Tux the cat was found frightened, dehydrated and “covered in fleas.” It’s still not clear precisely what happened to her.
For a nightmarish 34-hour stretch, Palash Pandey thought he’d never see his cat again.
On Saturday afternoon the Austin man took a Lyft to an animal hospital in his city, got out of the car and was walking around to get his cat, Tux, out from under the passenger seat on the other side when the driver pulled away. Pandey ran after the car, yelling for the driver to stop.
“I like ran behind him, screaming like ‘wait, wait, wait,’ I banged on his windows hoping that he would notice me and just stop. But instead of that he just like, peeled off, he drove away,” Pandey told Austin NBC affiliate KXAN. “I don’t know how else you would perceive somebody who you just dropped off running behind you and banging on your windows and doors. I don’t know if there’s a charitable explanation for that.”
He sent a series of frantic messages to the driver through the Lyft app, offering to pay him to return Tux and begging for information, but didn’t hear back until several hours later when the driver texted: “she isn’t there, sorry”.
You're right. The initial response was awful. Since then, we've done a lot behind the scenes, but I know we haven't communicated enough. We're very focused on this and will keep the community up to date.
The driver said he didn’t see the carrier or the cat in the car, and said several riders he’d picked up later didn’t mention a cat either.
After Lyft’s live customer service wasn’t helpful, Pandey turned to Twitter and Reddit, explaining the situation in detail, providing information and asking people in Austin to share a missing cat flyer with Tux’s photo and information.
In the meantime Lyft’s CEO got involved, apologized for the poor initial response and devoted significant resources to the incident. The company sent alerts to all of its drivers and riders in the Austin area, notified police and dispatched its own staff to help find Tux.
Canvassing the area around the animal hospital and following tips from the public, Lyft’s team eventually tracked her down at about 1:30 a.m. Monday morning, spotting her in the rear of an office building a little more than a mile from the animal hospital. Tux was frightened and climbed a flight of stairs when the Lyft staffers approached, but they were able to wrap her in a t-shirt and get her into a carrier they’d brought with them.
Pandey was overjoyed to be reunited with Tux and thanked everyone who helped looked for her, but in an update said she was scared, “covered in fleas and dehydrated.” He said she was eating, which was a good sign, and he planned to bring her to the veterinarian on Monday.
However, the fact that Tux was found alone without her carrier, dirty and wandering near a busy road indicates someone intentionally took her, then dumped her like a hot potato after realizing thousands of people, the police and a corporate response team were looking for her.
The Lyft driver isn’t suspected of anything but perhaps poor customer service. He told his employers that he didn’t stop when Pandey began banging on his windows because he didn’t realize there was a cat in the car and thought Pandey had become belligerent for some reason.
Pandey believes the person who took Tux will be caught.
“F—ing coward saw what was coming for him and left her on the side of the road,” Pandey wrote on Reddit in an update. “There’s plenty of cameras around, he’s not going to get away with this.”
Bob/Maui the cat was adopted by one family in 2013, went missing a few months later and was rescued by another family, who have had him for 10 years.
Bob the cat was adopted by Carol Holmes of Wichita, Kansas, in 2013.
Holmes says Bob disappeared a few months later and that was the last she saw of him.
Alex Streight, who also lived in Wichita at the time, found Bob in a bad way, malnourished and in “bad condition.”
“He was in horrible shape,” Streight told WRAL, a North Carolina TV news station. “I fed him, kept looking for [the] owner. I posted in the Wichita groups, but I never found anyone.”
Streight, who was 27 years old and pregnant at the time, said the veterinarian gave her no indication the cat belonged to anyone, and her efforts to find a potential owner were unsuccessful, so she paid for his veterinary fees, adopted him and named him Maui.
When Streight moved to North Carolina in 2015, she took Maui with her and he’s been living happily with her family ever since. In late August Maui slipped out of Streight’s North Carolina home. A neighbor picked him up and brought him to the vet, and the veterinarian realized there was a microchip. A scan showed Holmes as the cat’s owner.
Credit: Arina Krasnikova/Pexels
Now Bob/Maui is in the custody of Wake County (NC) Animal Control, whose staff don’t sound keen on returning the cat to Streight. They’ve called Wilson, who said she’d like to be reunited with Bob/Maui, and when Streight went to animal control to get her cat — returning with the veterinary records when they wouldn’t release him to her the first time — the staff called police.
“The cat is in protective custody where an investigation will begin,” Jennifer Federico, a veterinarian with the county animal control, told the station. “The cat is safe and isolated.”
Federico seems intent on making the situation more complicated than it needs to be, telling WRAL that “Microchipping proves ownership, so we have to take that into consideration, and launch a full investigation.”
Streight doesn’t see it that way. She wasn’t registered as the owner on the chip, but she’s got 10 years’ worth of veterinary records, a photograph of Maui laying on her couch the day he slipped out of her house, and photos and videos showing the tuxedo cat with her kids and other pets over the past decade.
“It’s just absurd to me that anyone would think to take someone’s pet away from the family that he’s been with for ten years,” Streight said.
We have to agree with Streight here, and it’s disturbing that animal control has not only made itself the arbiter of the cat’s fate, but has apparently decided that nominal ownership based on a microchipping from 2013 trumps the fact that Maui has been happily a part of Streight’s family for at least 95 percent of his life.
We feel for Wilson, but Streight did everything right: She looked for the cat’s family, posted about him online, cleaned him up and got him veterinary care, then adopted him when all indications were he didn’t have a home. With a decade’s worth of vet bills, photos and videos backing her up, it’s clear Maui is happy in her home, has been well cared-for, and if he could speak there’s little doubt about where he’d prefer to go.
She’s clearly bonded to the cat, and he to her: Only someone who really loves their furry friend regularly takes photos of their cat, even after 10 years. I can attest to that fact: Probably 60 or 70 percent of the photos on my phone are of Buddy, and I’d be devastated if we were separated.
What do you think? Should Bob/Maui be returned to Wilson or Streight?
Viking raiders, Roman ruins, an astronomical clock and a bishop who badly needed the services of a competent feline hunter: the story of the oldest known cat flap.
In 1598 Bishop Cotton arrived at his new post to find he had a serious rodent problem.
The new leader of Exeter Cathedral realized mice and rats were attracted to the animal fat used to lubricate the complex inner workings of the ancient structure’s astronomical clock, so he did what any sensible person would — he got himself a cat and had a flap installed so kitty had free reign of the church grounds and the chambers that held the hidden clockwork.
The newly-discovered details came to light thanks to the efforts of Diane Walker, the cathedral’s historian. One record shows the bishop paid a carpenter eight pence to cut a circular, cat-size hole in the heavy wooden door leading to the clockwork chamber, as well as ledgers showing the cat was officially on the church’s payroll.
“Back in the 14th and 15th Centuries we have records in the cathedral of payments of 13 pence a quarter for the cat and occasionally 26 pence a quarter for the cat,” Walker told the BBC. “We don’t know if that was double rations because they had been doing a good job or whether there were actually two cats.”
Credit: Exeter Cathedral
I love the idea of a happy cat licking her lips and cheerfully chowing down on medieval Temptations as reward for a job well done.
The cathedral has provided steady employment for felines, who still keep the rodents at bay on the grounds more than 400 years after Bishop Cotton hired his first mouser. Cute ginger tabby Audrey, pictured above, holds down the fort these days.
Exeter Cathedral has an interesting history besides its feline employees. It owes its existence to the vikings: the church decided to build a new cathedral as the bishop’s seat because his previous post was located near river routes and was vulnerable to raids from viking invaders.
Credit: Exeter Cathedral
Previously the site of several Roman structures, including a public bath house, the grounds were chosen because Exeter was a prosperous, bustling city and church officials thought it had a bright future.
The cornerstone was laid in 1112 and it took almost 300 years to finish, becoming one of the finest examples of a gothic cathedral in the Norman style.
The whole pet thing takes on a different vibe in Asia.
I first saw it in Tokyo where people push their cats along in baby strollers and luxury shops sell thousand-dollar accessories for felines and canines alike.
In countries like China it’s become a thing to dress pets in “cute little outfits” and pose them like dolls for social media snaps.
Now in Thailand — which is second only to China in pet ownership on the continent — people can bring their cats and dogs to the movies.
Agence France-Presse sent a reporter there to witness costumed Chihuahuas and poodles arrive by stroller and sit next to their humans for a screening of The Little Mermaid. A cat, who probably had no idea what the hell was going on, was plopped down on the seat next to her human.
“Shhhh! Some of us are trying to watch The Lion King here!” Credit: PITB
A spokesman for the Bangkok cineplex told AFP he thinks pet-friendly cinemas will bring people back to the movies after the pandemic. Pet owners, he said, have been less likely to leave home because their animals are now used to having them around all the time and experience separation anxiety when they leave.
As Bud’s loyal servant I know he does have separation anxiety, but I wouldn’t bring him to the local Alamo Drafthouse or AMC even if they had pet-friendly screenings here.
For one thing, he’s a damn cat! He’s not interested in screens unless they’re showing birds feasting on seeds in a forest, with all the accompanying sounds, while he’s viewing it from the safety of his own home
Second, I know precisely how he’d react, and he wouldn’t take well to being in a theater with a bunch of dogs and a handful of other cats. He’d spend half the movie hissing and the other half crying. I can’t imagine it being a fun experience for him.
Then there’s the “dress code.” Pets in Thailand’s new animal-friendly screenings must wear diapers and sit in bags provided by the theater. This is to ensure they won’t defecate all over the seats, obviously, but my cat has never even tolerated a collar. The chances of him accepting a diaper are zero.
“You gotta see Keanu in IMEOWX, my feline friends. It’s meowgnificent.” Credit: PITB
Lastly, at the risk of getting myself into trouble, the entire idea sounds about as appealing as trying to watch a non-kids movie in a theater full of screaming six-year-olds.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved accompanying my nieces to see the Super Mario Brothers movie, watching their delight at seeing the Mushroom Kingdom, Princess Peach, Mario and Luigi brought to life. (“You kids today with your Nintendo Switches, your fancy graphics and your networked games. We had Gameboy. It only had two colors, and you had to put little cartridges inside it to play games, and when they didn’t work we had to blow the dust out of ’em. You don’t know how good you got it, you kids today!”)
But do I want to be responsible for a feline with the intellectual development of a young child while I’m trying to watch a movie? If by some miracle Bud would stop hissing and/or crying, he’d focus on me and start yapping for snacks.
The movies just aren’t a great place for cats, and I’m not sure dogs would be thrilled to be there either.
Now, a hookah bar where you could bring your cat and give him his own little hookah filled with catnip? Maybe that could work.
“Yes, I’ll take an Amstel Light and a bag of your best Meowie Wowie for my little buddy here. Can I see the bar food and pate menus as well? We’ve just come from seeing John Wick 11 at the movies and we’re both famished!”
Mankind’s achievements in space came at the expense of dogs, cats and non-human primates, who were sent into orbit during the early days of the space race.
I’ve been watching Apple TV’s exceptional show, For All Mankind, which dramatizes the space race of the 1960s and beyond in a sort of alternate history where the Soviets, not Americans, first lay boots on the lunar regolith.
That loss lights a fire underneath the behinds of the people at NASA and convinces American politicians that the space race is the ultimate measure of our civilization. In real life, American ingenuity and the creativity fostered by a free society allowed the US to leap ahead and “win” the space race. Space missions were already becoming routine by the time the drama of Apollo 13 briefly rekindled public interest.
Then the Soviet space program faded, the competition turned one-sided, and without an arch-enemy to show up, American politicians pulled back NASA’s funding to a fraction of what it once was, where it remains today. That’s why the rise of the private space industry — Elon Musks’s Space X, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, etc — will almost certainly be our ticket to Mars.
But in For All Mankind, NASA remains the budgetary behemoth and source of prestige it was in the 60s and 70s, leading to the development of a permanent moon base, lunar mining operations and a planned mission to the red planet.
There’s a quiet moment in the second season when a Soviet cosmonaut, visiting the US as part of a peacekeeping mission, shares a drink in a dive bar with an American astronaut.
“Do you like dog?” the cosmonaut asks.
“Dogs?” the astronaut replies. “Of course. Who doesn’t like dogs?”
The Soviet shakes his head.
“No, dog,” he tells her. “Laika.”
Laika was the first dog in space, or more accurately, the first dog the Soviets acknowledged sending into space. (The Soviets didn’t acknowledge their failures, and we can only guess at the number of lost cosmonauts and animals officially denied by the Russians, drifting in space for eternity or disintegrated in atmospheric re-entry.)
Laika, also nicknamed Muttnick, wanted to please the humans who had taken her in, and didn’t understand that her trip would be one way. (Historical photo)
The moment turns somber as the cosmonaut recalls the Moscow street dog who was selected because she was docile, fearless and could handle the incredible noise and g-forces of a rocket launch.
“I held her in my arms,” the cosmonaut tells his American counterpart, taking a sip of his Jack Daniel’s. “For only one or two minutes on the launchpad.”
Then he leans in and tells her the truth: Laika didn’t triumphantly orbit the Earth for seven days in 1957 as the Soviet Union told the world. She didn’t endure the mission.
She perished, alone and afraid, just hours after launch when her capsule overheated.
The Soviets never designed the Sputnik 2, Laika’s ship, to return to Earth safely. Her death was predetermined.
We laud astronauts and cosmonauts, the brave men and women who willingly strap themselves into tiny capsules attached to cylinders of rocket fuel the size of skyscrapers and depart this Earth via brute force, knowing something could go wrong and their lives could end before they realize what’s happening. We should admire them. Their accomplishments are all the more impressive when you consider the fact that the combined processing power of every computer at NASA’s disposal in the 1960s was but a fraction of what we each hold in our hands these days when we use our smartphones.
Those first astronauts and cosmonauts were extraordinarily brave — but only up to a point.
Unwilling to risk human lives in the early days of space exploration, space programs used dogs, cats and later monkeys and apes, strapping them into confined spaces, wiring their brains with electrodes for telemetry data, poring over the information they gleaned about their heart rates, blood pressure and breathing as they left our home planet.
The sad eyes of a stray dog, separated from everyone she loved, were the first to behold Earth from space. A few years later the eyes of a French street cat took in the same view before humans did.
Felicette couldn’t move when she was placed into the capsule that took her to space and back.
Felicette, the tuxedo cat who was launched into space by the French on Oct. 18, 1963, didn’t even have a name until the French recovered her capsule and took her back for examination.
The scientists and engineers in charge of the launch didn’t want to humanize her if she didn’t make it, which was a common practice in space programs. (Ham, the chimpanzee sent into space by NASA in January of 1961, was known as No. 65 until his successful recovery. NASA was worried that a name would make him more sympathetic and lead to bad press if the chimpanzee died during the mission.)
Ham the chimpanzee was little more than a baby. Credit: NASA archives
Despite Felicette’s endurance and successful return, French scientists repaid her bravery by euthanizing her a month later so they could study her brain and learn more about the effects of spaceflight on mammalian biology.
Felicette, like Laika and Ham, was never given a choice. Those animals, with their child-like mental capacity, endured their missions out of a desire to please their human caretakers as much as any natural stoicism they may have possessed.
Would we do the same thing today? Will we repeat those experiments as we set our eyes on Mars?
Consider that the moon is a three day trip, and it’s close enough to Earth’s magnetic field to protect living beings from radiation. Mars is at least a seven month trip if the orbital conditions are right, and there will be no protection from radiation aside from what can be built into the craft. Take that trip without adequate protection and you’re guaranteed to get cancer.
It’s easy to say we wouldn’t make animals our test subjects for a Mars journey, and NASA now has decades of data on the effects of space and zero gravity thanks to the International Space Station.
And yet Neuralink, another company owned by Elon Musk, currently uses monkeys to test its brain interface technology, which allows the primates to operate computers with their thoughts. Those monkeys are forced to endure radical surgery to implant microchips in their brains. The teams working on the technology say suffering by those animals will be worth it as people with paralysis are able to do things with their thoughts and regain a measure of independence, increasing their quality of life.
Likewise, it will probably be an animal, or animals, who will be the test subjects on board craft that first venture beyond the Earth’s protective magnetosphere. Scientists and engineers will do their best to create a vessel that shields its occupants from harmful radiation, but they won’t know how successful they’ve been until the test subjects are returned to Earth and their dosimeters have been examined.
Will an astronaut volunteer for that kind of mission, knowing the “reward” could be a drastically shortened life?
Felicette pictured on commemorative stamps.
Felicette, left, was just one of several cats considered for the launch by French scientists.
To hear Musk and futurists tell it, pushing toward Mars is not just a matter of exploration or aspiration, but is necessary for the survival of our species. Earth becoming uninhabitable, they say, is an eventuality, not an if.
Others point out it’s much easier and wiser to pour our resources into preserving the paradise we do have, and the creatures who live in it, rather than banking on a miserable future existence on Mars where society will have to live underground and gravity, at 0.375 that of Earth, will change the human form in just a few generations.
To put it bluntly, while Musk and futurists look at life on Mars through the rose-colored glasses of science fiction fans, in reality living there is going to thoroughly suck.
If people do live on Mars they’ll never venture outside without a suit, never feel the sun on their skin, never swim in an ocean. They’ll never have another backyard barbecue, watch fireworks light up the sky on the fourth of July, or fall asleep to the gentle rain and crickets of warm summer nights. They’ll never hear birdsong or have the opportunity to see iconic animals like elephants and lions. Every gulp of air will be recycled, every glass of water will have passed through the kidneys of others. There will never be snow. Circadian rhythms will be untethered from the cycle that governed human biology for the 200,000 years our species has existed.
And while there could be a future — if you want to call it that — for people on Mars, there won’t be a future there for the rest of the living creatures on Earth.
As a lifelong fan of science fiction who devours SF novels, counts films like Alien and Bladerunner among my favorites, and is fascinated by shows like For All Mankind, The Peripheral and Star Trek, I understand the appeal of space and the indomitable human spirit that drives us to new frontiers. I just hope we can balance that with respect for the Earth and the animals we share it with. Let’s hope there is never another Laika, Felicette or Ham.
Correction: For All Mankind is the name of the Apple TV series about an alternate history space race. The first reference to the show’s name was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.
A close-up of Felicette’s face. Credit: French government archivesHam the Space Chimp waits for his apple reward. Credit: NASA archives
Pain In The Bud 