The Youtuber known as Xing goes to extraordinary lengths to create scaled-down places for his cats to play and lounge in within his Cat Town.
Xing, the Youtuber who previously turned heads by building a working subway system for his cats, isn’t finished transforming his Cat Town into a one-of-a-kind extravagance for his little buddies.
The Youtuber’s latest creations are a 3,500-seat, air-conditioned, to-scale feline basketball arena with its own real hardwood court and a cat hotel.
Xing also showed off the exterior of Cat Town, which has a McDonald’s and several empty buildings.
He’s soliciting ideas from viewers on what he should build next. While I love the subway and the arena, I think he should try something a little more practical, something his cats will definitely use. The cat hotel is different, since it’s entirely possible one or more of his cats will use the hotel room as a private getaway, but it does raise an interesting question: what would a cat want?
For most cats, including Xing’s fluffy Maine Coon, a pool wouldn’t be a great choice, but what about a hot tub? A Japanese capsule-style hotel with cozy rooms that fulfill the feline desire for tight spaces? A bowling alley where cats can knock pins over to their hearts’ content? A town park? A golf course filled with sand traps for…uh, never mind that last idea.
Here are some shots of the hotel lobby, elevator and guest rooms:
And here’s Xing showing off the impressive scale of Cat Town. He says he’s got a lot more room to build, so we won’t see an end to these impressive projects any time soon.
A Kardashian admitted she had her cats declawed, but wouldn’t take responsibility. People who are thinking of adopting should know declawing is mutilation and makes cats miserable.
Khloe Kardashian says she regrets having her cats declawed, admitting on her podcast this week that the kitties are “miserable” since she had them mutilated.
But she stopped short of taking responsibility, electing to blame an unnamed party for allegedly telling her it was okay to have her cats’ toes amputated at the first knuckle.
“I was really misadvised about getting my cats declawed. I’ve never owned cats before. I didn’t even know that was a thing. I feel really, really terrible that I did go in this direction,” Kardashian said.
Look, I get it. Learning stuff is, like, hard. If only someone would invent a worldwide network, an “internet” if you will, where one might access the entire sum of human knowledge with but a few keystrokes!
In the absence of such a miraculous technology, how are we to know that chopping off a cat’s toes will cause them a lifetime of pain and discomfort?
Credit: Instagram
Sarcasm aside, I’m not interested in going on at length about the Kardashians or litigating this decision online. Plenty of people are doing that. There’s really no point.
What I am concerned about is the unfortunate fact that the Kardashians have influence.
Because Kardashian isn’t taking responsibility, and she brought up her decision to declaw her cats in the context of her feelings and her regret, she is not effectively communicating why declawing is wrong, nor what it does to cats.
If you don’t know what it is, you should know declawing is mutilation. It is the amputation of your cat’s toes at the first knuckle.
It permanently changes a cat’s gait, leading to early onset arthritis. It makes simple tasks like walking and using the litter box painful.
It causes psychological problems because claws are a cat’s first and primary defense. Without them, cats feel vulnerable. That can manifest in several different ways, leading them to become fearful, or to become quick to bite because they have no other options.
Khloe Kardashian was previously caught “face tuning” her cats, meaning she applied filters to them to make them look different.
Declawing is cruel, barbaric and has no place in a civilized society. It is illegal in most of the world, and US states are finally joining civilization with laws banning the procedure. Kardashian lives in California, where it is banned, so presumably she had it done before the ban or despite it. If it’s the latter, the chances of her facing legal consequences are slim to none.
If you’re worried about protecting furniture, there are much better options, but you should also know cats have normal behaviors that don’t always align with the concept of a perfectly-kept house. Your cat will test boundaries, throw up when she’s had too much food too fast, knock things over, get into places you never thought he’d get into, cough up hairballs and more.
You will be surprised. Things will be broken.
But that’s part of the feline appeal: they’re curious, playful animals, and you have to earn their trust. Once you do, they’ll be your pals for life — and you don’t want to betray that trust by making life miserable for them.
A Kansas City family is in anguish after an Amazon delivery driver stole their senior cat, beginning a sequence of events that led to his death. Once again, Amazon treated the situation like a routine customer service issue.
At this point it feels like the certainties in life are death, taxes and Amazon delivery drivers stealing pets.
If there’s a fourth, it’s Amazon’s predictably awful response to customers whose cats and dogs are stolen by the company’s drivers. Whether asking distraught customers how much the pet was worth, offering credit, or offering to send stuffed animals as replacements, Amazon has generally been unhelpful. This is a pattern going back years now and Amazon still hasn’t come up with a protocol to handle these situations.
A recurring problem is that Amazon treats the incidents like regular customer service complaints. Their customer service representatives aren’t trained for the possibility, they are apparently reluctant to go off-script, and the result is that the reps treat the missing pets like fungible products, as if these situations can be rectified by sending a replacement or reimbursing a customer.
That’s the last thing anyone wants to hear. Pets are companions, considered family by most Americans who have cats and dogs in their homes. Hearing “And how much would you say Fluffy’s worth?” exacerbates the frustration and worry.
In the latest incident, surveillance footage shows an Amazon driver picking up a cat named Sidney from his family’s driveway in Kansas City on April 20. At 16 years old, dependent on medication with his health failing, Sidney was near the end of his life, Marsha Reeves told the local Fox affiliate.
Sidney
“I knew his time was near, and I just wanted him to be comfortable and at home when it came,” she said.
Because of the driver’s actions, Sidney’s last days were spent in distress and confusion, separated from the people who loved him. The driver surrendered him to a shelter the next day, and Sidney was bounced between shelters and animal control with his family frantically trying to track him when a veterinarian at a rescue group euthanized him.
“I cannot even imagine what he was thinking,” she said. “He did not deserve to die on a metal table with strangers poking him. He should have been at home in my arms when he took his last breath.”
Marsha Reeves, Sidney’s human
It’s a tragic and horrific end for a cat whose family wanted to fill his last days with love. They’re denied closure, and to add to the awfulness of the situation, Reeves said the mega-corporation was not helpful, at first not admitting one of its drivers took the cat, then slow-walking the response.
“I cannot even imagine what he was thinking,” Reeves said. “He did not deserve to die on a metal table with strangers poking him. He should have been at home in my arms when he took his last breath.”
We’ve written about this before, and previous cases make it clear: people who find themselves in this situation should not wait for Amazon (or any other company) to handle it, because it’s not a priority for them. In every case in which a family has successfully regained their cat, the common denominator was they took it upon themselves to lead the effort and were relentless in searching, posting flyers locally, rallying support online and making noise in local media. Sometimes even that’s not enough, but it increases the odds of a happy reunion by orders of magnitude compared to putting faith in a corporation and police.
In this case, there’s been no word from Amazon about consequences for the driver or changes to the way the company trains its delivery workforce and customer service representatives.
The driver “needs to come with a supervisor and face me and my family members who this has affected,” Reeves told the local Fox affiliate. “I think Amazon needs to be held accountable. I think this young woman needs to be held accountable. She needs to realize that there are consequences to her decision making.”
So far the company hasn’t admitted wrongdoing or offered an apology, which is consistent with cases in the past involving drivers who have stolen pets.
“Why won’t Amazon just come out and say ‘we screwed up?’”
Vigilantism against stray cats and their caretakers is on the rise in Australia and New Zealand amid increasingly pitched rhetoric from conservationists who say felines are responsible for driving other species to extinction.
Antone Martinho-Truswell wants to get rid of every free-range cat in his native Australia and says “it’s time we outlawed pet cats” as well.
The University of Sydney academic, who styles himself as a zoologist and makes impossible claims about the number of animals supposedly killed by felines every year, doesn’t mince words when presenting his argument, which boils down to a logical fallacy. He says he’s an expert, he says cats must be driven to extinction, ergo it must happen.
“Your cat is a killer and it cannot be permitted to live here,” Martinho-Truswell said.
With rhetoric like that, and special interests groups claiming cats are the primary force behind the pending extinctions of native flora and fauna, it’s not a surprise when people think they should take the problem into their own hands. In Australia and New Zealand we’ve already seen vigilantes who fail at hiding their joy at killing felines, and now volunteers helping cats have to worry about their physical safety.
A colony manager and two other volunteers were feeding strays in western Sydney on April 17 when a man in a gold Nissan stopped and asked them if they were helping the cats.
When they said they were, the man became violent and attacked the colony manager, a 31-year-old woman, and a volunteer who tried to protect her, a 33-year-old man who was knocked unconscious by the suspect, police said. The man drove off before officers arrived.
The victims were treated at a local hospital. Police have a description of the suspect and a license plate number, according to local media in Sydney, but it isn’t clear if they know his identity.
Credit: Cheng Shi Song/Pexels
A spokeswoman for the volunteer group, Community Helping Campbelltown Cats, told Sydney’s 9News that the resources the government makes available are “simply inadequate,” leaving volunteers to do the bulk of the work and fundraising for trap, neuter, return (TNR) and colony management.
“It is left to volunteer rescue groups and members of the community to do what they can to stop the breeding and get cats off the streets when they can,” she said. “These individuals risk their welfare day in day out; it is simply not right.”
As for the conservationists who advocate extreme measures, they need to dial it down a bit with the apocalyptic talk. There are productive ways to handle this problem, and they don’t involve demonizing animals for behaving the way nature intended, whipping people into a frenzy, and calling for the violent extinction of an entire species. Cat owners will need to be onboard for any effort to come up with a meaningful solution, and you won’t secure their cooperation if you’re constantly telling them their companion animals are “murderers” who need to be killed.
From TNR to managing colonies and finding homes for friendly strays, cat ladies never stop working to make life better for our furry friends.
Hat tip to Mollie Hunt for making us aware of Cat Lady Day, an unofficial holiday that is part of an effort to reclaim the concept of the “cat lady” through positive association.
That’s a noble goal, and at PITB we’ve long scoffed at the idea that gender makes a difference in appreciating felines.
Cats are paradoxically regal yet derpy, imperious yet loving, and their antics are always amusing. Those are qualities that can appeal to anyone regardless of gender, nationality, age or cultural background.
But I think we should also use a day like this to thank the innumerable cat ladies in every city, town and village across the country who work tirelessly to improve the lives of strays, ferals and shelter cats.
These are the people who walk the walk, who do the hard work of TNR (trap, neuter, return), managing colonies, and protecting cats without homes from animals and mean-spirited humans.
Credit: cottonbro studio/Pexels
Cat ladies find homes for friendly strays, keep colony cats fed, and obtain veterinary care for the sick and injured.
More often than not, they provide help out of their own pockets when donations can’t cover all the costs.
Not only is it thankless work most of the time, but misguided bureaucrats sometimes take it upon themselves to make life more difficult for the cat ladies caring for local strays and ferals.
Yet these women persist because they’re driven by one thing — love for our furry friends.
Pain In The Bud 