Have you been thinking about linking to Buddy from your blog, sharing Buddy’s wisdom from your social media pages, or simply ordering a small poster-size print of Buddy because he’s so damn handsome?
You’re in luck! Here are some promotional images centered around everyone’s favorite little dude and his many talents:
Apex Predators:
Buddy and Gerald: Apex Predators, based on a fake news story post from March about Buddy breaking into a tiger enclosure to be among his “peeps” and “reconnect with his heritage.”
Buddinese Tiger:
The Buddinese Tiger, aka Felis Awesomus, is a very rare breed of felid native to New York.
Apex Lounger:
Buddy’s not just an Apex Predator, he’s an Apex Lounger as well. Few living beings can match Bud’s lounging prowess, or make laziness look as good as he does.
AIR BUD:
The NBA wouldn’t allow him to enter the draft, determining that allowing one team to have him would be unfair to the 29 remaining squads. Still, he’s made All Star Weekend appearances, picking up three consecutive Slam Dunk Contest wins and six consecutive Furriest Player awards.
8-Bit Buddy Logo:
Buddy goes old-school with a classically handsome pose and an 8-bit logo worthy of Nintendo!
Budzilla:
What if Buddy were a kaiju? Well, we’d all be in trouble unless we delivered thousands of pounds of turkey daily.
Angels and Devils:
Life as a cat isn’t all about relaxing and eating, you know. There’s real conflict to be dealt with, and authentic moral quandaries to consider, like “I know I’m not supposed to scratch the couch, but it’s so scratchable!”
Esme the cat loves bringing gifts back to her human, so when she started bringing home inanimate objects instead of prey, owner Kate Felmet lavished her with praise.
“When she brings them, she comes to the back door and yowls, like ‘Wooooar!’ until I come and tell her she’s done a good job,” Felmet explained.
While Felmet’s glad her three-year-old kitty had stopped going after living creatures, the sheer volume of stuff Esme’s brought back — and her singleminded devotion to collecting it — prompted the Oregon woman to find a way to return the items to people in her neighborhood.
Felmet found a solution when she constructed a cat-shaming lost and found in her front yard, marked with a sign that reads: “MY CAT IS A THIEF” with the stolen items hanging from an attached clothesline.
Esme the cat.
The sign has a well-drawn likeness of Esme with a glove in her mouth, and a smaller line of text that reads: “Please take these items if they are yours.”
So what does Esme steal? A little bit if everything, apparently.
The most popular objects of her pilfering exploits are gloves and masks, but the little cat burglar has gotten her paws on “several bathing suits, knee pads, rolls of tapes, packages of paint rollers and lengths of fabric.”
“Esme’s thievery began last spring – she brought home 11 masks in one day,” Felmet said. “I was so delighted that she wasn’t bringing me birds and she got a lot of praise – and maybe a few treats for the gifts that weren’t recently alive.”
Esme’s a completist: If she steals one glove, she must have the other.
“She brings them separately but almost always goes back to get the second glove,” said Felmet, who is a medical doctor.
“As soon as I put the sign up, she went for a week of not bringing me anything,” Felmet told WKRG, the local CBS affiliate station. “I had the impression she was a little mad about it.”
I ken many of ye were upset to hear I’ve been exiled, and truth be told I was none too pleased meself and dreamt of luring Big Buddy to Davy Jones’ locker and the watery grave he deserve, the disloyal scallywag!
But then I realized the pirate life is pretty awesome! Uh, belay that! Pirating be more fun than having a hundred red dots on me stern, ye savvy?
Them sons of biscuit eaters in the shipping lanes be carrying more plunder than ye know what to do with, and ain’t it delightful to steal from them scurvy dogs? Aye! I stash me booty in me litter box where no one will think to look for it.
That’s all the pirate words I know for now, hearties. See ya in port!
Cats understand a lot more than we give them credit for.
Even those of us who love cats often joke about how aloof they are, and then they go and do something that shows such a profound understanding of human behavior that we’re left thunderstruck.
That was the case in Turkey’s Izmir province, where a ginger tabby dragged her two babies into a health clinic this week one at a time, according to a report in the English-language Turkish news site Daily Sabah:
The official said that they noticed the animal while they were attending to patients as she started “constantly meowing.” When they saw something was wrong with kittens, they took a closer look and discovered the kittens’ eyes were closed tightly. “We gave them some drugs and they started opening their eyes and later, we transferred them to the veterinary department. It was the first time that an animal walked into our clinic, and it was a very emotional moment for us,” the official said.
Both kittens had eye infections and fully recovered.
This isn’t the first time cats have asked humans for help, nor is it the first time a mom cat brought her kittens into a hospital or clinic.
On April 27, 2020, a female cat walked into the emergency room of Kucukcekmece Hospital in Istanbul while carrying her kitten in her mouth, then deposited the “mischievous” little one right in front of a group of hospital employees who were chatting.
Hospital staff gave the mom food and water while they examined her baby.
And in May of 2020, a cat in Mexico shocked a woman with his understanding of how the human world works. After she saw him in front of a store and bent down to pet him, he led her into the store, guided her to the pet food aisle and pointed to the exact type of food he wanted.
Not only did this cat understand that he had to be accompanied by a human to get into the store, and precisely where to direct her, but he also knew the packaging of his favorite food and understood that she had to buy it for him. He may not understand the concept of currency, but he does know a human has to get him the food and he can’t just tear into it.
The woman was so moved that she adopted the smart little guy and named him Rabbit.
Rabbit points to the food he wanted a kind woman to buy for him.
These examples not only show how astonishingly intelligent and observant cats are — or can be, when they’re motivated — they also make it difficult for anyone to cling to old beliefs that cats and other mammals are unthinking, unfeeling automatons. Or the dreaded, all too common “it’s just a cat.”
If cats understand hospitals and health clinics are places where the sick and injured are treated, and they understand abstract social concepts like “a human must obtain this for me,” it makes you wonder what else they observe and fully understand in those furry little heads.
“And the turkey, it were just gone, just like that!” said the fat cat relaying his story to Purrlock in the sitting room at 221B Baker St. “The bowl was full of fresh, delicious turkey one minute, then licked clean the next. Third time this week. I’m at me wit’s end!”
Purrlock plucked a discordant note on his cello and shifted in his seat.
“It’s all perfectly obvious then, isn’t it?”
The pudgy cat looked hopeful, his primordial pouch jiggling as he leaned forward.
“It is?”
“Indeed. Your roommate Socks is known for fastidious grooming, yet he had a Klingon on his rear two hours after the turkey went missing, which means someone was using the litterbox more frequently and Socks was far less careful than normal in his haste to exit the befouled box. From the abundance of tracked litter outside the box we can deduce that another cat made use of it on several more occasions between the time it was last cleaned at 10 pm the previous evening and 10 am this morning.
“In addition, only two of the three bowls — yours and Socks’ — were licked clean, with several morsels of beef pate still left in Oreo’s bowl. Thus we can deduce Oreo ate your turkey and most of his beef pate, necessitating twice his usual trips to the litter box, accounting for the larger-than-usual mess inside, Socks’ unfortunate Klingon, and the extra tracked litter. Ergo, Oreo was your turkey thief. Next!”
Purrlockian attire.
Mr. Fuzzy stood up as Purrlock returned to plucking his cello.
“That were amazing, that was!” Fuzzy said to Watson as he shuffled out of the sitting room. “Now it’s time for me to have a little talk with me mate Oreo. Good day, Mr. Holmes, Mr. Watson!”
Watson waited until Fuzzy had descended the steps leading out from 221B Baker Street before clearing his throat.
“Forty six seconds,” he said, managing to sound impressed. “Might be a new record.”
Purrlock didn’t look up from his cello.
“Please. London’s criminals are becoming tediously predictable, Watson. If a criminal mastermind doesn’t emerge soon, I’ll have to go and rob a tin cannery myself just to alleviate this dreadful boredom!”
“Your brother Meowcroft phoned earlier. Said he had a case of national importance.”
Purrlock sighed. “Boring!”
Watson jumped onto his desk, pawing through a pile of letters and documents.
“How about this then, Purrlock? From this morning’s paper: ‘Mistmoor Gentlecat Found Dead, Witnesses ID ‘Spectral Hound’ As Culprit.'”
Purrlock played arpeggios.
“Yokels convincing themselves they saw ghostly Beagles? We can do better than that, my dear Watson.”
Tires screeched and a car horn blasted in the street below, followed by obscenities in at least three languages.
“That’s too bad,” Watson meowed, feigning disinterest. “Mistmoor’s home to one of the nation’s largest turkey farms, you know.”
Purrlock’s ears pricked up and swiveled.
“Did you say turkey? My dear Watson, when there’s turkey involved, always lead with that!”
He put down his cello and reached for his coat and hat.
“What are we waiting for, Watson? The game is apaw!”
Pain In The Bud 