Choupette has her own custom Louis Vuitton carrier and enjoys perks like a personal chef.
Choupette Lagerfeld travels the world in her own private jet, appears in commercials for Japanese beauty projects and has graced high fashion covers, including a shoot with French supermodel Laetitia Casta for V Magazine.
At one point she traveled with a body guard, two minders, a personal chef and her own doctor, according to the New York Times. She drinks and eats from silver bowls and enjoys a one-of-a-kind Louis Vuitton carrier.
Oh, and she’s worth millions.
Choupette (“sweetie” in French) is a white-and-cream Birman with subtle tabby marks on her head, and she was adopted by Karl Lagerfeld in 2011. The German designer, who was the creative director of fashion houses Chanel and Fendi, died of pancreatic cancer in February of 2019 but left a considerable fortune to his cat.
On Thursday, Choupette’s minders marked her 11th birthday by sharing a snap to her Instagram, choupetteofficiel, showing the fabulously wealthy feline aboard her private jet, with a cake presumably made of pâté, a bottle of champagne, balloons and various gifts from her late human’s fashion collections.
“Happy birthday to me,” the post reads. The pampered puss’ Instagram has 121,000 followers.
Choupette celebrated her birthday on Aug. 18. A snap shows her celebrating on her private jet, which ferries her between modeling gigs and vacation spots like Ibiza.
No one’s sure precisely how much Choupette is worth, but Lagerfeld — who had a net worth between $170 million and $300 million, per reports — left her a considerable sum.
“She’s an heiress,” Lagerfeld told an interviewer. She “has her own little fortune.”
Like human celebrities she’s the subject of net worth profiles on various sites, which list an often-cited $13 million number. Some of that money includes her own earnings for commercials in Japan and Germany, where she’s been the face of beauty products and luxury cars, respectively.
Sacre bleu! The Eiffel Tower, a French supermodel and Choupette! This photo was printed in V Magazine, which featured Laetitia Casta and Choupette in a 10-page spread.
I’m kind of at a loss for words here. Anything I could say seems so obvious.
However, I’m thinking it may be time to put Buddy’s good looks and charm to use for once and arrange some sort of meet cute with Choupette.
The name Buddy would have to go. He’d have to be called something appropriately, Frenchly snooty, like Jean-Luc Budélard Lucien or Yves Buddiene Baptiste. I’d have to school him in Parisian meowing, invent a suitably bohemian upbringing for him, and fabulate a skill that hints at his creative genius. Perhaps he’s inspired by Choupette’s late human and works as creative director of the Buddeaux fashion house, or maybe he creates abstract art by smearing paint on a canvas with his paw pads.
Meanwhile, in India…
Street kids eat from the garbage, wear tattered clothes and exist beneath the notice of the rest of society.
A UK couple created a cat flap that uses algorithmic AI to determine if their cat is trying to come inside while carrying prey in her mouth. If she’s carrying prey, the cat flap won’t open.
Jinx the cat was so grateful to UK couple Martin Rosinski and Michelle Bowyer for giving her a home that she decided to bring them a gift.
“The first time I was working at home, I heard Michelle making a commotion because Jinx had come in with a mouse and dumped it on the carpet in front of her as a ‘thank you’. That’s their way of expressing love. You can’t tell her off, so we thanked her a lot for it and took it away from her,” Rosinski said.
“Then this started happening more and more often to the point where we would be woken up at 2 a.m. as Jinx would meow loudly and announce, ‘Hey I have a gift. If we didn’t get to her fast enough she would decide to eat it herself, which would involve piles of mouse parts being smeared into the carpet. This was happening at 2 a.m., then again at 4 a.m. on many nights and we’d not get any sleep having to deal with this. Her record was four in one night – that night was a frenzy of three mice and one bird. It was something that was a real cause of stress.”
The solution is pretty simple, right? Keep Jinx inside.
The former stray won’t like it at first. There will be an adjustment period when the meowing will be seriously annoying. But it’s better than allowing your cat to play Predator at night and waking up to find your cat sitting on your chest, proudly presenting a twitching mouse to you.
Rosinski and Bowyer didn’t take Jinx inside.
Instead they created a bespoke intelligent cat flap that allows Jinx to come and go as she pleases, but won’t open if she’s carrying prey. They both have backgrounds in tech: he’s a researcher who also tinkers with software and hardware, and she’s a web developer.
Despite being domesticated, cats retain their predatory instincts and many will kill small mammals and birds if allowed to wander on their own outdoors. Credit: Aleksandr Gorlov/Pexels
Their system, OnlyCat, uses a camera and an algorithm to determine if Jinx is carrying something in her mouth. If she is, the cat flap won’t grant her access, and Bowyer and Rosinski will get a text informing them Jinx has been up to her hi-jinx again, along with a photo of her entry attempt.
The OnlyCat prototype has prevented Jinx from bringing in 42 prey animals since June of 2021, the couple said. OnlyCat may prevent her from bringing her prey inside, but it hasn’t dissuaded her from killing.
“Two months ago I think something clicked and she realized, ‘I can’t bring these home. It’s just not going to work,’” Rosinski told the UK’s South West News Service. “She still catches them outside but she’s learned that there’s no point even trying to bring them home, which is a relief.”
The couple developed the OnlyCat into a full product, which launches on Aug. 16 at £499. (A little more than $600 USD.) Their site says the retail version of the flap has worked 100 percent of the time in tests, and the developers believe “99%+ accuracy should be achievable for everyone.”
It’s similar to a device built by Amazon engineer Ben Hamm which uses DeepLens, an AI-enabled camera system, and Sagemaker, a software tool for training machine-learning algorithms, to determine if cats are carrying prey.
Hamm’s version, which he created for his cat Metric in 2019, initiates a 15-minute lockout timer if Metric tries to enter while carrying a kill, and automatically sends a donation to the National Audubon Society, which protects birds and their habitats. The algorithm was trained using tens of thousands of images of cats approaching normally, and with prey in their mouths. So far, Hamm hasn’t developed a retail version of his AI-enabled cat flap.
The feline predatory drive is instinctual. Indoor cats can exercise that drive with wand toy games and by chasing laser pointers. Credit: Aleksandr Nadyojin/Pexels
We don’t think there’s any one way to raise cats, and it’s obvious there are different cat cultures in various countries.
Nevertheless, seven out of 10 cat owners in the UK allow their cats to roam free, and anecdotes like the ones about Jinx, with her multiple kills a night habit, draw the ire of birders and conservationists.
Peter Marra is the author of Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences Of A Cuddly Killer and co-author of many of the leading studies claiming cats are the primary threat to bird populations. He’s currently making the media rounds and endorsing strict policies — many of them in enacted in response to his studies — that would make it illegal to allow cats outdoors.
Maybe it’s time for more people to reconsider allowing their cats to roam free. Like putting a cat on a diet or trying to break a bad habit, there’ll be loud and annoying protests in meow, and it’ll get worse before it gets better, but eventually cats always adjust to changes if given long enough.
As domesticated animals they don’t have a natural habitat anymore, and they don’t actually need to be outside. It’s entirely possible to keep things fun and interesting for the furry little guys, and that’s on us. All that’s required is our time, attention and affection. Interactive play time. Toys that can keep a cat occupied by herself. Catnip. Condos and tunnels. Window perches. Cat TV on Youtube. Simple things to play with, like plastic bottle rings, crinkled tin foil and cardboard boxes.
We don’t think anyone should be required to keep their cats indoors, and that’s the point. We have an opportunity to meet conservationists halfway and make a real effort to reduce feline impact on small wildlife. If we don’t, eventually we’ll be forced to comply by laws that’ll be draconian compared to the voluntary measures we could have taken to prevent the government from getting involved.
Maximino the Cat figured a good way to get his human’s attention was by singing along with her.
A young opera singer was practicing on a live cast when her cat joined in for an impromptu duet.
Maura, who goes by @maura.music online, seemed annoyed at first when her cat, Maximino, hopped up on the desk and walked between her and the camera.
She opened her mouth and drew breath for the next line, then cackled with delight as Maximino cut in for the second verse:
Maura, who has been involved in opera for about 10 years, told Newsweek the video was recorded “a few years ago.” She posted it online on Aug. 11 and it’s since gone viral.
Maximino “loves music, and the only way I can get him to follow me is by whistling his favorite tunes,” she said.
The Persian is an especially vocal cat who “screams” at Maura when he wants something, which sounds an awful lot like another furry little guy we know.
In a second video recorded after the first one went viral, Maura tells Maximino “you’re famous!” before trading off with him again, with her singing in Italian while he answers in meow:
Today is International Cat Day, and it’s certainly a day for celebrating our cats and doing something special for them, whether that involves treats, extra attention, catnip or more time playing their favorite games.
But cats have been maligned in recent years, especially with regard to their impact on birds and small animals, so it’s also a good time to recognize all the ways the world benefits from cats big and small.
Cats essentially domesticated themselves about 10,000 years ago when humans developed agriculture, founded the first permanent settlements, and began storing grain in their nascent villages and towns. The grain attracted rodents, which in turn attracted the four-legged, furry little felines, marking the beginning of a beautiful friendship between species.
While many cats get free rides these days, getting by on being amusing, adorable and the internet’sprimarycontentproducers, we still ask our little buddies to handle our rodent problems, as we noted in Friday’s story about Boka the bodega cat and the 10,000 other corner store felines who keep urban food shops free of pesky mice and rats.
Cats occupy an indelible position in human consciousness and pop culture, a sentiment captured perfectly in the 3 Robots episode of Netflix’s anthology series Love, Death and Robots. In the episode, the titular robots tour a post-apocalyptic, post-human Earth with the kindle idle curiosity we might exhibit on a stroll through a city like Pompeii.
“What’s the point of these things?” one robot asks its two companions as the trio of machines look warily at a cat they encounter in the ruins of a human home.
“Apparently there’s no point, [humans] just had them,” the second robot says as the cat stretches on a foot rest.
“Well, that’s underselling their influence,” the third robot says. “They had an entire network that was devoted to the dissemination of pictures of these things.”
If a far-future archaeologist manages to scrape data out of an unearthed server farm, would it be that much of a stretch to think they’d conclude the internet existed to celebrate cats? (Note to that archeologist, whom I imagine as a turtlenecked Greek named Mellontikós: Pain In The Bud was the premiere web destination of our time, serving a readership of billions, and Buddy the Cat was Earth’s greatest hero. Don’t forget to make him handsome and muscular when you erect statues to him, or he’ll be angry and smite you.)
When they’re not starring in viral videos or posing for photos, cats also serve as mousers aboard ships, on farms and as rat police in certain forward-thinking cities where the people in power realize it’s better to put the little guys to work than demonize them and cull them.
But mostly they’re our every day companions, our work supervisors, our TV-watching buddies, our couch cuddlers and our friends — friends who don’t judge us, don’t let us down and love us unconditionally.
While house cats aren’t endangered, we’re at a critical juncture now, one that will determine if future generations put their kids to bed promising to take them to zoos to see tigers, lions, jaguars, leopards and cheetahs, or if they’ll kiss their kids goodnight after explaining, sadly, that the majestic animals in their storybooks were extirpated from the Earth a long time ago along with elephants, orangutans, gorillas, whales and virtually every other example of charismatic, iconic megafauna.
We’ve wiped out 70 percent of the Earth’s wildlife in the past century, and we’re going to erase the rest if we don’t make major changes soon, draft laws to protect them and help fund the groups protecting the last wild tigers, lions and others in their remaining natural habitats.
The world is a better place with cats, and we’re lucky to have them. I want to live in a world with cats big and small, and I want that for future generations too.
The 17-year-old Anastasia has been living on the grounds of the Rector’s Palace in Dubrovnik her entire life.
Anastasia is still living the palace life.
The community cat found herself in the middle of an uproar after staff at the Rector’s Palace, a historic site in Dubrovnik, Croatia, kicked her off the palace grounds which had been her home for 17 years.
In 2021 staff at the Rector’s Palace, a six-century-old structure which is now a museum, said Anastasia’s little nook, with food and water bowls on top of cardboard, was an eyesore and wanted her gone.
They took away her belongings in May, prompting local carpenter Srdjan Kera to build a beautiful wooden cat house that mimicked the color and architectural details of the palace, giving Anastasia a dwelling that would shield her from the elements as well as blend in with the historic building’s facade.
But palace staff wouldn’t accept the compromise and had the wooden home removed, sparking an outcry among Dubrovnik’s locals and tourists. A petition demanding Anastasia be allowed to stay was signed by more than 12,000 people — a figure greater than the number of people who voted for the city’s mayor, representing more than a fourth of the city’s population.
The furor died down and there hasn’t been much news since then, but Mark Thomas, editor of the English-language Dubrovnik Times, told PITB Anastasia is back at the Rector’s Palace and basking in her fame.
“She doesn’t have her fancy home that was built for her,” the U.K. expat told us, “but rather her spot on a piece of cardboard. She is well fed and seems to be more than happy and enjoying having her photo taken with tourists.”
Thomas said he’d last seen Anastasia just a few days ago in her usual stomping grounds at the palace.
It seems odd that staff at the palace wanted her gone because they found her original nook unsightly, then removed the aesthetically pleasing cat house created by Kera only to go back to the old cardboard arrangement, but we’re glad the senior kitty isn’t subjected to the stress of being forcibly moved from the only home she’s ever known.
Previously, staff at the Rector’s Palace said Anastasia didn’t need her shelter all year round, so perhaps they’ve come to a compromise and will allow it during the winter. Dubrovnik enjoys a mild Mediterranean climate, with temperatures bottoming out at about 50ºF (10ºC) in January, its coldest month, but while the city remains temperate, it experiences significantly more rain in the winter months.
Pain In The Bud 