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.”
The reaction says volumes about our society’s sense of proportionality, our collective understanding of animals, and our ability to politely disagree on topics we feel strongly about.
This hasn’t been a great week for feline PR.
Not only did two celebrities come out with bizarrely forceful anti-cat sentiments, but from their statements, they both “hate” cats because they’ve misinterpreted feline behavior.
The fallout hasn’t been good either, for the actress and rapper involved, or for the more extreme animal lovers who have responded with disproportionate rage.
The first comes from rapper Docheii, who insists cats “genuinely aren’t friendly animals.”
“yall be scratched and beat tf up by your own animals I can’t lmaoooo,” the towering intellect from Florida wrote on social media.
Cats, she asserted, “don’t wanna be domesticated.”
Presumably she got that information from the Pew Center for Feline Public Opinion, and the rest of us simply aren’t privy to the latest opinion polls among cats. And here I thought our furry friends were mostly ambivalent about anything that doesn’t involve napping, playing and eating. (I took an informal poll of Bud. He responded with a simple “Fetch me a snack, will you, human?”)
A promo shot of Doechii, real name Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon
Regardless, even if there was some way to ascertain how cats feel about a process their ancestors initiated — one that takes thousands of years to result in speciation — it’s irrelevant. The decision was made 10,000 years ago when The First Kitteh was drawn to a human settlement by the promise of rodential prey in abundance.
Modern cats have no more say in the matter than we have in our ancestors slaughtering dodos. It happened. We can’t change the past.
The actress vs the ‘pedigree bitch’
The second bit of anti-feline sentiment comes from Jessie Buckley, an Irish actress who is weirdly proud of forcing her husband to ditch his two pet cats when they began dating. She talks as if she’s been waging a personal war against the species, and her reason for disliking felines also indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of their behavior.
Buckley’s comments were made on a podcast late in 2025, but resurfaced this week and went viral as her Oscar buzz reached its peak. On the podcast, Buckley said one of her husband’s cats was a “pedigree model bitch” who was orchestrating a “coup” against her.
She thinks the cat had it out for her: “I’d come home and there’d just be, like, poo on my pillow.”
This is actually sad, because people who really know cats, who understand why they behave certain ways, will immediately understand that they don’t have accidents out of spite. If the cat was eliminating outside her litter box, there was a legitimate underlying problem causing her a great deal of stress.
She could have been injured, she could have been sick, or she could have been plagued by the cumulative stress brought on by the presence of a hostile woman who ludicrously saw her as competition. Our furry friends are much more perceptive than generally realized, especially when it comes to our emotional states, and Buckley’s hostility would have been immediately apparent.
Buckley with co-star Paul Mezcal, who was equally enthusiastic in his intense dislike of felines, telling an interviewer: “Yeah, f— cats!”
Alas, Buckley didn’t reluctantly ask her then-boyfriend to give up his cats. She demanded it, then did a victory lap when he complied, which makes me suspect she was merely taking the whip out for a test drive before further commitment. If he’s willing to abandon two pets, he’s almost certainly going to be a pushover when she begins to prune his friends from his life, starts dressing him the way she likes, maybe even monitors his phone. *shudder*
“It’s me or the cats,” Buckley said she told her husband. “But I won!”
Congratulations, I guess?
The rage of cat lovers
As ludicrous as it seems, the backlash may cost Buckley an Oscar. Personally I don’t keep up with the approximately 200 awards ceremonies actors hold to fete themselves annually, but apparently Buckley turned in a solid performance in a movie called Hamnet.
She was considered the front-runner for an Academy Award. Now critics are openly wondering about her chances.
As always, these sorts of statements reveal a lot more about the people involved than they do about cats. I just wish people understood the species a little better, so maybe attitudes won’t default to anger or hostility if, say, a scared cat scratches a person who corners her, or a kitty with a stomach bug pukes on the carpet.
When a toddler gets sick, we don’t respond by yelling at the kid, blaming him and chasing him off. We make sure he’s okay, give him some medicine or take him to the doctor, and clean up the mess. Cats are essentially furry little toddlers, with the same innocence as children. When we adopt them, we agree to care for them.
Both Buckley and Docheii have been hammered on social media since their comments went viral, and it’s important to address that too. They expressed opinions. That doesn’t make them “pieces of s—,” “worthless human beings,” “scum” or any of the other nasty things some people have been saying.
We can disagree with them without overreacting, even in the age of dehumanizing online conversation.
Maintain yourselves!
And honestly, it makes all of us look bad. The day Walter Palmer returned to work is forever seared into my mind. Palmer was the American dentist who infamously and illegally lured Cecil the lion out of a protected area and killed him to take his head as a trophy in 2015.
Worse, Palmer — who had a history of getting in trouble for breaking the law while hunting — killed Cecil with a bow and arrow in order to claim some meaningless hunting record for himself and bungled the point-blank kill shot his guides had lined up for him. Cecil, who was an iconic lion with a distinct mane, suffered for hours before he died.
People were understandably angry, and protesters showed up outside Palmer’s office the day he returned to work. Most of them behaved themselves. But as Palmer made his way toward the front door of his dental practice, one of the protesters let loose a blood-curdling scream and shouted “WAAAAALTER PAAAAALMER!“, vowing vengeance for Cecil.
Palmer returning to work while media and protesters crowd him.
That moment of unhinged, unregulated rage overshadowed the good intentions of every person who registered their displeasure calmly and politely — and provided ample ammunition to those who enjoy painting all animal lovers as lunatics.
Buckley and Doechii expressed opinions we don’t like, and that’s their right. The best thing we can do is explain why they’ve misinterpreted feline behavior, and show them that cats really are loving, friendly animals — it just takes a little patience and trust. I say that as the faithful servant of a cat who can be particularly prickly and a complete lovebug, depending on the circumstance.
In the meantime, celebrities who hate cats should probably take a pass on broadcasting their intense dislike and save themselves the resulting headache. Sadly, we no longer have any sense of proportionality when it comes to disagreements, and no one gets a fair shake when things are litigated via social media.
“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.
The woman left her dog tied to a post near the departure gate, telling police she didn’t want to miss her flight after the airline told her she didn’t have the right paperwork to bring her dog in the cabin as a service animal.
A dog who was abandoned by his owner at a Las Vegas airport has a happy ending to his ordeal after he was adopted by one of the police officers who responded to the initial abandonment call.
The sequence of events began on Feb. 2 at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. A woman was trying to board with her goldendoodle — a medium-size breed that is a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle — when an airline employee told her she needed paperwork proving the pooch was a service animal. Emotional support animals don’t need paperwork and aren’t certified by any agency, public or private, but service dogs must be trained and certified.
Instead of trying to work the problem out, the woman abandoned her dog, leaving him tied to a post near the departure gate. The airline’s staff called police and when officers arrived, they found the woman waiting to board her flight.
The woman pictured with Jet Blue the dog before abandoning him at the airport. Still image from a video provided by Las Vegas PD.
She was insistent she’d done nothing wrong, according to Las Vegas police, and said she could find the dog again after returning home because he has a tracking device. That excuse didn’t fly, and neither did the woman– officers pulled her off the departure line and arrested her for abandoning an animal.
In a positive twist of fate, one of the officers who responded that day had been looking to adopt a dog of that same breed and had already applied and been cleared by a local shelter. He was just waiting for the right dog.
The officer, Skeeter Black, adopted the abandoned good boy and named him Jet Blue after the airline. Jet Blue joined his new family on Sunday after undergoing the usual veterinary checks, quarantine and a 10-day mandatory hold with animal control.
“We’re very excited to add him to our family,” Black said when animal control handed three-year-old Jet Blue off to him. “We’re gonna enjoy him. He’s gonna be very much loved.”
As for the Las Vegas Police Department, the brass issued an exasperated statement reminding people that animals are living beings with their own feelings.
“We can’t believe we have to say this,” police wrote in a post, “but please don’t abandon your dog at the airport — or anywhere else.”
Terry Lauerman literally sleeps on the job, and cats love him for it.
Seven years ago, Terry Lauerman and the Safe Haven Cat Sanctuary went viral.
Lauerman, then 75, walked into the Green Bay, Wisconsin, rescue one day and told the staff he liked to brush cats. They welcomed him as a volunteer, he immediately curled up with a cat — and fell asleep.
Since then, Lauerman’s been going to Safe Haven every day, brushing his feline friends, then yawning and passing out with a cat in his arms.
Lauerman usually spends an hour sleeping on the couch with a cat, then wakes up and moves to another couch to nap with the next cat, WCCO reports. He did this for six months straight before Feldhausen eventually told him he had become an official volunteer and had him fill out a form.
Now CBS went back to check on Lauerman and the shelter. He’s still at it, napping away the hours with the shelter’s cats, giving a comfort they wouldn’t normally have until finding their forever homes.
“We’re very lucky that he walked in here,” said Elizabeth Feldhausen, Safe Haven’s executive director.
Lauerman, who is also a brother at a nearby abbey, said he senses God in our four-legged friends, which is a notion he probably shouldn’t share with them lest they become even more imperious.
“I’ve always been a cat person,” he said. “To me it’s a blessing to be touched by creation.”
As a CBS reporter put it: “You sleep on the job.”
“Yes,” Lauerman said, “that’s exactly it.”
Bud and I salute Mr. Lauerman. Years ago we heard a friend observe that “there are two kinds of people in the world: those who take naps, and those who don’t even understand how that’s possible.”
At the time, I agreed with her. But napping starts to seem like a great idea as the years pass by, and when you have a cat, well, sometimes you don’t have a choice. With 11 years now under my belt as Bud’s pillow, I can safely say there are few things more relaxing than opening a book, reading a few chapters as your little buddy curls up in your lap, and easing into some Zs.
Images via Safe Haven Cat Sanctuary.Header image via Pexels.
Pain In The Bud 