Los Gatos’ position in the illegal catnip market has become precarious in the wake of a federal raid and the arrest of a courier. Meanwhile, an old rival threatens to fill the power vacuum…
LOS GATOS, Calif. — Los Gatos, the premier purveyor of fine catnip and narcotics to the feline world, is looking for discreet, professional couriers following a recent setback in Costa Rica.
A Gatos courier was caught sneaking into Pococi Penitentiary on the night of May 22. The feline, a novice smuggler, was having difficulty navigating around a section of fence topped by razor wire when guards at the prison spotted and intercepted the kitty.
Correction officers captured the courier and found 2.4 ounces of crack-cocaine and eight ounces of marijuana wrapped tightly in plastic and taped to her body.
Under questioning, the narco feline admitted she was conducting a delivery for Los Gatos, creating legal troubles for the US-based nipcotics collective. It’s the biggest setback for Los Gatos since its 2022 war with another catnip cartel led to 14 cats getting sprayed in a drive-by urinating, an infamous incident known as the Tragedy of Tijuana.
Earlier this week, federal agents raided a Gatos compound, seizing an estimated $2.1 million in high-grade catnip and other nipcotics, the Drug Enforcement Agency said.
News footage showed several cats in handcuffs bundled into black SUVs while drug-sniffing dogs smirked.
“You’d better wipe that smirk off your face, holmes!” one Gatos lieutenant shouted at the canines, hissing out the words.
The raid and courier arrest have left Los Gatos with significantly less product — and fewer methods of delivery.
“The courier will be dealt with, as will those mangy mutts,” Los Gatos spokescat Pawblo Escobar said ominously. “In the meantime, we have customers who rely on us for timely deliveries of high-quality catnip and drugs, and Los Gatos has a reputation to uphold.”
Industry insiders say Buddy the Cat has been quick to fill the void. The longtime Gatos archrival reactivated long-dormant channels and has expanded his territory from his power base in New York.
“Buddy the Cat has the muscle, quite literally, to go paw to paw with Los Gatos and the other cartels,” said Felix Finch, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “But obviously this isn’t a one-cat operation, which is why it’s fortuitous that Buddy has been establishing ties with the jaguars and forming a coalition with other big cats. Can Los Gatos withstand the combined might of Buddy and big cats? That’s the question on every feline’s mind right now.”
Buddy has worn many hats in his time, literally and figuratively. He’s a good boy!
In 2019, Buddy was called up to the Yankees from AAA Scranton in place of the injured Giancarlo Stanton. Batting behind team captain Aaron Judge, Buddy hit a terrific .328 with 117 runs, while his jersey became the top seller in the team’s official store.
Sgt. Buddy in his USMC dress blues.
In 2015, Buddy was promoted to the rank of sergeant (E-5) in the US Marine Corps, where he served as a drill instructor at Marine Corps Recruit Depot on Parris Island, South Carolina. A tough but fair DI, Buddy churned out some of the Corps’ finest Marines while pioneering new hand-to-paw combat techniques.
In 1627, Buddy ascended the Phoenix Throne of the Joseon dynasty, earning him the title “Jeonha,” or king. Jeonha Buddy led Joseon through a period of post-war turmoil and into recovery while also establishing trade eastward with a previously-unknown culture that raised a magnificent bird known as turkey.
In 2023, Buddy was chosen as the face of Armani’s newest line of sleek suits, cutting a dapper figure on the runway.
Cats and dogs communicate primarily by scent, touch and body language, but human efforts to understand them have focused exclusively on meows and barks. If we want to truly understand our non-human friends, we need to take an approach that considers the other ways animals “talk” to each other.
A few years ago when MeowTalk made a minor splash in the startup world, I was pretty bullish on its potential to help us understand our cats better.
Sure, the app had an unhelpful habit of attributing improbably loving declarations to Buddy, but I thought it would follow the trajectory of other machine learning models and drastically improve as it accumulated more data.
More users meant the app would record and analyze more meows, chirps and trills, meaning it was just a matter of time before the AI would be able to distinguish between an “I want attention!” meow and a “My bowl is dangerously close to empty!” meow.
Obviously that didn’t happen, and what I personally didn’t take into account back then — and should have, given how obvious it is in retrospect — is that cats don’t just communicate via vocalizations.
In fact, cats don’t normally incorporate vocalizations into communication at all. Pet kitties do it entirely for our benefit because they know we’re generally awful at interpreting body language and we are completely useless when it comes to olfactory information.
It’s actually amazing when you really think about how much of the heavy lifting cats do in our efforts to communicate with each other. They recognize we can’t communicate the way they do naturally, so they try to relate to us on our terms. In return, we meet them less than halfway.
No wonder Buddy sometimes looks frustrated as he meows at me, as if I’m the biggest moron in the world for not understanding the very obvious thing he’s trying to tell me.
“Human, how can you not understand the simple feeling of innerer schweinehund I’m trying to convey here? The cringe is killing me!”
Now the Chinese tech giant Baidu is throwing its hat into the ring after filing a patent in China for an AI system that uses machine learning to decode animal communication and “translate” it to human language.
Machines are designed to process things from a human viewpoint according to human logic, so if Baidu wants to succeed where MeowTalk has not, its engineers will need to take a thoughtful approach with the help of animal behavior experts.
This is a hard problem that encompasses animal cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, biochemistry and even philosophy. If they approach this strictly as a tech challenge, they’ll set themselves up for failure.
Without the information and context clues provided by tails, whiskers, facial expressions, posture, eye dilation, heart rate, pheromones and even fur, an AI system is only getting a fraction of the information cats are trying to convey.
Trying to glean meaning from that is like trying to read a book in which only every fourth or fifth letter is legible. There’s just too much missing information.
Even if we can train machines to analyze sound visual, tactile and olfactory information, it may not be possible to truly translate what our cats are saying to us. We may have to settle for approximations. We’ve only begun to guess at how the world is interpreted differently among human beings thanks to things like qualia and neurodivergence, and the way cats and dogs see the world is undoubtedly more strange to us than the way a neurodivergent person might make sense of reality.
“He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.” – Cordwainer Smith, The Game of Rat and Dragon
An animal’s interpretation of reality may be so psychologically alien that most of its communication may be apples to oranges at best. Which is why I always loved Cordwainer Smith’s description of the feline mind as experienced via a technology that allows humans with special talents to share thoughts with cats in his classic short story, The Game of Rat and Dragon.
In the story, humans are a starfaring civilization and encounter a threat in the void between stars that people don’t have the reaction speed to deal with. Cats, however, are fast and swift enough, and with a neural bridge device, teams of humans paired with cats are able to keep passengers safe on interstellar journeys.
The narrator, who is one of the few people with an affinity for teaming up with felines, hopes he’ll be paired with one of his two favorite cats for his latest mission, but instead he’s assigned to partner with an old glutton of a tomcat whose mind was dominated by “slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans of half-spoiled fish.”
The narrator wryly notes that the last time one of his colleagues was paired with that particular cat, his burps tasted of fish for weeks afterward. But the cat in question, despite being obsessed with fish, is a badass at killing “dragons,” the human nickname for the bizarre entities that attack human ships in space. (The software that allows felines and humans to link thoughts also portrays the “dragons” as rodents in the minds of the cats, stimulating their ancient predatory drive so they’ll attack instantly when they see the enemy.)
We can’t know for sure if Smith’s interpretation of the feline mind is accurate, but another part rang true when he wrote that cat thoughts were all about the moment, filled with sentiments of warmth and affection, while they rapidly lost interest in thoughts about human concerns, dismissing them “as so much rubbish.”
If the mind of a cat is that relatable, we’ll be incredibly lucky. But in reality we’re dealing with animals who evolved in drastically different ecological niches, with different priorities, motivations, and ways of looking at the world — literally and figuratively.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand our furry friends. Research has yielded interesting information about the way animals like whales and elephants communicate, and AI is at its best when it augments human creativity and curiosity instead of trying to replace it.
Even if we don’t end up with a way to glean 1:1 translations, the prospect of improving our understanding of animal minds is tantalizing enough. We just need to make sure we’re listening to everything they’re saying, not just the meows.
The mercurial tabby cat tried to convince Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to bomb the Isle of Dogs, White House officials grudglingly acknowledged.
The controversy over leaked war plans expanded Monday after new reports revealed a journalist was not the only outsider added to a text group between senior members of the administration.
Buddy the Cat, a domestic tabby from New York, was also invited to the group and subsequently made privy to classified information, the White House acknowledged.
While Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg observed the text conversation between senior members of the Trump administration without participating in the exchange, sources say Buddy the Cat tried to convince Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to bomb London’s Isle of Dogs.
In addition, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt grudgingly acknowledged Buddy was able to convince Hegseth and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, to send federal agents to the home of a cat named Smudge, describing him as “a gastronomic terrorist who hates America and will stop at nothing to claim all the snacks for himself.”
When administration officials denied knowing Buddy the Cat, social media users began unearthing dozens of photos of the feline associating with national leaders. No one knows how deep the conspiracy goes.
Initially White House officials denied the feline was given access to the text group, with Leavitt calling it “an egregious example of the fake news media inventing absurd stories,” but they were forced to acknowledge the veracity of the incident when confronted with copies of the exchange.
“Folks, we are cleared for go, CENTCOM has given us the green light for the fifth strike package,” Hegseth wrote. “F-18 launch imminent.”
“Are we just going to ignore the Isle of Dogs?” Buddy the Cat texted in response.
The text caused confusion, with several senior officials speculating on the sender’s identity.
“The contact says ‘BTC.’ Who the heck is this?” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard asked.
“It’s [US Marine Corps] Gen. [Barrington T.] Caldwell,” replied Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor. “Got to be.”
Noem also initially tried to distance herself from the scandal by claiming she didn’t know Buddy, but photographs soon emerged of the tabby cat lounging on the podium while she spoke at CPAC in 2003.
It’s not clear how senior White House officials were convinced by a cat that a London neighborhood was related to an Iran-backed Shia militia in Yemen, but an anonymous official credited Buddy the Cat for “being very convincing. We all thought he was the general.”
While the feline’s suggestion to bomb the London neighborhood was co-signed by Hegseth, it was ultimately rejected by CENTCOM, which noted the UK is an allied country and there was no indication “terrorist dogs” populated the London neighborhood.
More successful was Buddy the Cat’s suggestion to send a federal strike team to the home of Smudge, his archrival.
The chonky cat screeched his innocence after heavily armed and armored federal agents smashed the door down and found him mid-bowel movement in his litter box.
“1337et: Agents have located the CHONKY little jerk in his domicile, where they found fresh explosive materials in his litter box and a suspiciously well-stocked cupboard,” Buddy wrote to the Houthi PC Small Group.
“Congrats, general!” Waltz wrote, while Noem called the arrest “a major win for American freedom and security.”
Reporters, former military officers and intelligence officials criticized the leak, pointing out that if a cat could get access to highly sensitive war plans — and influence them in real time — America’s enemies could do the same. But White House officials pushed back on the criticism, saying it was overblown.
“So someone put a cat on a text chain,” Leavitt said, snapping at a reporter during a press briefing. “So what? You guys are, like, being so dramatic!”
The animated feature about a cat surviving an apocalyptic flood has racked up awards and earned universal acclaim.
It’s been quite a year for Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis and Cat, the star of Flow.
Their film won an Oscar for best animated feature film, racked up wins at the Golden Globes and smaller film festivals, became the most-watched film in Latvian history, snuggled its way into the hearts of audiences in the US, Europe and Asia, and enjoys incredibly rare universal accolades from critics and viewers alike, scoring 97 and 98 percent with each group respectively on film review site Rotten Tomatoes.
Now Cat has officially recognized his Oscar by doing precisely what his species loves to do. In a short video posted by Zilbalodis, Cat smacks the golden statue off the railing of his boat and onto the deck, to the annoyance of his lemur buddy.
Pain In The Bud 