Tiny black-footed kittens were born at the San Diego Zoo during the Coronavirus lockdown.
Zoos around the US are closed because of the Coronavirus, but that doesn’t mean we have to miss out on the milestones of baby animals like the San Diego Zoo’s Ryder and Skyler, two black-footed kittens.
Black-footed cats are notable not only for their diminutive size — typically maxing out at two or three pounds — and their cuteness, but also for their astonishing hunting skills. The tiny terrors have voracious appetites and a 60 percent success rate when hunting. That eclipses the 25 percent success rate of lions, 32 percent success rate of domestic cats and the zero percent success rate of Buddy.
Ryder, a male, and Skyler, a female, were born in April. They haven’t started hunting yet, but they’ve now reached the stage where they’re eating meat instead of milk, as this video shows:
Mistaking her for a stranger, Buddy ambushed his cat sitter while his human, Big Buddy, was away.
I’m up in the Catskills this weekend, which means a friend has been looking in on Buddy and feeding him while I’m away.
He knows her and she’s helped me out by cat-sitting in the past, but it didn’t occur to me that it’s been quite a while since the little guy saw her.
Most cats would run and hide if their humans were away and a “stranger” suddenly entered the house. Not Buddy, apparently.
My friend unlocked the door, stepped inside and was greeted by all 10 pounds of the Budster in attack mode. Little man calmed down when he recognized her and realized she was there to feed him.
I’m sure he also gave her an earful, including “Where’s my servant?! This is unacceptable!”
For all our progress in communicating with our pets, learning body language and other non-verbal cues, we humans still don’t have a way to help them understand what a weekend getaway is, or ease their anxiety by reassuring them we will be home in a few days.
I expect I’ll get the cold shoulder when I walk through the door. It’ll last a minute or two until Bud’s resolve breaks down and he celebrates my return by meowing happily and getting his scent all over me.
Because we never miss an opportunity to do spectacularly stupid things here in good old ‘Merica, we’ve politicized the act of wearing a mask, the simplest and most effective way to prevent the spread of the Coronavirus.
Since mask-wearing has become a meme as well, a historical photo that apparently shows a cat wearing a mask has been making the rounds. It shows a California family — mom, dad, two boys, two girls and a cat — standing together for a group photo, with each of them wearing a facial covering.
It’s become something of a go-to on social media, used in response to those who believe the virus is a hoax, a minor threat overblown by the US media, or an invention of evil Big Pharma who infected the world — while cackling evilly, presumably — in order to rake in enormous profits from selling the vaccine. (How “Big Pharma” is making billions off a vaccine that doesn’t exist is never explained by the conspiracy theorists.)
The photo was archived by the Dublin (CA) Heritage Park and Museum, and it’s dated from 1920, the third and last year the Spanish Flu spread to every corner of the globe. Between 50 and 100 million people lost their lives to that virus, historians estimate, and it wasn’t until several decades later that scientists understood what they were dealing with.
Snopes spoke to Tyler Phillips, who coordinates the archival material for the Dublin Heritage Park and Museum. Unfortunately, Phillips said, not much is known about the photograph other than that it was taken around 1920.
“The fun thing about this photo is that it does appear that even the cat is wearing a mask, but unfortunately we cannot prove that. The staff here at our museum go back and forth on that same question,” Phillips said. “My personal belief is that it is an optical illusion. I cant imagine any cat staying that calm with a tight fitting mask on their face. Also if you zoom in real close you can start to see the faint features of the cats face (nose and mouth). Since the original photo is pretty small and very old its not much easier to tell looking at it.”
So Snopes says the claim that the cat is wearing a mask is “unproven,” and Phillips thinks it’s an optical illusion.
We here at PITB think it’s a legit mask: We don’t see whiskers or even visual artifacts that would result from pixelated or blurred whiskers at the low resolution of the photo. In addition, it’s perfectly normal for a mask to follow the contours of a face, so that doesn’t rule out a mask. A coat pattern that happens to look exactly like a cloth mask, however, isn’t common.
Lastly, cats are individuals. Some will tolerate masks, some won’t. Buddy would probably try to claw me to death if I made him wear a mask, but your average Maine Coon would probably think, “Yeah whatever is cool, bro!”
One thing’s for sure, though: You won’t see any cats confusing the small inconvenience of wearing a mask with “tyranny” or “oppression,” and you won’t see Kitty Karens pulling the snowflake card in grocery stores, insisting the rules don’t apply to them. Those are uniquely human behaviors.
The treats cause worrying behavioral changes and they’re made of junk ingredients.
Little Buddy, I’m happy to announce, has been weaned off the kitty crack.
And no, I’m not talking about catnip, which he enjoys once a week or two without yowling mournfully for more. I’m talking about Temptations, those crunchy cat treats that turn our furry little friends into fiends with one-track minds.
This is the second time I’ve stopped giving him those treats. One is never enough. Two, three, six? Not enough. More. More! More Temptations!!!
It got to the point where Buddy would meow insistently in front of the treat cabinet first thing in the morning, then get up to follow me every time I went in the general direction of the kitchen, trilling in anticipation.
If I made the mistake of leaving the bag out, he’d paw at it and meow insistently.
And one time I got an economy size tub of the stuff from Costco, fed him one or two pieces, then got distracted by a phone call. I was only away for a minute at most, but during that time Buddy swiped the tub off the coffee table, causing the lid to pop as it hit the hardwood floor and spilling hundreds of the kittycrack biscuits everywhere.
When I returned I found Bud gorging himself, vacuuming up his precious Temps like a high end Hoover. I shooed him away and carefully swept up every remaining piece, but it was too late — the little guy started throwing up everything he’d just eaten.
Astonishingly, when he’d gotten the last of it up and I was on hands and knees cleaning the mess, he began to meow for more Temptations.
That is hard core, epic crack fiend behavior.
It’s “Houston, we have a serious problem” level.
Not the only one: Lots of people have reported instances where cats helped themselves to the kitty crack. Credit: theknowmad/reddit
Temptations are cat junk food. They’re packed with filler, animal by-products, things cats can’t properly digest (corn, rice, corn gluten meal), and the added nutrients cited by Whiskas are of dubious nutritional value at best.
Cats aren’t drawn to them for any natural reason: Whatever chemicals they’re coated with are designed to manipulate the feline brain, and in the human world we’d call them drugs. The behavioral changes alone are enough to warrant a change.
I was doing a disservice to my little guy by feeding him that crap, so now we’re going to find something better. If you’d care to offer any suggestions, we’re all ears. Please leave them in the comments.
News sites are exploiting another tragedy for clicks.
If you’d just skimmed headlines like “Kiss of Death: Elderly Woman Killed By Cat” and “Tragedy as woman is killed by her CAT, as doctors issue a dire warning to pet owners” you’d think a woman was somehow violently killed by an enraged 10-pound cat.
The reality is much less dramatic: A woman’s cat scratched her, then licked the wound.
Through her saliva, the cat named Minty infected the victim with bacterial meningitis, doctors told the New Zealand Herald.
The woman fell into a coma, was found by relatives and brought to Melbourne’s Box Hill Hospital, where medical staff kept her sedated as they tried to treat her. With few options, the family in consultation with the doctors decided to wake her to say goodbye, then placed her back in a coma and withdrew life support.
“Infections related to cat bites and scratches like this person, we’d get at least one a week where somebody comes into the hospital,” Lindsay Grayson, director of infectious diseases at Melbourne’s Austin Health, told the newspaper. “It is very important that if a cat is biting or scratching you, you mention it to your GP.”
The woman was 80 years old, and the story suggests she had a compromised immune system. It didn’t provide any other details about her overall health, existing co-morbidities or whether her cat was allowed outdoors. Outside cats have a greater chance of picking up bacteria that can harm humans, experts say. A separate article mentioned the victim took blood thinners.
Grayson’s warning is simple and spot-on: Take bites and scratches from cats and dogs seriously, get the wounds treated and call your doctor. Something that looks like an inconsequential scratch could prove deadly or cause major health problems.
Cats and dogs live in more than 100 million homes in the US alone and infections are exceedingly rare. Grayson is aware of that, and he’s giving solid preventative health advice to people in the pet-owning demographic.
Unfortunately calm and reasoned doesn’t draw clicks, so the story is propagating via headlines that conjure images of a cat literally murdering its owner.
It should go without saying that the cat didn’t intend to cause any harm and is incapable of understanding what happened. All she knows is that her human is dead, which she’s certainly distraught about, and it sounds like she’s not getting sympathy or affection from her new humans.
“I was in shock for a good couple of weeks,” the woman’s daughter said. “I’ve tried not to hate the cat … but then I was sitting with it trying to be nice and it lashed out at me as well for no reason.”
With all respect to the grieving, there most certainly is a reason. The cat is grieving too, she’s living with new people in a new situation, and she’s almost certainly scared. It’s an unfortunate situation for all involved.
Pain In The Bud 