A cat named Cinder makes it clear she wants nothing to do with an underwater treadmill even as her veterinarian lavishes praise on her for “using” it.
Meet Cinderblock, or Cinder for short. In the video below, a veterinarian’s got her on a treadmill, and Cinder is having NONE of it. Is it just me, or does that meow sound a hell of a lot like “No!”?
To make matters worse, it’s an underwater treadmill. Water and exercise, the bane of cats everywhere!
Anyway, Cinder takes the opportunity to provide a master class in how to get by with the absolute least amount of effort:
Cinder was surrendered to the veterinarian by her owner, who said she could no longer care for the portly kitty and asked for her to be euthanized. The veterinarian, Brita Kiffney, had a better idea.
“I couldn’t do it and asked her to relinquish her to me,” Kiffney told CNN. “She agreed and was grateful, as she really didn’t want to euthanize Cinder but was overwhelmed with the care of her father. So, she is morbidly obese, due to overfeeding by the father.
Now Cinder is on an involuntary weight loss journey, which Kiffney is documenting with a new Youtube channel, Cinder Gets Fit. Recent updates like the video below show the reluctant chonkster didn’t get away with the one-paw treadmill workout for long:
A good name means knowing the personality behind it.
Before I adopted Buddy, I vowed I’d be a different kind of cat dad.
Where other people gave their cats normal, mundane and even human names, I would give my kitten a spectacular moniker, one that would convey both his awesomeness and my cleverness.
If my new kitten were female, I’d name her Arya or Khaleesi. By the time I was ready to adopt, I was set on the former. For people who weren’t Game of Thrones obsessives for the past eight years, Arya Stark (pictured above) was the show’s plucky orphan and one of its most popular characters.
If my new kitten were male, I’d name him Khal Drogo after the fierce Dothraki warlord played by the musclebound Jason Momoa. But perhaps Khal Drogo wasn’t awesome enough. Maybe I needed something even more badass, like Tigron, Destroyer of Worlds, or Saberfang the Earthshaker.
Khal Drogo: Except for the huge muscles, he doesn’t have much in common with Buddy.
Then I took the soon-to-be-named Buddy home and realized those names were ridiculous. This tiny ball of fur with a pipsqueak mew couldn’t be Khal Drogo or Tigron. In fact, the first thing I called him was buddy: After I’d placed him in his brand new carrier and carefully buckled the carrier into the front passenger seat of my car, he looked at me through the bars with those big grey (at the time) eyes and cried.
“Don’t worry, buddy, we’re going to be best friends,” I assured him. “You’ll see.”
No doubt he was further traumatized and terrorized by my terrible singing voice as I queued up some tunes for the drive home.
“Your singing voice is abominable. It should be outlawed under the Geneva Conventions.”
After some two weeks of indecision, I was hanging out with my brother one night when he asked me about my new friend.
“Ah, the cat…” I said.
“You still haven’t given him a name?” My brother was incredulous.
I had given him a name, I just hadn’t realized it yet. During those two weeks I called him buddy, with a lowercase b. A nickname. Not long after that, it became official.
My cat’s name is Buddy.
“Everybody on the dance floor, shake your Buddy!”
In retrospect, it makes sense to hold off on granting a name for a while. There are a million Mittens and Socks and Shadows in the world, but how many cats have names that reflect their personality?
It turns out Buddy isn’t a particularly common cat name. It doesn’t appear at all in most popular cat name lists floating around the web, whether they’re sourced from registration, veterinary records or user-generated data.
Buddy finally makes an appearance way down on the list of cuteness.com’s most popular cat names, at #67, way behind enduring male names like Max, Charlie, Milo, Simba, Oliver, Jack, George, Loki, Jasper, Felix and Tiger.
In an article on male cat names, veterinarian Debra Primovic hits the nail on the head:
The majority of cats named Buddy are mixed breed cats owned or named by men. They are often rescued or strays brought into homes and hearts across the world. They are generally loyal and adore their owners.
A Buddy isn’t a prissy, carefully-bred show pet. He’s a Buddy.
The word buddy first came to prominence in 19th-century ‘Merica, and there are two main theories about where the name comes from. The most popular one posits “buddy” is a corruption of the word “brother,” according to Word Detective, while others trace its etymology back to “butty,” a slang-word for a comrade or co-worker among miners, pirates and others who were after “booty.”
Not booty in the modern sense, as in “Get on the dance floor and shake your booty!” but in the treasure sense, as in “Argh! Tell us where the booty be or walk the plank, we shall make ye! Now talk, scallywag!”
I like the first one because it fits: While I do feel parentally protective of my Bud, I see him more as a little brother or a best friend instead of my “child.” No disrespect meant to the people who call their cats “furbabies,” of course. It’s just how I envision our feline-human friendship.
What’s your cat’s naming story? Were you as ridiculous as I was, or did you have your heart set on something less absurd from the beginning?
Mikey the Cat wouldn’t come down from a tree, not even for delicious extra crispy.
A few days ago the unthinkable happened.
Mikey, a tabby from California, escaped from his human’s living room and got himself stuck in a 90-foot palm tree on Sept. 25. We don’t care what kind of plump, juicy bird he was chasing, 90 feet ain’t no joke.
His dutiful human servant, Christine Lopez, tried everything she could to get the little dude to come down. She cracked open cans of the kitty crack. She waved tuna. She spoke soft words to reassure him.
She even called the local fire department, which tried to help but didn’t have a ladder long enough to get to Mikey.
Running out of options, Christine called animal control, and they suggested the ultimate weapon: KFC.
Now I don’t know about you, but Buddy would find his way down from a skyscraper to get his paws on that crispy fried goodness. It is, after all, finger lickin’ good.
Here’s where the story gets weird: Mikey didn’t go for it. He wouldn’t come down, not even for KFC! What kind of cat turns down KFC?
By that point Mikey had been in the tree for a week, and he’d attracted an audience according to the Whittier Daily News:
The neighbors’ dogs would sit in the yard, looking concerned; the neighborhood cats would sit at the base of the tree, staring and caterwauling, with Mikey responding with meows, she said.
Yep. They were probably telling Mikey they were gonna eat his tuna and his KFC if he didn’t get his butt down from the tree.
By Monday morning Mikey was still up there. Drone footage confirmed the terrified tabby was still huddled amid the fronds. Almost two weeks had passed. Mikey was meowing for help and Christine was getting desperate.
She called PETA for assistance and the group found a heroic, cat-loving order of chivalric knights who call themselves The Crane Guys of La Mirada led by Sir Miles of Burkhart.
Sir Miles reached the top of the palm and began negotiations with the terrified Mikey.
Miles Burkhart tries to reach Mikey the cat in Pico Rivera, CA, on Monday, Oct. 7. Photo credit Tracey Roman, Whittier Daily News.
Just when it seemed this ghastly ordeal would be over, Mikey jumped, activating Kitty Flight Mode, and upon landing immediately dashed under a neighbor’s porch, probably because of all the human, canine and feline onlookers milling around. Poor Mikey was embarrassed.
Thankfully, the story has a happy ending: Christine was finally able to reach Mikey when he chose a new hiding spot underneath a car. A relieved and famished Mikey tucked into a can of the good stuff and lapped up a whole bowl of water.
The little criminal has now lost his freedom.
“He’s doing life inside the house now,” Lopez told the paper. “After he decides to get paroled, he might walk on a leash.”
Shelly the cat showed Mr. Snake the business end of her claws.
His Grace Buddy, King of All Cats, First of His Name, the Most Handsome and Totally Not Scared of Anything, is pleased to issue a Commendation of Bravery to Shelly, a rescue cat who saved her human from a venomous snake.
Shelly’s human, Jimmie Nelson, heard strange noises one night last week and chalked it up to Shelly burning off some energy with a late play session. Nelson went to sleep, oblivious to the danger he was in until the next day when he saw a dead copperhead under his kitchen table.
“On the side of the snake’s neck and head there were claw marks and one big slash, so we knew right then that the cat had definitely killed the snake and then brought it out a few days later to show it to her little dad,” Nelson’s daughter, Teresa Seals, told NBC affiliate WBIR in Tennessee.
Like all great cats, Shelly is a grey tabby.
Copperhead snakes are pit vipers, ambush predators that rely on hemotoxic venom to paralyze and injure their prey. They’re common in the southeastern U.S., though it’s unusual for the snakes to seek out humans or enter homes.
Copperheads don’t provide warnings before they bite and “strike almost immediately when they feel threatened,” according to LiveScience. Although their venom is not as potent as their deadlier cousins in the pit viper family, children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable. Copperhead bite victims are usually treated with antivenin and painkillers, and recovery can take months.
Nelson, who is 81 and a stroke victim, doesn’t like admitting his affection for his feline master, but Seals knows it’s just an act.
“He loves her, he doesn’t wanna act like he pays attention but I’ve caught him actually petting and loving on her,” she said.
She doesn’t think it’s an accident that Shelly ended up with her father.
“I think the Lord sent the cat to us to save my dad,” she told WBIR.
His Grace King Buddy said he’s honored to award Shelly with the King Buddy Commendation for Feline Bravery, an honor created in 2014 after His Grace defeated a vicious mosquito in single combat. The award itself is a bronze statue of Buddy striking a heroic pose at the moment of victory, paw raised after slaying the insect, muscles rippling from the effort of delivering the death blow.
Shelly with her servant, Jimmie Nelson of Tennessee.
“What a cute kitty,” I thought, then squinted. “Wait… Is that a dead mouse clamped between her teeth?”
After zooming in and verifying that, yes, that is a poor rodent meeting its unfortunate end, I came to a profound realization: Cats are cute even when they’re committing murder.
Like this little guy below: Totally cute. Totally thinking about murder.
“My hobbies include eating, sleeping, knocking items off flat surfaces, and murder. I’m really passionate about murder.”
Think about that for a second. We love cats because they’re great companions. They’re loving despite all the myths that claim they’re not, they’re cute, and they’re endlessly amusing.
We welcome them into our homes, adjust our schedules to their needs, and fret about how they might not like a new brand of litter or a newly-arranged living room.
We laugh when they shred paper and enthusiastically tear into plush toys.
We trim their razor-sharp claws, kiss their little heads and give them names like Buddy, Gizmo and Puddin’ Head.
And yet cats aren’t just murderers, they’re serial killers. They’re the bane of birds, rodents and lizards on six of the seven continents. They’re so ruthlessly efficient at killing, in some countries it’s illegal just to let them outside.
A serial killer in training.
Thankfully I haven’t had to deal with my cat bringing me “presents” of dead rodents or lizards. We live in an apartment, Buddy doesn’t want anything to do with the outside unless I’m with him, and if our games are any indication, he’s a hilariously inept hunter who probably couldn’t catch a rodent even if I slow-tossed one to him like a pitcher serving up meatballs in a home run derby.
Yet I’ve heard many stories from friends and acquaintances whose cats are little terrors. Murderous cats are even the subject of this week’s pet advice column on Slate, where a reader complains that her cat proudly presents her with dead mice, frogs and rabbits.
So what sort of powerful magic is at work here? Why do we disregard the murderous side of our little friends? Or is this the work of toxoplasma gondii, that infamous cat-carried parasite that is rumored to take over human brains?
In truth, it’s just who cats are. They’ve been companion animals for so long, it’s easy to forget the reason cats and humans came together in the first place was to kill rodents who were eating their way through stored grain in the very first human agricultural settlements.
So instead of fretting about their murderous ways, maybe we should just be thankful they’re not large enough to eat us too. Isn’t that right, Mr. Fluffy?
“What? Am I not cute even whilst committing murder?”“I am NOT an inept hunter! You don’t want to tangle with these talons, bro.”
Pain In The Bud 