Despite her advanced age and loss of hearing, Flossie is still “affectionate and playful,” her human says.
When Flossie was born, Mariah Carey, Coolio and Pearl Jam ruled the airwaves alongside a band called Deep Blue Something with their hit, “Breakfast At Tiffany’s.”
Robert Deniro and Al Pacino were kings of the box office for their film, Heat, alongside Robin Williams’ Jumanji and Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride Part II. Bill Clinton was still serving his first term as president, and the internet was in its infancy as a network available to the wider public after years of use by the military and academics, with users connecting via cumbersome and painfully slow modems.
Your humble correspondent was just a kid, and Buddy wouldn’t be born for almost another 20 years.
Yet Flossie’s still going and just celebrated her 30th birthday on Dec. 29. The tortoiseshell was officially named the world’s oldest cat in 2022 when she was 26 years old. Flossie, originally a stray living near a hospital, was adopted by her first human, a healthcare worker. When that woman passed away, her sister became Flossie’s caretaker. And in August of 2022, having outlived two of her humans, Flossie was taken in by the UK’s Cats Protection, who carefully screened applicants until settling on Victoria Green, who lived in Orpington, UK.
“I’ve always wanted to give older cats a comfortable life,” Green said when she was chosen as Flossie’s caretaker.
Flossie was deaf and had “limited eyesight,” veterinarians noted when they helped Guiness World Records verify the long-lived feline’s age. But despite that, Flossie remains “affectionate and playful,” Green said.
“I feel like I’m not sharing my home with the oldest cat. I feel like this is her home and I’m encroaching on her space,” Green told Guinness World Records at the time. “She’s a very nice roommate and we get on very well. I don’t feel like I’m living with a senior.”
The oldest cat on record was Creme Puff of Austin, Texas, who was born in August of 1967 and lived until 1995, when Flossie was born.
We wish the birthday girl a happy one and hope she’s got at least a few more birthdays in her.
Convinced that culling cats will prevent local wildlife from going extinct, despite no evidence supporting that idea, New Zealand’s authorities have pledged to wipe out ferals and strays.
A recent RNZ story about efforts to exterminate cats in New Zealand starts with an anecdote about a man named Victor Tinndale, describing the way he bludgeons a cat to death as casually as if he’s sipping a cup of coffee.
Tinndale has taken it upon himself to kill cats even though the country’s wildlife management authorities told him not to. Why? Because he thinks cats are responsible for driving native species toward extinction.
He doesn’t know that, of course. No one does. No one’s bothered to do the research, and the driving force behind the claim that cats are responsible is a series of meta-analyses by birders who literally invented numbers to align with their predetermined conclusions about predatory impact.
To date there is not a single study that accurately measures feline predatory impact, nor is there a shred of evidence that slaughtering cats — whether beating them to death, shooting them with shotguns or poisoning them — has any beneficial impact on endangered bird species.
Yet there are vigilantes aplenty slaughtering cats across New Zealand, youth hunting contests encouraging kids to shoot cats and kittens, and government-sponsored extermination programs, like a particularly ghastly effort on a small island off New Zealand’s coast, where members of a team tell themselves they’re doing good work by sniping animals who are doing what they were born to do.
Ferals and strays already have tough lives without being hunted for sport or at the behest of government officials who aren’t in full possession of the facts. Credit: Mohan Rai/Pexels
The RNZ story describes Tinndale merrily skipping through the Aotearoan wilderness, singing songs and cracking jokes like a perverse Tom Bombadil as he murders cats unfortunate enough to get caught in his traps.
RNZ cameras follow Tinndale as he finds a terrified feline in one of the his traps. Tinndale describes the cat’s impending death at his hands as some sort of inevitable cosmic justice. He didn’t sentence the cat to die, he argues. He’s just the man who carries out the sentence.
“This cat is just an utter killing machine,” Tinndale says, addressing a camera as he repeats rhetoric from birder Peter Marra — who has advocated for the destruction of the entire species — almost word for word. “I’d hate to think what this cat has slayed to survive. So this guy has got to go, you know?”
The next scene shows Tinndale walking along the shore, the cat now hanging dead in his hands. He is judge, jury and executioner.
Tinndale buries his victims in a “graveyard” he made near a hut, admitting the graveyard is a “little bit of a laugh.” Tinndale was shocked, the story says, when New Zealand’s Department of Conservation didn’t pat him on the head for his vigilante efforts.
“I thought they’d have a chuckle, you know, and be pleased, but it was nothing of the sort,” he told RNZ.
Thought they’d have a chuckle?
This man thinks bludgeoning animals to death is hilarious. He is a psychotic vigilante who has taken it upon himself to violently end life. Why is he allowed to own weapons? Why is he not in prison or on a court-mandated mental illness management program?
Brad Windust with a trophy hunter’s expression as he shows off a Maine Coon mix he killed with the help of his hunting dog. Credit: Supplied to NRZ
The story goes on to quote Jessi Morgan of the Predator Free New Zealand Trust, who flat-out admits she can’t say how many cats there are in the country, let alone measure their predatory impact.
“I’ve seen estimates from two-and-a-half million to 14 million, which basically tells us we’ve got no idea what those numbers are,” Morgan said before immediately relaying anecdotes from hunters and farmers who say they’re “seeing more.”
This is not how we make decisions between life and death! This is not science, not by any definition of the word. This is not public policy. This is vigilantism and a mob mentality, amplified by the fact that it’s easier to blame a defenseless species for our own conservation failures and humanity’s impact on wildlife.
It is gross, utter disrespect for life under the guise of conservation, by people who not only can’t articulate what sort of damage they think felines are doing to their country, but have not a scrap of evidence that vigilantes running around bludgeoning cats to death are doing anything other than causing needless suffering.
Worse, it’s clear at least some of these self-appointed nature guardians are enjoying the task of murdering cats. It’s evident in their smiles as they show off their prizes and in the way they talk about their “work” — not as a solemn duty after all other options have been exhausted, but as something to “have a chuckle” over.
Credit: Dianne Concha/Pexels
This is also a failure of journalism, a failure to follow the most basic best practices and rules, to ask for proof when people assert opinions and call them facts. Those who call themselves journalists, who credulously spread the bunk studies about feline impact on native species, should be ashamed of themselves for not even taking a few minutes to read the studies they cite. Anyone who reads the research would immediately understand that the “studies” — which are really meta-analyses of old data — don’t provide any proof that cats are responsible for pushing endangered species toward extinction. They do nothing of the sort.
What we do know, and have confirmed over more than half a century of rigorous science, is that we are responsible for wiping out wildlife — more than 73 percent of the world’s monitored wildlife populations in the past 50 years alone, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s annual report.
Aside from the fact that they don’t have homes, these cats are no different than pet felines. They are the same species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Animal welfare groups have never disputed the idea that cats probably do have a part in endangering small mammals and bird species. They are predators. Hunting is their role.
But that is a far cry from proving they have a measurable impact, let alone are the primary drivers. In rare cases when research teams did the hard work of taking a feline census, as Washington, D.C.’s Cat Count did, the population numbers turn out to be considerably lower than expected.
Data from the Cat Count also confirmed what we know, that cats do not stray more than a few hundred feet from their territory, whether it’s a human home or a small shelter in a managed colony. In urban and suburban environments, the study found, cats have minimal impact through hunting unless they’re living directly adjacent to wooded areas.
Sending a bunch of lunatics out, dancing and skipping as they arbitrarily slaughter sentient creatures with real emotions, is the kind of monstrous behavior only humans are capable of.
Human-made devices and structures kill innumerable birds annually, a fact that isn’t accounted for in studies and news stories blaming cats for bird species extinctions. Credit: Amol Mande/Pexels
But it isn’t enough for New Zealand’s government to have vigilantes killing cats, or community-sponsored cat hunts. Now the government has pledged to eradicate feral cats by 2050. Because feral cats are the same species as stray and pet cats, and there is no way to determine by sight if a cat is feral or just frightened, that means any feline found outdoors will be killed.
“In order to boost biodiversity, to boost heritage landscape and to boost the type of place we want to see, we’ve got to get rid of some of these killers,” says Tama Potaka, the country’s conservation minister.
Note the language in the linked story, which describes domestic cats as if they’re a separate species. That’s the kind of ignorance that drives these cruel efforts.
New Zealand is heavily reliant on tourism, with visitors accounting for almost six percent of the country’s GDP before COVID-19, a number the country’s leaders expect to match in late 2025 as the tourism industry recovers. It’s part of New Zealand’s overall shift to services instead of products in an effort to diversify its economy.
Anyone who loves cats, who thinks men shouldn’t play God, who thinks we ought to demand at least something in the form of proof before allowing socially maladjusted vigilantes to brutally kill animals, should boycott New Zealand as a travel destination.
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Header image: Tinndale walking with a cat he killed via RNZ
There’s a disconnect between the usually careful language of research studies and the exaggerated claims of news articles.
The headlines over the past few weeks have all been variations on the same riff: cats meow more frequently to male caregivers because we don’t know how to bond with the little stinkers, we disregard their feelings, and we ignore their pleas.
Others are more blunt in their assessment, like a story from YourTango that stated women “bond deeply” with cats, whereas we men are merely “manipulated” by them.
“Other studies have found that women are much better at giving their cats more attention, understanding their cats’ emotions, and are more likely to mimic their cats’ vocalization, too,” the YourTango story claims. “Whereas for men, the same cannot be said. Considering they tend to give affection more sparingly than women, it’s no wonder that the dynamic is different.”
Just picture it: women levitating above the rest of us, sharing their amazing Female Affection with the poor, emotionally starved pet felines who belong to men. If we’re trying to get rid of the “crazy cat lady” stereotype and spread the idea that cats are great companions for every kind of person, this probably isn’t helping.
“I am NOT a loudmeowth!”
So what’s the source of these claims?
Apparently a study out of Turkey that involved just 31 cats and their humans. All of the human participants were Turkish, and just 13 of them were male. All were recruited online. (And for some parts of the study, like the analysis of greetings by owner gender, only 26 participants were included because the other five did not submit complete data, including the ages of their cats.)
It’s important to make a distinction between what the study’s authors claim and what the media reports, because they’re almost always two different things.
“Science” doesn’t “say” anything. Science is a method for investigating things we don’t understand. It’s not an entity, it has no opinions, and the only clear conclusion from such a small study is that we need more data.
Hogwash! Balderdash! Codswallop!
The research team from the University of Ankara counted more meows directed at the 13 male caregivers in their study compared to the 18 female caregivers. In their paper, the team acknowledged their sample size was too small to draw any conclusions, and lacked the demographic diversity to rule out innumerable potential reasons why those 13 cats meowed more frequently than the 18 cats cared for by women.
Even with a more robust sample size including men of different ages, social classes, and nationalities, correlation is not causation, and it may be that the apparent difference in feline vocalizations disappears with a larger study group that more accurately reflects universal demographics.
Indeed, the study’s authors state clearly that feline greeting behavior is “a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that defies straightforward explanation.” (Emphasis ours.)
The conclusion, as always, is that we need more data, which is one reason why studies must be repeatable.
That nuance doesn’t make it into listicles or stories optimized for maximum shareability on Facebook, so instead we get headlines that present studies as the last word instead of the first tentative steps to understanding a phenomenon.
In case it wasn’t obvious, there is no data to support the claim that men “give attention more sparingly” than women, or that women are better at reading feline emotions. We don’t even have baselines or criteria for those claims. How do we objectively measure “better” when it comes to reading cats, especially when every cat and human bonded pair have their own pidgin “language”? What’s the “right” amount of attention?
“Brrrrrrrruuuuppp!”
As the loyal servant of an infamously talkative cat, I’m not sure gender makes any difference. Bud’s vocal tendencies were already present from kittenhood, and I simply nurtured them by engaging in conversations with him, giving him loads of attention and doting on him.
Often our conversations go like this:
Bud: “Mreeeoww! Mow mow! Brrrrrt a bruppph!”
Me: “I know, little dude. You told me, remember?”
Bud: “Brrrrrr! Brrrruppp! Yerp!”
Me: “Yes, but they’ve tried that already. It’s not just about tokamak design, it’s…”
Bud: “Merrrrrp! Mow mow!”
Me: “No, it’s about plasma containment. No containment, no reaction, no energy gain!”
Bud: “Brrrrr! Mrrrowww! Brupbrupbrrrruppp!”
Me: “Yeah, well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
I really do talk about science and science fiction with my cat, since he seems to respond to it. Of course it’s gotta be at least partially due to my tone, but strangely if I talk to him about other abstract things, he acts like I’m bothering him with so much human nonsense.
Regardless, Buddy and I object to the claim that a talkative cat is a disengaged or neglected cat. It’s not that he talks a lot, it’s that he never stops!
Buddy the Cat’s talents are innumerable! In this rousing number he slips into the style of Gilbert and Sullivan and uses verse to tell us what a feline should be.
“I am the very model of a feline so crepuscular My visage is so handsome and my meowscles are so muscular! I am a little tiger though the fact may seem improbable My knowledge is near boundless in all matters gastronomical I eat six meals a day in circumstances nominal For serving snacks when I demand, my human is responsible No challenge is impossible, no problem yet insoluble I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
I’m schooled in all biology from macro to subcellular A meowster of olfactory for every object smellular My hearing’s extrasensitive in low and higher frequencies I hear the mice a-chatter but the elephants don’t speak to me My style is more Big Punisher than Doctor Dre or Easy E Cuz when it comes to hip hop my tastes all face to easterly I like to shake my booty, I’m funky when I need to be I am the very model of a cat who does it easily!
I rule with iron paws be it jungle or the living room And when I’m finished dining, I am content to sit and groom When it comes to games I am the ultimate competitor Obligatory carnivore, I am a model predator Yet somehow cute and fluffy when I feel the need to be Mostly when I tell my buddy “Wake up, human, and feed me!
I am well-versed in big cats whether tiger or jaguarian And qualities of catnip like a feline rastafarian Intimidating surely, in my home I am the guardian Look dashing in a tux or the kit of a safarian! When it comes to ladies all the gents seek my analysis I designed the Taj Mahal and Cleopatra’s palaces I drink champagne from bottles and sip water from my chalices Then ignite sky with a range of borealises! A champion of Opens like the French, Aussie and Wimbledon My game is too complex for the tastes of canine simpletons
A predator so optimal, impeded by no obstacle When I’m roused to anger you will find me quite unstoppable Stylish with a monacle, calm and rarely volatile I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
I am the very model of a feline so phenomenal!
[Chorus of girls]
He is the very model of a feline so phenomenal! Find a better cat? Well that is just impossible! He is the very model of a feline so phenomenal!”
In apocalyptic news for house cats everywhere, a pharmaceutical company is kicking off a trial of a GLP-1 drug for felines.
If cats could read newspapers, chances are they’d be gripped by a cold terror right about now, wondering if they’re among the unfortunates to have their yums curtailed by the same weight loss drugs their humans have been gobbling.
As the New York Times reports, a biopharma company headquartered in San Francisco, Okava Pharmaceuticals, is about to begin a trial to determine if GLP-1 drugs can help our chonksters slim down. More than 60 percent of American pets are packing extra pounds, the Times notes, while consequences like diabetes are shortening the lifespans and reducing quality of life for felines and canines.
“It is our belief that the condition of obesity, the condition of being overweight, is by far the number one most significant preventative health challenge in all of veterinary medicine,” Okava founder and CEO Michael Klotsman told the paper.
The upcoming study will include 50 cats. Most will receive a GPL-1 medication while a control group — about one third of the cats — will be given a placebo.
Since cats aren’t exactly known for being cooperative when it comes to taking oral medicine and weekly injections at a veterinary office are impractical, Okava has developed a system with a patch about the size of a microchip that will dispense the weight loss drugs over six months before a tiny cartridge needs to be replaced.
If all goes well with the trial, Okava will seek FDA approval and address other obstacles like convincing caretakers that their little pals can benefit from the feline version of Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy.
That may be easier said than done considering our relationships with our furry friends and the role food plays in things like training, bonding and every day life
For lots of cat caretakers “their main way that they interact with and show their love to their pet often revolves around food,” Dr. Maryanne Murphy, a veterinary nutritionist at the University of Tennessee, told the Times.
How could the dynamic between cat and human change if the flow of yums is reduced to meals only? Will training — for everything from walking on a harness, to entering a carrier and fun tricks like high fives — still work if the reward is just a bit of encouragement or a scratch behind the ear?
An earlier weight loss drug developed for dogs, Slentrol, did not catch on because, as one veterinarian noted, “the main way [people] interacted with their pet was by feeding them, and seeing their excitement and happiness when they were eating the food.”
There’s also the not-so-small matter of cost. GLP-1 drugs are in high demand, and they’re expensive. One in eight Americans has taken Ozempic or one of its competitors. At times, the demand has threatened availability for diabetics, for whom the drugs were developed in the first place.
If the trials are successful and the GLP-1 drugs for pets gain FDA approval — which would require a series of much larger scale, more rigorous studies — the company hopes to offer them to consumers at a cost of about $100 per month per pet.
Even if this iteration of the drug fails, it’s unlikely to derail the larger effort. Vets have been prescribing tiny doses of the human version to cats with diabetes, and perhaps most telling of all, pet obesity continues to rise despite years of efforts by the veterinarian community to get people to play with their pets more and feed them less.
As Dr. Ernie Ward, a veterarian and founder of the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention, told the paper: “We haven’t moved the needle.”
And now we check in with our correspondent, Buddy the Cat. Buddy, what do you think about the possibility of GLP-1 for your species and the end of the proverbial gravy train?
Buddy? Bud? Are we having technical difficulties?
I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, we can’t find Buddy the Cat. We’ll resume this segment if and when we manage to locate him.
Pain In The Bud 