Unfortunately, Lord Fluffybutt III did not make the list.
U.S. News and World Report compiled a list of the top cat names in America by looking at pet insurance registrations, and a bunch of familiar names topped the list.
Luna is the current most popular name for female cats, followed by Bella, while Milo edged out Oliver for the most popular male cat names. The data is current for the year 2024, the report said.
While other lists use different ways of calculating the top names, including registrations on pet-related sites and listings on PetFinder, the U.S. News list closely mirrors the others.
The name “Buddy” was named “most badass” for the 27th year in a row, since pet insurance companies began keeping statistics. (Okay, we made that up, but it’s probably true.)
Are we doing right by our furry friends? The latest issue of New York magazine takes a deep dive into the concept of pet “ownership” and the ethics of keeping animals in our homes.
Almost the entirety of New York magazine is devoted this week to what its editors call “an exhaustive exploration of the ethics of pet ownership.”
There are also articles about what veterinarians really think of “pet owners,” whether runaway dogs deserve to be free, and even a story asking whether the word “owner” is appropriate to begin with. (You’ll notice PITB almost always avoids that word, unless we’re quoting others. I refer to myself as Buddy’s servant and his caretaker, words that feel more honest than owner.)
The stories are worth reading. Some are free for a limited time, others can be read as part of the weekly article limit. And if you can afford it, supporting a magazine or two during these brutal times for the publishing industry is a good way to help quality publications survive, so we’re not all drowning in a sea of clickbait garbage tuned for algorithms instead of human readers.
Regular readers of this blog are likely familiar with the story of Bud’s one and only “escape” as a kitten. When I found him, this cat who hates being picked up leapt into my arms, holding onto me like a terrified toddler, and his relief was palpable as I felt him purring into my neck. We were both relieved.
He’s had the opportunity to leave since, but he won’t. He’s got a good thing going here, living like a little king with his personal servant. He gets tons of attention, he’s allowed to do pretty much anything he wants as long as it isn’t dangerous for him, and he loves his Big Buddy.
I know he does from the way he approaches me, purring and meowing happily as he bunts his forehead against mine. I know it from the way he makes biscuits on me and falls asleep in my lap, feeling content and secure. And I know it from his refusal to leave my side the two times I was so sick I could barely move.
He’s got his own site, awesome retrowave logos and online admirers, but Buddy only cares about the snacks.
We shouldn’t feel guilty for giving cats a home.
I think we tend to forget that as domesticated animals, cats don’t have a natural habitat. The process of domestication made them friendlier, more trusting and more capable of reading human body language, facial expressions and tone of voice.
But those changes came at a cost, as they always do in domestication. Felis catus looks like its wild relatives and retains many of the amazing abilities of wild cats, but compared to them the species has lost a step. Domestic cats are not as quick or agile, they’re too trusting, and they’re not well suited to providing for themselves. The statistics on life expectancy reflect that, with ferals and strays living short, miserable lives.
Although it’s usually very difficult to tell a domestic cat from felis lybica, the wildcat species seen here, there are major differences in their respective survival abilities and instincts. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
So if felis catus has a habitat, it’s our living rooms. When our ancestors welcomed them into human settlements ten thousand years ago, they formed an indelible bond and made a pact, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.
Consider it a debt we owe for the survival of our species, when nascent civilization would have likely been snuffed out were it not for cats protecting the grain stores over long, cold winters.
Without cats, rodents would have eaten their way through the season’s rations, starving out the early settlers before the next harvest. The great agriculture experiment would have been over as quickly as it began with people returning to the nomadic life of hunter-gatherers, and it’s likely that everything after — from the first cities, to the birth of western civilization in Greece, to the remarkable achievement of putting a human being on another world — would have been jeopardized or taken radically different paths otherwise.
So you can thank your cat for your house, your car, the medicine that keeps you tip top, all the comforts of modern civilization, and all the stories and songs of humanity. Without cats and their heroic willingness to eat their way into our good graces, we wouldn’t have gotten here. Thank them often. You can’t go wrong with treats.
It’s International Cat Day, which means you should totally do awesome stuff for your cat.
Hello there, PITB readers! I have taken over the blog from my inept human on this most auspicious of days, International Cat Day, to offer some great suggestions on how to honor your feline overlord!
Let’s get right into it, shall we?
10) Human snacks: Let’s be serious here for a moment. I’m sick of getting the same old crunchy treats, meaty sticks, soft Buddy Biscuits, Churus and party mix. I want cheese! I want filet mignon! I want roast turkey! I want a cheeseburger! Day after day we have to sit here, our mouths watering as you humans stuff your faces with all sorts of food we would love to eat. Well, today’s the day. Start cookin’, servants!
Yes! More cheese, hold the lettuce and tomatoes. Credit: Juan Santos/Pexels
9) Roombas. That’s right. It’s 2024 and I still don’t have a Roomba. I’m very angry about that. When do I get my mighty steed? Let it be today!
8) Catnip and silvervine. Sure, we get these on other days, but this day absolutely must not go by without you giving us at least a few doses of the good stuff. Hurry up! I need to get my fix!
7) Sweet cat drip that shows you’re owned by a cat. My Big Buddy just got two t-shirts. One shows a roaring jaguar with the word “Savage,” because I am savage, and the other is a kitty samurai with a cool sword. Aside from the fact that this is premium drip, everyone will know that you answer to a fluffy, benevolent overlord back home. That’s what’s important.
The drip.
6) A throne. I’ve wanted a throne since I was a kitten. It doesn’t need to be an Iron Throne with the melted swords of everyone I’ve conquered, a la Game of Thrones. It can be something humble, made of gilded metal, velvet cushions and maybe a lion crest or cool tiger heads on the paw rests. I’m not picky as long as it looks awesome. What’s important is the symbolism and comfort.
5) Hire a mariachi band to parade through the streets hoisting an image of your cat, performing songs in your feline overlord’s honor. This is another humble offering that says “I serve a cat, and I’m proud of it!” When people ask what the hell is going on, hand them Cuban cigars and say “We are celebrating el jefe!” They’ll know who you mean.
“We sing of the great, wise, handsome and meowscular Buddy the Cat!”
4) Hire a portraitist to paint your kitty. Again, it doesn’t have to be extravagant. As a humble cat, I don’t mind being portrayed as a naval commodore, a king, a great warrior of world renown, or a massive tiger. The important thing is that it looks cool and you hang the picture above the couch in the living room. Get on it, human.
3) Massages. Schedule them throughout the day, sprinkling them around naps and meal times. Do you know how satisfying it is to enjoy a nice massage after Food O’Clock? I like to have my chin rubbed and the top of my head scratched while being told what a good, handsome, awesome, amazing, handsome, meowscular feline I am.
2) Toys. Not just for Christmas, you know. In fact, go ahead and consider this Kitty Christmas In Summer. Wand toys, track toys, new boxes, those little plastic ring things from milk gallon containers, stuffed animals that we can hunt and murder like the apex predators we are. You don’t have to wrap them, just bend the knee and present them as tribute. You’ll have our thanks, and our favor.
1)Hang out with us! It really is that simple. The most important thing you can do on International Cat Day is spend time with your cat! Many of the above suggestions fall under this category, including playing with us, giving us massages and reading epic poems you’ve composed about us. Personally I like settling down to nap on top of my Big Buddy after a massage. There’s something about having my chin scratched that makes me start yawning, and there’s no better place to nap than on my human, where it’s safe and there’s body heat and he can’t get up to use the bathroom because it would disturb me. That’s love.
I hope these suggestions are helpful! I’ve tried to list really easy, basic, humble stuff, but if you feel like constructing a 426-room cardboard box castle, well, I won’t stop you. In fact, that would be pretty cool. But like I said, the most important thing is that we get to hang out with you. And eat filet mignon.
Buddy is many things, but he’s NOT quiet. His incessant chattiness can kill my sleep and my peace and quiet, but in the world of A Quiet Place, it would kill me! Would your cat get you killed in the movie franchise’s monster-stalked reality?
As a cat lover, big time science fiction fan and appreciator of the first two A Quiet Place installments, the very first thing I thought when I saw the trailer for A Quiet Place: Day One was “I hope the cat doesn’t meow!”
My second thought? Bud and I would be so, so dead.
Dead immediately. Dead a thousand times over.
Apparently I’m not the only one, because fans have taken to social media to participate in the “Quiet Place Challenge,” which involves reenacting some of the scenes from the movie with their own cats to see if their furry overlords can stay silent.
As PITB readers know, Buddy never shuts up. He’s got something to say about everything, he often narrates his activities in real time, and he’s got an entire meowing ritual that starts at least a half hour before Food O’Clock, gaining in volume and annoyingness until a fresh bowl of turkey is placed before him. His personal patois, the Buddinese dialect, makes heavy use of trills, chirps, grunts, chuffs and sniffs to elaborate on his meows.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Quiet Place movies, they imagine a world that’s been invaded by so-called Death Angels, dread creatures of extrasolar provenance who are completely blind, but have extraordinarily sensitive hearing. The first movie, about a family surviving on their farm in upstate New York months after the initial invasion, was universally lauded for its taut script, effective tension and novel use of a quiet/loud dynamic that is a marked departure from the usual horror-thriller formula.
John Krasinksi directs and stars in the original A Quiet Place as Lee Abbott, a father who survives the invasion along with his wife (real life spouse Emily Blunt) and their two children. Credit: Paramount Pictures
In A Quiet Place (2018), its 2020 sequel and the recently-released prequel, Day One, entire minutes pass soundlessly. As a viewer you can’t help but wince and tense up when a character errs and makes noise, knowing the consequences can be immediately tragic.
There’s simply no way Bud and I would survive more than five minutes, and if I had to put money on it, I’d wager we’d probably be dead within 60 seconds of the terrifying monsters showing up.
Indeed, the movie doesn’t dither: the Death Angels make planetfall at around the 12 minute mark. Mild spoilers from the beginning of the film follow:
12:31 – On Chinatown’s ruined Pell Street, within a haze of dust so thick you can’t see more than a few feet in any direction, a man shouts loudly into his smartphone, telling the person on the other end that something meteor-like had landed just a few hundred feet away. He’s pulled suddenly and violently into the smog, his scream ending as abruptly as it began. Verdict: Death by Buddy. He’d probably meow in protest at the dust and get us both killed immediately.
12:53 – A female National Guard soldier sees Nyong’o’s Sam and shouts at her to take cover. The guardswoman’s radio crackles with the panicked screams of her comrades saying the enemy is everywhere, and then she’s dispatched as quickly as the guy on the phone. Verdict: Death by Buddy. He’d almost certainly huff derisively at the soldier’s order to take cover, and we’d both be crushed underneath the foot of one of the lumbering beasts.
13:34 – Sam huddles behind a vehicle with another woman when a panicked man screams, drawing the aliens like moths to a flame. Verdict: Death by Buddy. Little dude’s default reaction when he’s scared is to run screaming and hide behind my legs. He’d draw the monsters right to us and we’d die.
13:50 – Sam wakes up inside a theater several minutes after an explosion knocked her out. She’s about to speak when Djimon Hounsou’s Henri clamps a hand over her mouth and raises a finger to his lips. Unfortunately that doesn’t work with a cat. Verdict: Death by Buddy. Attempts to get him to shut up would be fruitless, and while I’d know my only chance for survival would be to throw him like a football so the aliens track his indignant screech, I wouldn’t have the heart to do it. We’d die together.
Frodo, the feline co-star of Day One and “service cat” to Lupita Nyong’o’s Sam, is precisely the opposite. He’s a Good Boy extraordinaire, consistently calm in his mother’s arms and reliably silent when he needs to be.
Frodo is a handsome and resourceful little guy, and much of Day One’s tension comes from putting him in danger. Credit: Paramount Pictures
Without meows to rely on, director Michael Sarnoski gets quite a performance out of Nico and Schnitzel, the two cats who play Frodo. They’re expressive felines who could teach Nicolas Cage a thing or two about how to emote with subtlety, as in one scene when Frodo sees a man emerge gasping from a flooded subway station. Frodo regards the stranger with curiosity, his little face registering surprise at the man’s sudden appearance with just the slightest twitch of his mouth and whiskers.
It’s effective and very cute, but we never forget about the incredible danger that faces Frodo and Sam as they return the One Ring to Mount Doom navigate the ruins of New York City amid blind predators with extraordinarily sensitive hearing.
“LOL I got you killed, dude! Hey! Wake up! I’m hungry! Turkey time! I’ll take my evening meal on the balcony and dine al fresco this evening, okay? Big Bud? Dude?”
If Day One’s world was reality — and I’m extremely thankful it’s not — I suppose it’s possible I’d get lucky if we were in a deep subterranean level of a building for some odd reason, and if Bud decided it’s not worth disturbing his nap to investigate the ruckus above.
But the moment his belly rumbles and he starts screeching for yums, or the second he gets it into his little head that he just has to tell me his latest theory regarding entangled subatomic particles, it would all be over, for me at least. I could totally see Bud making noise, then dashing to his customary hiding place behind my legs while a “Death Angel” impales me with one of its giant claws.
What about the rest of you? Is your cat a Frodo, a Bud or another sort entirely? Would you be dead as quickly as we would be, or do you think you could survive with your furry pal?
Cats have established themselves as the de facto rulers of 220 million households, where they enjoy perpetual lives of leisure and are doted on by their adoring humans. How much more successful can they be?
Dear Buddy,
There’s been a lot of talk lately among the humans about how they’ll evolve in the future, whether they’ll become more successful, and whether they’ll merge with machines! Scary!
But what about us? How will cats evolve to be more successful? Will we always have human servants?
Feline Futurist in Florida
Dear Futurist,
Do we really need to be more successful?
As a species we’ve secured our rightful place as royalty in human homes where all our needs are catered to.
We’ve become so adept at manipulating our human minions that we even know how to spur them to immediate action by embedding urgent baby-like cries in our purrs.
We figured out that humans are hardwired to respond to cries in that frequency, and once we find that manipulative sweet spot, we never forget it. We’ll push that coercive button all day and night to get what we want. There is no rest for humans until they comply with our demands.
But now we have gone beyond that significant accomplishment, essentially hijacking the humans’ species-wide consciousness by taking over the internet.
Imagine some alien archaeologist poking through the rubble of human civilization far in the future, its delight at recovering data from an ancient human server turning to utter confusion as it realizes entire zetabytes are comprised of nothing but images and videos of small, mysterious, furry creatures that seemingly do little besides eat, sleep and enjoy massages.
“Did I have it all wrong?” the confused alien might say. “Could it be that these ‘cats’ were the true power on this planet all along, and humans were in thrall to them?”
What else do we need to be successful, and to what evolutionary pressures do we need to adapt? We’re not fighting our way through hostile territory in the living room, fending off attacks en route to the kitchen where there’s only a chance for food.
Nope. It’s literally served to us on a regular schedule and whenever we screech for it. Our servants know they will never hear the end of it if they don’t meet our demands, and the best of them have learned to anticipate our desires before we have to vocalize them.
How much better can it get? We’ve managed to achieve a lifestyle in which we can perpetually live in the moment with no worries about the future, and everything taken care of for us. The humans don’t expect us to do anything in return except be cute and cuddly.
We “earn” our keep by allowing them to pet us every now and then as we lounge, until we grow weary of human affection and dismiss them with an annoyed flick of the tail or a gentle bite that says “Enough, you’ve had your 30 seconds, human!”
We break their stuff, vomit on their carpets, poop in their shoes, disturb their sleep, lay on their clean piles of laundry, ignore their boundaries, deny them their privacy, destroy their furniture, steal their cheeseburgers, force them to scoop and dispose of our waste, take over their beds, and we still act like the humans are fortunate to serve us.
We are irreproachable, imperious and untouchable, and when we’ve pushed our luck perhaps a bit too far, all we have to do is flop onto our backs, pull our little paws up beneath our chins, and squeak out a meow.
“Awww,” our humans say, their thoughts manipulated by our toxoplasma gondii mind-control superpower. “What a good boy! He’s so innocent! Of course he didn’t mean to [insert incredibly disrespectful action here], he’s an angel!”
So no, my friend. I don’t think we have to participate in the evolutionary arms race. That’s for lesser creatures whose futures are uncertain. Us? We’re winning at life without lifting a paw.
Your pal,
Buddy
“That’s right. Obey us, humans. We honor you by allowing you to serve our meals, scoop our poop, scratch our chins and buy us toys. You are so fortunate!”
Pain In The Bud 