“Scooter does not like bears,” the fearless feline’s human said.
Scooter is one brave little dude!
The tuxedo cat from Asheville, North Carolina, wasn’t even phased by a pair of young bears who unwisely entered Scooter’s territory. Sure, Scooter had the benefit of a glass door between him and the ursine invaders, but Buddy here would have bravely and valiantly defended his home run screaming and taken up a position behind my legs while moaning pathetically.
Plus, I mean, they’re bears. Young bears, yes, but Scooter and his human placed an awful lot of faith in the strength of that glass.
Will Jones, Scooter’s human servant, made the understatement of the year when he posted the video and said flatly “Scooter does not like bears.” Ya think?
Regardless, the little guy clearly had the big animals spooked. They flinched from his hiss-accompanied flurry of rapid paw jabs, then decided it wasn’t worth dealing with the furry lunatic behind the glass and promptly left Scooterland.
Maybe they should be grateful Scooter couldn’t break through the glass instead of the other way around.
For the uninitiated, it’s a quirky behavior in which a cat sits upright on its back feet, then places the front paws together and moves them up and down as if fervently at prayer — or begging for something. (Though that’s undoubtedly our anthropomorphic interpretation of a distinctly feline quirk.)
Our post about the begging paws has become one of the most popular stories on this site, with people regularly finding us via search engines as they try to learn more about this strange behavior.
The last time we asked around, several veterinarians and behaviorists were happy to speak to us about the subject, but no one could say for sure what the begging paws motion means.
We’re going to give it another shot and hopefully get some answers by comparing notes with people whose cats engage in the behavior. If your cat does the begging paws/praying gesture, we’d love to hear from you!
Please comment here or email paininthebud at gmail along with:
The name, age and gender of your cat
How frequently your cat does the gesture
Anything patterns or related behavior you’ve noticed: does your cat “pray” at certain times or in response to something she sees? Do you reward the behavior with treats, affection or attention? Has your cat always done it, or did the behavior emerge at a particular time?
Any detail could help uncover what exactly our furry friends are doing.
If you have photos or video of your cat “praying,” we’d love to include those clips in our follow-up story as well.
Hopefully by working together we can understand this quirky behavior and finally solve the mystery of why our cats do it!
A substantial new reward from a local shelter is providing incentive for the return of Willa the cat, who was stolen from her home by an Uber Eats driver in January.
It’s been two months since a delivery driver working for Uber Eats allegedly stole their cat, but a South Carolina family is determined to get their feline family member back.
Four-year-old Willa the cat was a fixture in her neighborhood, known and loved by neighbors and people taking walking tours of the area. The 17-pound Calico, with her magnificent floof and striking coat pattern, could usually be spotted lounging on the front porch of her home, where she liked to watch people going about their business.
Now Pet Helpers, a shelter in Charleston, is helping keep the story in the news and creating greater incentive for people to join the search for Willa by offering a $2,500 reward for her return, in addition to a reward the family is offering.
On Jan. 15, shortly after delivering Greek food to a home on the same street, Katy Barnes of Goose Creek, SC, allegedly scooped Willa up, carried the Calico to her SUV, and drove off.
Willa’s family, the Layfields, did not have an angle on the cat-napping from their home security cameras, but cameras belonging to neighbors and a gym about a mile away show a woman police have identified as Barnes taking Willa, then pulling over and discarding the feline’s collar and AirTag.
Despite her arrest and the footage, Barnes has refused to cooperate with police, claiming she no longer has the Calico. If she did simply release Willa, as she claims, she did it during the coldest season of the year during a deep freeze, when most of the country was seeing single-digit or sub-zero temperatures. That’s a challenge for any cat, especially a feline accustomed to an indoor life.
“I am amazed that people can be so cruel,” Liza Layfield told PITB. “Why? Why would this person take their animal and then put her out to essentially die? Why would Katy take Willa and refuse to give her back or tell us anything about her whereabouts in the face of freezing temperatures and snow? Why would she want to torture a family over a cat that is apparently no longer in her possession? We cannot understand, and it is keeping us awake at night.”
Despite the stress of the situation, the family has continued their relentless efforts to get Willa back.
Charleston police have taken the case seriously, arresting Barnes and charging her with petty larceny. They secured a search warrant for Barnes’ home, which did not turn up any signs of Willa, and they arrested her a second time, charging her with littering for disposing of the collar and AirTag and keeping her in police lockup overnight twice in two weeks.
The message: they’re not letting this go either. Neither are locals, who have rallied to support the Layfields and have started a petition asking authorities to do as much as they can to help find Willa, and calling on Uber to do more to help. Almost 1,700 people have signed the petition, and it continues to accrue signatures.
In the meantime, the Layfields have turned to their community for help. An email account they set up has yielded promising tips, and neighbors have been on the lookout for Willa in Charleston as well as in Goose Creek near Barnes’ home.
“It is very much an active and ongoing investigation,” Liza Layfield told PITB.
“We love our animals as our children, they are a part of our family, and we can’t rest until she is found.”
We’ve made enormous mistakes in our reconstructions of prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs and mammals. Would paleontologists of the future misinterpret the clues our civilization leaves behind?
Imagine if, far in the future, humanity has spread across a healthy swath of space, colonizing worlds across dozens of light years.
Academics at a prominent science institute, looking to learn more about the humble beginnings of our species, fund a scientific expedition to Old Earth, where radiation and toxicity have finally declined to a point which allows teams to poke through the ruins of our civilization.
As they piece together clues from the rubble, they find references to companion animals who have been domesticated while their wild counterparts continued on.
What does a cat look like? they wonder. Then they find the bones, beginning with a handful of incomplete skeletons…
Critics have long argued that our depictions of dinosaurs are like skeletons wrapped in flesh, with modern representations doing a poor job of representing complete animals. What if the paleontologists and historians of the future mistranslate a word like “fur” or don’t realize the skeletons of cats are the same furry creatures that were human companions?A tiger imagined as a semi-aquatic animal with scales instead of fur, and a skull interpreted in much the same way we interpret dinosaur skulls. “Surviving texts make clear the tiger was comfortable in water, and like its distant cousin the crocodile, would remain mostly submerged, looking for opportunities to ambush prey.”No fur, just musculature, as if an anatomy book of animals is one of the few texts to survive in hard copy.A cat with magnificent plumage: “Research shows felines engaged in elaborate mating rituals, using their vivid colors and patterns to demonstrate virility to females in heat.”Finally, a winged cat. Outlandish? Maybe. But what if of the scraps of mythology to survive is a statue of a manticore, or paleontologists discover the bones of a cat species mingled with those of a large bird that died alongside it in a tar pit? In our time we’ve accidentally invented entire species of dinosaurs by mistakenly matching skulls from one species onto the spines of others, or wildly misinterpreting clues in the body plans of new and unfamiliar creatures.
“Can’t find your keys, human? That’s terrible. I don’t know where they are, but perhaps I could recall that information if, say, there were treats involved. Take your time, I’m in no rush even if you are.”
A new study shows dogs and human toddlers are eager to help when their adult caregivers are looking for a missing item, but cats don’t seem to care.
The study, which involved running the same experiment for young children, dogs and cats in their own homes, made it clear cats were fully aware of what was happening and understood their humans were looking for the missing object.
They just didn’t care.
There was one notable exception, of course. If the missing items were important to the cat — a favorite toy, for instance, or a bag of treats — the felines were motivated to help search or direct their humans to the missing objects, the research team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary found.
But at all other times, feline observers were content to hang back and watch, even when they understood their humans were getting frustrated.
By contrast, young children and dogs actively tried to help and signaled to adults when they thought they’d found the object.
“Lookin’ for something? No, I’ll just watch, thank you. Warm, warmer…oh! Cold…colder…that direction doesn’t look promising, human.” Credit: Gord Maclean/Pexels
So does this mean cats are jerks? Probably. Are we surprised by the results? Not at all.
We still love our furry friends, who do have their own unique ways of demonstrating they care about their humans beyond seeing them as providers of food, shelter, and safety, as well as playmates, minions and servants.
Besides, testing whether dogs or cats were helpful or not wasn’t the point. As the authors note, “[t]hese three species provide an important comparison because they share a similar anthropogenic environment but differ in their ecological and evolutionary backgrounds.”
In other words, they’re interested in figuring out how evolution plays a part in how species behave in particular situations. Although it’s yet to be conclusively proven for this behavior, a likely reason is because domestic cats are the descendants of a mostly solitary wildcat species, whereas we humans and our canine friends have long evolutionary histories of living in social groups and cooperating with each other.
The study is included in the March 2026 issue of Animal Behavior.
Pain In The Bud 