cat stories – Pain In The Bud

Moms Are The Best! Happy Mother’s Day!

Let your mom know you love her today!

I have a lame joke whenever my mom says something like “I’m a pretty good mom, right?”

I say “Sure, if you don’t count like 4,479 other moms,” often going through a list of mothers we know, including her friends, and ranking her below all of them.

But of course she knows I love her wholeheartedly and consider her the best mom, not “just” out of love but also recognition that she had a very difficult job as a single mom to my brother and I. It couldn’t have been easy raising two idiots like us.

My brother turned out to be a good dude, a well-respected member of the community and someone people look up to, and I turned out to be…well, me, but she shouldn’t hold that against herself. One out of two ain’t bad!

Moms make the world work. To be a good mother is to be utterly selfless, to always put your children first no matter how tired you are or how bad of a day you’re having. Moms give of themselves to ensure their children grow up happy, healthy and with a decent shot at life.

From nursing us and wiping our behinds as helpless babies, to soothing us when we scrape our knees as toddlers, to guiding us as we discover the world as kids, tolerating our insistence that we Know Everything as teenagers, and reassuring us during moments of uncertainty as adults, moms are always there for us and want the best for us.

Cats are extraordinary mothers to their kittens, and they don’t have it easy, especially if they are strays or ferals. Their love for their babies is so strong, they’re willing to run into raging fires for them. I’ll never forget a story one reader told me about her adopted stray, Snowy, who delivered kittens shortly after securing her new indoor home. Snowy died defending her babies from a pair of dogs who tried to get at them while they were on a back porch. The woman kept Snowy’s daughter and found good homes for the other kittens.

I’ve blogged about this before, but while I do not call myself Bud’s “dad,” and prefer to think of us as best pals, enablers, and co-conspirators in our ridiculous plots for world domination, I do have parental feelings for my Little Buddy, and consider it my privilege to be his caretaker until the day he finally hits mythical felid maturity and turns into a hulking and fearsome tiger. (Do NOT tell him it’s not going to happen, he is absolutely convinced it’ll be any time now. He’ll be yuge and orange, just you wait!)

But of course he would not be such a fine young Buddy if not for his feline mom, who may not have smacked him upside the head as much as was probably warranted, but nonetheless admirably prepared him to take over his forever home and install himself as King.

So to all the moms out there, human and feline, we love you and we’re eternally grateful for your love.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Kitten Buddy lounging in my lap, probably about 10 weeks old.

Woman Rescues Kitten Found In Bucket Of Glue, Now He’s Her New Buddy

Little Elmer likely wouldn’t have survived more than a few hours if a Good Samaritan hadn’t found him and brought him to the Humane Society.

Leah Owens and Elmer the kitten have had a rough time of it lately, but now that circumstances have brought them together, both their lives have improved.

Owens, 72, lost her husband to blood cancer late last year and has been feeling lonely. She has three cats, but they’re independent little rascals.

Then Elmer came along.

The gray tabby kitten, who has a very Buddesian look about him, was rushed to the North Texas Humane Society about two weeks ago by a Good Samaritan who found the little guy submerged in a bucket of industrial glue.

Elmer when he was covered in glue, left, and looking healthy and happy now, right. Credit: Humane Society of North Texas

After dish soap and several other substances failed to get the glue out of Elmer’s fur, Owens stepped in and gave the kitten a bath in canola oil.

Removing the super sticky substance required round-the-clock care, with Owens returning Elmer to his oil bath and massaging the glue out of his fur by hand.

Elmer was so relieved, he now considers massages a several times daily requirement and nudges Owens to give him the spa treatment.

Staff at the Humane Society say they’re not sure if Elmer fell into the glue bucket or if someone tossed him into it. He’s about two months old.

Elmer resembles a certain gray tabby and even has a similar tuft of white fur on his chest. Credit: North Texas Humane Society

As stories like this always do, Elmer’s plight pulled on the heartstrings of potential adopters, but Elmer and Owens have grown quite fond of each other.

Now it’s official: Owens’ home is Elmer’s forever home, and she’s his caretaker/masseuse for life.

Great job, Leah Owens! And watch out, gray tabbies can be quite demanding, but they also have big hearts.

Home Inspector Freaked Out By Large Maine Coon [VIDEO]

The surprised home inspector made a phone call from inside the owner’s living room, reporting “an intimidatingly large cat.”

Home camera footage shows a housing inspector who enters a family’s living room and stops dead in his tracks because he sees…a Maine Coon?!

The inspector was concerned enough that he phoned back to the office to report an “intimidatingly large cat.”

“I’m doing a home inspection now and, like, there’s this cat here, and it’s a very large size cat,” he tells the person on the other end of the line. “You know how you see a cat and they have a cute face? This cat is like… I might eat you later.”

What’d he think it was, a lynx?

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Of course we get this sort of thing all the time here at Casa de Buddy. Oftentimes people will hear Little Buddy’s terrifying roar and cast an uncertain glance my way.

“Dude, you got Elmo locked in a room or something?”

Followed inevitably by Bud’s indignant reply.

“I do NOT sound like Elmo! I’m a tiger, I just haven’t hit my growth spurt yet.”

So there you have it. Weird things can happen when you have a huge cat in your home…or one who sounds like Elmo.

In Tehran A Woman And Her Cat, Both Terrified, Try To Survive The War

American news networks show us crowds chanting “Death to America!” but the majority of Iranians are just like us.

As our president threatens to erase civilizations, tells the Pope what Christianity is about, and shares AI images of himself as Jesus, it’s important to remember what’s happening in Iran is a real war with real victims, something easy to lose sight of amid all the absurdity.

A first-person account in al Jazeera reminds us of the human and animal suffering caused by war. Even when people aren’t physically impacted, the mental strain of living in a city under attack is considerable, and their poor animals have no idea what’s going on.

One thing you’ll rarely see on American networks is an acknowledgement that the vast majority of Iranians are just like us.

Before the war, they had open access to an uncensored internet. Despite the oppressive theocratic government, it’s easy for Iranians to get TV networks from outside their country. The Iranian regime was never as adept at controlling information as some of its contemporaries.

The people of Iran are overwhelmingly secular, fully aware of what’s happening, and they have long been sick of their government.

The aftermath of a US airstrike on a school in Minab, Iran, that killed 120 young girls and 156 people overall. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

For them it must be a Farenheit 451 moment, watching footage of the bombing while explosions rumble around them. Survival is down to luck. The missile you see streaking toward your city on TV could be the one that hits your apartment building.

To remind us of what’s happening where the bombs are landing, here’s Sana, a 27-year-old woman from Tehran, describing the first night of the war:

“Seven or eight more explosions followed. They were bombing near Mehrabad airport, close to us. I genuinely thought I was going to die.

When I finally went back upstairs, my cat was hiding in the wardrobe, trembling. My family and boyfriend had been calling and texting, without response, for hours, watching the news reports about strikes near the airport and imagining the worst.“

I recommend reading the rest, if for nothing else than to be reminded that Sana is so normal, so much like us.

Header image of Tehran under attack at night via Wikimedia Commons

Expert Napper Is Cat Sanctuary’s Best Volunteer

Terry Lauerman literally sleeps on the job, and cats love him for it.

Seven years ago, Terry Lauerman and the Safe Haven Cat Sanctuary went viral.

Lauerman, then 75, walked into the Green Bay, Wisconsin, rescue one day and told the staff he liked to brush cats. They welcomed him as a volunteer, he immediately curled up with a cat — and fell asleep.

Since then, Lauerman’s been going to Safe Haven every day, brushing his feline friends, then yawning and passing out with a cat in his arms.

From a CBS News report in 2018:

Lauerman usually spends an hour sleeping on the couch with a cat, then wakes up and moves to another couch to nap with the next cat, WCCO reports. He did this for six months straight before Feldhausen eventually told him he had become an official volunteer and had him fill out a form.

Now CBS went back to check on Lauerman and the shelter. He’s still at it, napping away the hours with the shelter’s cats, giving a comfort they wouldn’t normally have until finding their forever homes.

“We’re very lucky that he walked in here,” said Elizabeth Feldhausen, Safe Haven’s executive director.

Lauerman, who is also a brother at a nearby abbey, said he senses God in our four-legged friends, which is a notion he probably shouldn’t share with them lest they become even more imperious.

“I’ve always been a cat person,” he said. “To me it’s a blessing to be touched by creation.”

As a CBS reporter put it: “You sleep on the job.”

“Yes,” Lauerman said, “that’s exactly it.”

Bud and I salute Mr. Lauerman. Years ago we heard a friend observe that “there are two kinds of people in the world: those who take naps, and those who don’t even understand how that’s possible.”

At the time, I agreed with her. But napping starts to seem like a great idea as the years pass by, and when you have a cat, well, sometimes you don’t have a choice. With 11 years now under my belt as Bud’s pillow, I can safely say there are few things more relaxing than opening a book, reading a few chapters as your little buddy curls up in your lap, and easing into some Zs.

Images via Safe Haven Cat Sanctuary. Header image via Pexels.