We will be with our extended family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Buddy won’t be at the large family gatherings on Christmas Eve (allergic family members) or Christmas Day (three pooches will be present and obviously you can’t have a Buddinese tiger walking loose, for the dogs’ protection), but he will get to participate in the Christmas morning gift-giving among immediate family, he’ll get leftovers and he’s already had quite a bit of excitement with my nieces around.
We have Santa Claus, cats have Santa Claws. He’s chonky.
We hope all of you are able to be with family or friends this holiday, and that your gathering is delicious. Cookie spreads are important, people! It’s not all about hors d’oeuvres and main courses. You’ve gotta go out with a bang! And make turkey so the leftovers can be taken home to your cat, of course.
Thanks for helping PITB — and Buddy’s legend — grow in 2023. We’re looking forward to 2024 when Bud will continue his quest for world domination.
Gacek the cat went viral earlier this year, commanding international headlines as thousands of tourists rated him the top attraction in his home city in Poland.
But as the feline’s renown grew so did his waistline, with tourists flocking to his little wooden home on the street to snap photos of the rotund tuxedo and — despite signs pleading with them not to feed him — gift him with snacks.
That wasn’t the only problem. Gacek couldn’t walk around most of the time without an entourage following him, and in March a woman tried to snatch “The King of Szczecin” in broad daylight. Her catnapping caper was quickly canned when Gacek slipped out of her arms and took refuge under a car while his admirers turned their phone cameras on his would-be abductor, who sheepishly retreated to a cab and took off.
The last straw was a recent veterinary exam which found the tubby tux was as many as 11 pounds overweight.
Something had to change.
Szczecin’s municipal animal shelter took the little big guy in their care and put him on a diet while looking for an appropriate home for him. Now Gacek has been adopted, the shelter wrote in a series of social media posts, and he’s starting to slim down after six years of livin’ la vida treats with a steady stream of visitors to his court, seeking his favor with offerings of yums crunchy and soft.
That’s okay. He’ll be a different kind of king now, with dedicated servants to see to his needs 24/7.
And although his old wooden cat house was cozy, well-maintained and lined with blankets, it wasn’t enough to keep him warm on cold winter nights. Now he’ll snooze indoors with the option to use a human pillow should he desire additional body heat.
When we open our homes to furry overlords, we make a promise to give them good homes and care for them for life. Unfortunately not everyone sees it that way.
Stories about people abandoning perfectly healthy cats for inane reasons abound, but this week two particularly egregious cases from the same shelter caught my eye.
In the first case, Biscuit the cat was living comfortably in a home with “her cat best friend” when the latter feline died. Instead of realizing his surviving cat was distraught and taking special care of her, Biscuit’s former “owner” brought her to a shelter, saying he was surrendering her for euthanasia because his family “wanted a kitten” instead.
At 12 years old, Biscuit is “as sweet as a 12-week-old kitten,” staff at the Chesapeake Feline Association in Maryland wrote in a caption accompanying a video explaining her situation.
Thankfully the shelter did not honor the man’s wishes for Biscuit to be put down, and the video is starting to accumulate views and comments. Let’s hope Biscuit’s future loving human is among them, and I’d like to think the CFA told her former human to beat it and sent him home without the kitten he wanted.
If they give in, that poor kitten’s going to come back to them a few years down the line as the guy keeps trading ’em in for younger ones like Leonardo DiCaprio.
Ignoramus Surrenders Cat For Scratching A Carpet
Cats have claws. Cats scratch. They don’t do it to piss us off and they don’t do it to ruin furniture. They do it because they’re genetically hardwired to, because it served multiple functions when their ancestors were in the wild — including marking territory — and because it still has practical purposes, like wearing down claws that have grown too long.
Anyone who knows the most basic facts about cats knows this. Anyone who has done at least minimal research before bringing a feline home knows you need to provide kitty with scratchers and redirect him to them when he goes for another object.
And if you have furniture you really want to protect, you make arrangements before bringing your new friend home, whether that means up-armoring a couch with scratch guards, putting soft nail caps on kitty’s claws, keeping her out of a certain room or one of many other potential solutions.
What you don’t do is adopt a cat, give him a home for six months, then take him back because he scratched your carpet.
Doing that makes you a jerk.
I’m not sure if general ignorance is the problem here, or if people see cute felines on Instagram et al, imagine unicorns and rainbows and bright-eyed kittens poking out of baskets, and never even think about the fact that felis catus is an animal, not a Pokemon or a stuffed toy.
In any case, surrender for acting like a cat is exactly what happened to Finnegan, a gray and white tabby who “melt[s] in your arm and give[s] you all the love,” shelter staff wrote.
The little guy’s offense? Scratching a carpet. Shelter staff really tried to make it work: They offered to put nail caps on Finnegan every month at no charge and his humans still said no.
His ordeal has not soured him on people, thankfully. A video from the shelter shows him loving massages from volunteers at the shelter, and he looks like an incredibly chill little dude. He deserves a home where people love him.
You can find Biscuit, Finnegan and lots of other adoptable cats on the shelter’s Petfinder page and website.
Finnegan, seen here in stills from a video, was surrendered by his people for the crime of behaving like a cat.
A historian casts doubt on tales of widespread cat purging, tracing the origin of the claims to a novel published in the 1990s.
The Washington Post has a new guide for taking better photos of cats and dogs with some solid advice for people using smartphones as well as more traditional cameras.
The article is in front of the paywall so you don’t need a subscription to view it, and it emphasizes a few major points I’ve often written about when people ask me how I’ve been able to get certain shots of Bud:
Always let your cat get used to the camera, whether she sniffs it, head butts it or just wants to see it up close. Let her check it out and lose interest and then it becomes just another thing, allowing you to begin capturing more candid-style photos.
Bribe ’em: Your cat’s a model and deserves compensation. A few treats will keep him hanging around and happy as you snap away.
Pay attention to the lighting, especially if you’re shooting a black cat or a kitty with a darker coat pattern. Unless you’re going for a silhouette or a sunrise behind your furry friend, keep your cat facing to the right or left of the primary light source so you’re getting light and shadow to put those feline features in relief. It’s also worth taking a close look at how professional photographers shoot melanistic jaguars and leopards, carefully using light to highlight their features. In the right conditions their rosettes are still visible, they’re just slightly different shades of black. While house cats don’t have rosettes, the same attention to light and detail can help pick out the contours of their beautiful coats.
Under the right light conditions, the contours, spots and rosettes of a black jaguar are visible in beautiful detail. Credit: Edin Zoo/Wikimedia Commons
Did People Really Slaughter Cats During The Plague?
It’s often claimed that Europeans murdered felines en masse during the waves of Black Plague that devastated Europe during the Dark Ages, visiting countless cruelties on cats while inadvertently amplifying the spread by nearly wiping out disease-carrying rodents’ most effective predators.
In a new post that closely examines documents and evidence from burial sites of the era, Snopes concludes there was much less cat-killing than claimed, and the claims of widespread purging at the hands of pandemic-weary zealots have their roots in a 90s novel, which was then circulated on the web as fact.
Sites where as many as 79 sets of cat bones from the era were found show clear signs that the animals were slaughtered for their fur, and a singular slaughter in 1730s Paris often cited as proof is not only a few centuries off but was also motivated by class hatred, not fears of the plague.
While the papal bull Vox In Rama was real, and a famously zealous inquisitor really did make the preposterous claim that Satanists had a ritual that involved literally kissing the asses of black cats, the pope never called on anyone to kill felines and there’s no evidence that people took it upon themselves to do so. There was plenty of other unbelievable superstitious idiocy that led to the deaths of animals at the time, including the practice of putting animals on trial for alleged crimes, but Europeans weren’t rampaging through towns and killing cats.
Snopes quotes Welsh historian Mike Dash, who says the modern claims of widespread cat-killing are “almost certainly a modern internet-based fabrication.”
Max didn’t like his new “home” in a barn in Amish country and returned to the man who first showed him kindness.
Brad Bennett said Max the stray was in a bad way when he showed up.
The young cat was malnourished, missing patches of fur and was suffering from infections when Bennett saw him on the property of a western Pennsylvania home where he works as a personal caretaker, first via trail cameras set up to catch images of local wildlife, then in person.
The orange tabby cat was drawn by stale cat food Bennett had thrown out, but he was extremely cautious. He hissed at Bennett the first time the 58-year-old approached him and tried to attack him.
Bennett, who thinks Max may have been abused in the past, earned the stray’s trust and was eventually able to deworm him and give him flea and tick medication, he told local newspaper the Tribune-Democrat.
“I started feeding him and working with him,” Bennett told the paper. “Three months later, [he] was on my lap with me on the swing.”
Max the cat. Credit: Bill Bennett
Bennett, who has two cats of his own, said he couldn’t afford to keep Max because he was “tapped out” by thousands of dollars in veterinary bills, but he knew the little guy needed a home before winter so he made arrangements to take him to a nearby Amish farm which was in need of a mouser.
Max clearly wasn’t taken with the farm because he walked five miles and crossed a major interstate (376) to get back to the home where Bennett works — in one day.
“I kept having feelings of guilt about sending [him] off, not knowing what was going to happen,” Bennett said. “Part of me was kind of excited to see him.”
Bennett knew he couldn’t send Max back to the farm. After he wrote a Facebook post about Max’s situation, Jill Powell, a volunteer with Homeless Cat Management in Pittsburgh, drove about an hour from Pittsburgh to pick Max up. He’ll stay with a foster family until Powell and her organization can find him a forever home.
Whoever opens their home to him will find a grateful cat who knows what it’s like to struggle on his own.
“I was able to hold him, he meows and he reaches for petting,” Powell said. “He seems very sweet.”
Pain In The Bud 