire country, but it can be done in different locations and provide a baseline to work with. Without that effort, the estimates of feline impact are nothing more than guesswork by professors sitting behind desks often entire continents away from the locales in question, plugging invented numbers into formulas intended to extrapolate totals for birds, mammals, lizards and insects killed by felis catus.

While similar studies estimated the number of cats in the US at between 25 and 125 million, Australia’s federal government says there are between 1.4 and 5.6 million cats in the country. If that’s true, it means each free-roaming cat in Australia kills between 500 and 1,850+ animals a year. It’s also difficult to accept estimates of predatory impact when the corresponding estimates of total cat population are so vague.

a fluffy cat on a sidewalk — A “feeral ket.” Credit: Ferhan Akgu00fcn/Pexels

Still, as I’ve written in earlier posts, government intervention was inevitable without proactive measures. Australia’s cat lovers and caretakers would do well to voluntarily keep their pets inside, and to double their efforts to catch, spay/neuter and find homes for as many strays as they can.

If you live in Australia, you have until December to provide feedback to the federal government, and it’s probably a good idea to check with your local animal welfare groups, which are undoubtedly composing their own responses to the plan.

Two Families Battle Over A Cat, Prompting The Question: What Defines Pet ‘Ownership’?

Bob/Maui the cat was adopted by one family in 2013, went missing a few months later and was rescued by another family, who have had him for 10 years.

Bob the cat was adopted by Carol Holmes of Wichita, Kansas, in 2013.

Holmes says Bob disappeared a few months later and that was the last she saw of him.

Alex Streight, who also lived in Wichita at the time, found Bob in a bad way, malnourished and in “bad condition.”

“He was in horrible shape,” Streight told WRAL, a North Carolina TV news station. “I fed him, kept looking for [the] owner. I posted in the Wichita groups, but I never found anyone.”

Streight, who was 27 years old and pregnant at the time, said the veterinarian gave her no indication the cat belonged to anyone, and her efforts to find a potential owner were unsuccessful, so she paid for his veterinary fees, adopted him and named him Maui.

When Streight moved to North Carolina in 2015, she took Maui with her and he’s been living happily with her family ever since. In late August Maui slipped out of Streight’s North Carolina home. A neighbor picked him up and brought him to the vet, and the veterinarian realized there was a microchip. A scan showed Holmes as the cat’s owner.

a tuxedo cat on a hanging wooden bridge — Credit: Arina Krasnikova/Pexels

Now Bob/Maui is in the custody of Wake County (NC) Animal Control, whose staff don’t sound keen on returning the cat to Streight. They’ve called Wilson, who said she’d like to be reunited with Bob/Maui, and when Streight went to animal control to get her cat — returning with the veterinary records when they wouldn’t release him to her the first time — the staff called police.

“The cat is in protective custody where an investigation will begin,” Jennifer Federico, a veterinarian with the county animal control, told the station. “The cat is safe and isolated.”

Federico seems intent on making the situation more complicated than it needs to be, telling WRAL that “Microchipping proves ownership, so we have to take that into consideration, and launch a full investigation.”

Streight doesn’t see it that way. She wasn’t registered as the owner on the chip, but she’s got 10 years’ worth of veterinary records, a photograph of Maui laying on her couch the day he slipped out of her house, and photos and videos showing the tuxedo cat with her kids and other pets over the past decade.

“It’s just absurd to me that anyone would think to take someone’s pet away from the family that he’s been with for ten years,” Streight said.

We have to agree with Streight here, and it’s disturbing that animal control has not only made itself the arbiter of the cat’s fate, but has apparently decided that nominal ownership based on a microchipping from 2013 trumps the fact that Maui has been happily a part of Streight’s family for at least 95 percent of his life.

We feel for Wilson, but Streight did everything right: She looked for the cat’s family, posted about him online, cleaned him up and got him veterinary care, then adopted him when all indications were he didn’t have a home. With a decade’s worth of vet bills, photos and videos backing her up, it’s clear Maui is happy in her home, has been well cared-for, and if he could speak there’s little doubt about where he’d prefer to go.

She’s clearly bonded to the cat, and he to her: Only someone who really loves their furry friend regularly takes photos of their cat, even after 10 years. I can attest to that fact: Probably 60 or 70 percent of the photos on my phone are of Buddy, and I’d be devastated if we were separated.

What do you think? Should Bob/Maui be returned to Wilson or Streight?