Category: cat safety

Actress Shares Why She’s A ‘Crazy Cat Lady,’ PLUS: Waymo Denies Responsibility For SF Cat’s Death

Waymo says KitKat “darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away” in the accident that killed the popular bodega cat.

Last week when we wrote about a San Francisco cat hit by an autonomous taxi, the Google subsidiary that produces the cabs hadn’t responded to media requests for comment.

Now Waymo has confirmed one of its driverless taxis did strike KitKat late on the night of Oct. 27, but claims the nine-year-old tabby got in the car’s way as it began to move. Here’s Waymo’s statement:

“The trust and the safety of the communities we serve is our highest priority. We reviewed this, and while our vehicle was stopped to pick up passengers, a nearby cat darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away. We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and the community who knew and loved him, and we will be making a donation to a local animal rights organization in his honor.”

People in the neighborhood where KitKat was a fixture are not happy with the response. Per Mission Local: “Waymo did not reply to a request to review the video, and did not say how much it would donate or what group would receive the gift.”

Mission Local noted witnesses gave slightly different accounts of the collision, saying KitKit was in front of the taxi for several seconds before it began moving.

As testament to how well-known and beloved KitKat was, there’s now a considerably sized memorial to him in front of the store he called home, with flowers, candles, drawings of KitKit and even cans of cat foot left on the spot. The San Francisco Chronicle has photos of the memorial.

KitKat featured prominently on Instagram, where photos show him hanging out with customers, patrolling the sidewalk in front of the store, and curling up for naps on the counter. Credit: https://www.instagram.com/randasmarket/

The paper also quotes a local who explained the outpouring of grief: “If you’re not a 16th Street regular this can seem silly, but this cat meant so much to this community. If you knew KitKat, you’d understand.”

KitKat’s death has soured more people on Waymo, with the Chronicle noting it “struck an emotional nerve in a neighborhood already wary of driverless cars weaving through its crowded streets.”

Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company), operates driverless fleets in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin (TX) and Atlanta, with plans to offer automated taxi service in Washington, D.C., and Miami.

“When they show up in your yard and they need you, we can’t look away.”

As someone who avoids medical dramas like the plague, I’m not familiar with Wendi McLendon-Covey’s work, but I’m sure many PITB readers will know the St. Denis Medical star. In an interview, McLendon-Covey talks about rescuing cats, earning their trust, and getting satisfaction from knowing she’s improving one life at a time.

The actress with one of her feline friends. Credit: https://www.instagram.com/wendimclendoncovey/

Most recently she’s been earning trust with a stray she calls Harvey, saying it’s “taken me forever to bond with him” and she still has work to do before he trusts her enough to go indoors.

Cats, she said, are “cuddly, they’re cute, they’re hilarious. They all have their different personalities and they have their little meetings and their little way of talking to each other, and it’s just fascinating to watch. So that’s a hot Friday night for me, is just throwing treats to the cats.”

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Declawing Banned: Rhode Island Becomes 5th State To End Cruel Procedure

Rhode Island’s law has some teeth: veterinarians who violate it will have their licenses suspended or revoked.

Five down, forty five to go.

With a new law going into effect in the fall, Rhode Island joins New York, Maryland, Virginia and Massachusetts in banning the declawing of cats.

Declawing may sound like a sort of kitty manicure, but the neutral name disguises a cruel form of elective mutilation that involves amputating a cat’s toes at the first knuckle.

It’s the equivalent of chopping off 1/3 of each finger, all to prevent potential damage to inanimate objects like furniture.

“Declawing is painful, unnecessary and inhumane. It’s no way to treat any pet,” said Rhode Island state Sen. Melissa Murray, one of the bill’s co-sponsors. “Fortunately, there has been growing awareness of the risks and cruelty of declawing. Our state must recognize that declawing is animal abuse and prohibit it altogether.”

Rhode Island’s new law is more prohibitive than some of the others: veterinarians who declaw cats once the law goes into effect on Sept. 1 will have their licenses suspended or revoked entirely.

Declawing doesn’t “just” cause short term pain from the procedure. It forces cats to change the way they walk and move in general, altering their gaits. As a result, declawing leads to early onset arthritis among a host of other medical problems.

Declawing also results in psychological and behavioral problems. Cats who are declawed often become depressed, and they’re more likely to avoid the litter box since standing on litter is painful for them.

Since the procedure also takes away their primary defensive mechanism, declawed cats are much more likely to bite, which along with litter box avoidance means they’re more likely to end up abandoned in shelters.

Bud’s got this one, which is sold as the Ultimate Scratcher, which is about 3 feet tall and sturdy, offering an optimal place for cats to literally scratch their itch.

Cats should never be declawed!

There are several viable options for keeping them from scratching furniture, including nail caps and redirecting them to scratchers. The latter are a bare necessity if you have a cat, as scratching is a natural feline behavior and our little friends will find something to scratch if we don’t provide them with appropriate scratching surfaces.

Since cats like to stretch while they scratch, I highly recommend getting a large tower scratcher with a secure base. Bud has one, he uses it constantly, and he does not touch the couch or the chair in the living room, nor does he touch any other furniture. It can be done, it just requires patience and consistent redirecting, with positive encouragement.

Negative reinforcement, such as yelling at your cat, will not achieve results. The only thing it will accomplish is damaging your relationship and trust with your cat.

Since New York became the first state to ban declawing in 2019, more states have considered similar legislation. Although routinely opposed by state Veterinary Medical Associations — special interest groups that represent a portion of veterinarians who see declawing as a reliable money-maker — lawmakers have allied with veterinarians in support of bans, as well as groups like the Humane Society, the SPCA, the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the Paw Project to overcome opposition and get bills passed.

Let’s hope the trend of declawing bans continues.

‘Swift And Lethal’: Cats Have No Defense Against Bird Flu, And It Keeps Showing Up In Their Food

Bird flu is killing cats domestic and wild, in captivity and in nature. Experts are sounding the alarm, warning people not to feed their cats raw food, allow them to drink milk, or let them roam outside where they can easily catch the virus by going after small prey.

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, the clinical name for bird flu, is a danger to all animals, but for cats it’s a virtual death sentence.

Only a handful have survived infection thanks primarily to early diagnosis, intervention and round-the-clock veterinary care. In the vast majority of cases, the virus burns through its feline victims in three or four days.

Bird flu has become even more deadly for felines of late. Of the 126 domestic cats killed by H5N1 since 2022, according to the US Department of Agriculture, half of them have have died in 2025 — and it’s only been three months.

Notably, that total doesn’t include captive wild cats and big cats, such as the 20 pumas, bobcats, tigers and other felids who succumbed to the virus at the Wild Felid Advocacy Center, a sanctuary in Washington state. Nor does it include cats living in the wild, like two pumas in the same state that died in December.

To appreciate the true scope of the problem, the more illuminating statistic may be 82 million, which is the number of chickens “culled” — killed — in the US since 2022 because they were infected or raised at facilities where other birds tested positive for the virus.

Factory farming compounds the matter: more than 1.6 million egg-laying hens and 337,000 “pullets” — chickens less than a year old — were “depopulated” at a single facility in Texas last year. As staggering as those numbers are, Texas’s Department of Agriculture noted the figure merely “accounts for approximately 3.6% of the company’s total flock.”

Per the USDA:

“To provide context on the overall size of the U.S. poultry flock, there are more than 378.5 million egg-laying chickens in the United States. In 2023, more than 9.4 billion broiler chickens and 218 million turkeys were processed in the United States.”

If there ever was an example of putting too many eggs in one basket, this is it. American food supplies are vulnerable with so much concentrated in the hands of so few companies, a lesson the general public is learning the hard way now after eggs peaked at record prices last month. Things have cooled off a bit since then, but shoppers aren’t getting any benefit as grocery chains continue to charge a premium: the nationwide average for a dozen eggs was $5.90 in February, but stores in some states are still charging $10 or more.

It also raises questions about the sustainability and ethics of eating animals. Humans slaughter more than 75 billion chickens every year, and projections indicate there will be three billion more of us by the mid-2080s.

Meat from infected chickens can still end up in your cat’s bowl

Media reports about culling give the impression that those birds are removed from the food chain, but that’s not entirely true. The pet food industry has always cut corners by harvesting meat not fit for human consumption, a category that includes everything from the carcasses of sick animals, to “meat by-products” that can include beaks, hooves, eyes, hearts and other organs.

So while the culled chickens won’t show up in shrink wrap at the grocery store, they are making it into the pet food supply chain. Most pet food is “rendered,” cooked at such high temperatures that potential pathogens have been destroyed.

But an increasingly bigger slice of the market has been claimed by companies selling “premium” raw food — and that’s been the primary infection vector for domestic cats, particularly indoor cats who otherwise would have little or no exposure to the virus. (Cats who spend time outdoors can catch bird flu by preying on infected animals, just as wild cats do, and barn cats have caught it by drinking the milk of infected cattle.)

Cats are mostly lactose intolerant, and should not be given cow’s milk, despite the common misconception that it’s healthy for them.

“The animals that were depopulated could potentially have ended up in the food chain for pets,” Laura Goodman, an assistant professor at Cornell University’s Baker Institute for Animal Health, told NBC News. “It’s not uncommon for substandard meat to end up in the pet food chain.”

That’s what happened to Tim Hanson’s beloved cat, Kira, who died in February after eating raw food from a company called Wild Coast. The company has recalled the product, Boneless Free Range Chicken Recipe. It’s one of four recalls in the last month alone.

Hudson is suing Wild Coast for the veterinary bills — about $8,000 — and said he was devastated that Kira, whom he called “the happiest cat,” is gone. He said he thought he was doing right by her by feeding her the expensive raw food, but now urges people to avoid feeding their cats raw food at all costs.

“I don’t want any more cats dying,” he said. “Hopefully people can learn from Kira’s passing.”

Top image via Pexels. All other images via Wikimedia Commons

Feeding Your Cat Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Is Not Funny

A woman taunts her cat with ultra-processed snacks, then laughs at his disgusted reaction when he gets a taste. The “cute” video has gone viral.

From the bowels of TikTok comes the latest “cute” video of an attention monger abusing her cat, this time by feeding him Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

The user opened the bag in front of Butters the cat, waved the Cheetos in his face, held them up to his nose, then feebly protested “These are my snacks! It’s spicy!” after getting the little dude interested.

She allowed Butters to eat Cheetos from her hand and lick her fingers, and his reaction is about what you’d expect from an obligate carnivore who just ate ultra-processed food made from cheap corn filler, chili powder, cayenne pepper, and cancer-causing artificial food dyes. He’s disgusted and uncomfortable.

“You can’t have these! Let me wave them in your face and taunt you, so you know you can’t have them! Haha, isn’t that clever?”

The difference is, Butters can’t guzzle milk or water to wash the taste away, so he settles for angrily swatting at his human while she laughs at him.

The woman thought her video was so clever, she’s shared it online and is enjoying the cheap dopamine hit that comes with accumulating internet points, aka likes.

Here’s a question for people who make social media “content” at the expense of their pets: how many likes are worth destroying the trust between you and your cat(s)?

I’m sure some people think I’m a scold, but all it takes is one clown to start a viral trend, and then all of a sudden you have thousands of people, all of them desperate for validation from strangers on the internet, foisting Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Takis on their unsuspecting cats. As a general rule, the dumbest and most abusive trends go viral.

UK Pol Resigns After He Was Filmed Trying To Kill Cat With Explosives

The cat survived but her personality has radically changed from loving and affectionate to distant and wary, her human said.

A councilman in a rural UK village resigned from his post and is the subject of renewed police scrutiny after allegedly trying to blow up a neighbor’s cat twice in 2023.

Councillor James Garnor was reportedly trying to stop the cat from climbing into a bird feeder, and decided the best way to do it was to rig the feeder with explosives and lure the curious feline in, according to a report on UK broadcaster LBC’s website.

Garnor was apparently so amused by his handiwork that he distributed video of the incidents to his friends. The footage shows a cat named Suki leaping onto the bird feeder on April 9, 2023, and nibbling on some of the bird feed before the explosive detonated. An injured Suki took off immediately and ran home.

She “came home one day missing her whiskers on her face – they looked like they’d been dissolved – so I put a post in my local community page on Facebook… just to warn people in case there was something she’d rolled in that had dissolved them,” said Suki’s human, a woman named Nikki.

Suki’s whiskers were singed off by the heat from the explosion. Image credit: Provided by owner to LBC News

“But somebody contacted me to tell me it wasn’t what I thought it was, that somebody had actually blown my cat up – and that it was my neighbour and local councillor. It made me feel physically sick.”

After she received the video, Nikki filed a complaint with local police, who elected not to arrest Garnor. However, after a second video surfaced with a clearer view of Garnor’s alleged actions, police responded to the public outcry and said they were reviewing the case again.

Per LBC, which broke the story:

“The incident is one of at least two occasions that cats in Whittlebury, Northamptonshire, were allegedly targeted by Councillor James Garnor in 2023 using remote-detonated explosives.”

It’s not clear if the new video shows a second attempt, or a different angle on the first. Garnor “was dealt with using anti-social behavior legislation,” a type of civil admonishment usually associated with things like noise complaints, littering and damaging public property, not trying to kill an animal.

Still images from a video showing Garnor allegedly setting off an explosion targeting Suki the cat. Credit: Photos provided by owner to LBC

Garnor resigned from his post on Feb. 7, and the council distanced itself from him, saying its members “understand the concerns raised by the community and want to assure everyone that we take all matters of animal welfare seriously.”

That hasn’t mollified people living in the small community, who are wondering why police didn’t press charges the first time they were presented with evidence of the attempt on Suki’s life. 

“You can clearly see the videos have been slowed down [and] edited. It’s very set-up: the animal has been enticed on the bird table with food whilst said individual was sitting there with the detonator waiting for [the cat] to appear,” a neighbor told LBC. “He is a member of our parish council, so it makes you worry what decisions are being made there by the individual… he has offered no apology [and] shown no remorse.”

In the meantime, Suki has been permanently impacted by the incidents. The tabby was affectionate and friendly, Nikki said, wrapping her little body “like a scarf around your neck.”

“Now she very rarely comes near you, and if she does, she’s got her claws out – she hisses, she growls,” Nikki added. “She’s not the loving cat she used to be – and I don’t blame her… the change in her happened pretty much overnight.”