A feel-good video about a kitten who was rescued from the brink of death.
The girl in this video found an orange tabby kitten on the verge of death in Hubei, China, and refused to give up on the little one.
Through tears, she used a hair dryer to warm the kitten while her 39-year-old dad filmed her efforts. She was successful! The kitten slowly began to stir and felt well enough after two hours to lap up some milk.
Temperatures in Hubei can plunge into the 20s and 30s overnight this time of year, so the kitten would have died without the little girl’s intervention.
The felines were found deceased near open tins of tuna, and laboratory tests confirmed they’d been poisoned.
In early October, a woman who helps manage a colony of stray cats in South Carolina’s Lowcountry stopped by to feed them and was distraught by what she saw.
Six cats lay dead not far from several open tins of tuna. After the woman called for help and a larger group searched the area, they found the bodies of seven more cats and three opossums, the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office said.
The cats were spayed/neutered and managed by volunteers from Lowcountry Trap, Neuter and Release Network, meaning their population was controlled and they were routinely monitored and given veterinary care.
Tests showed the cats were poisoned, according to the Professional Veterinary Pathology Services in Columbia and the Michigan State University Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory.
While police were looking into the poisoning, they got a tip that a local man had been complaining about the cats and claiming they were a nuisance.
On Thursday, police charged 28-year-old Andrew Dock and 45-year-old Charles Waylon Ulmer with 13 counts of felony ill-treatment to animals with torture and one count of conspiracy. Dock’s wife, Sara Rose Dock, 23, and his mother, Laura Mary Dock, 61, were charged with conspiracy along with Michael Jeffrey Kemmerlin, 30. All five suspects live in or near Summerville, a town about 25 miles northwest of Charleston.
Each felony count is punishable by as many as five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, per South Carolina penal code.
Dock was the ringleader of the group, according to police, and enlisted the others to help him poison the cats.
“Anyone that is capable of putting out poison and creating that level of pain and suffering is a concern to me as a human in our community,” Carol Linville, founder of a local nonprofit called Pet Helpers, told Lowcountry news station WCSC. ”That is a dangerous person. If they can do it to a cat, they can do it to a dog or do anything else that they deem they don’t want around.”
Locals involved with colony management and animal rescue praised the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office for seeing the investigation through and arresting the suspects.
“The fact that the law enforcement took this seriously and really wanted to see justice and really do their due diligence to make sure that justice is really coming for these cats. I am, I’m very grateful,” said Kayte Williams, one of the women who cared for the colony. “Hopefully nothing like this happens again because the public will know if this happens, you will be prosecuted, you will be charged and you are not going to get away with it.”
On his social media accounts, Dock describes himself as a former welding instructor at Horry-Georgetown Technical College originally from Newark, New Jersey.
All five suspects were released after posting bond, according to the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office. It wasn’t immediately clear if they had retained lawyers, or if they were given return dates for preliminary hearings.
More Americans say they can’t afford to keep their cats because of inflation, leading to an increase in surrendered and dumped cats in some places.
More than 110 years ago, American geneticist Clarence Cook Little developed a theory explaining why some cats have orange coloring and some don’t.
Now Little has been proven correct thanks to the work of separate teams in Japan and the US, which discovered the mechanism that leads to orange coloring, including fully ginger felines as well as calicos and tortoiseshells.
The explanation may be a bit too heavy on genetics for some readers, but essentially the researchers found the specific gene that leads to the growth or orange fur. They’ve known about the gene for a long time, but didn’t realize the totality of its function. Its official name is ARHGAP36, but for the sake of simplicity, scientists are calling it “the orange gene.”
“The orange gene has a known role in hair follicle development, but scientists didn’t previously know it is also involved in pigment production,” a team of geneticists and biotechnologists wrote in The Conversation, a science publication. “This means that a new pathway for pigment production has been discovered, opening the way for exciting and important research into a basic biological process.”
Ginger cats are usually male, but the pigmant can also appear in female cats due to an error in gene copying which deletes one segment of the orange pigment-producing genetic code.
That’s why calicos and tortoiseshells have orange blotches or mixed orange fur. “[T]he orange gene is persistently switched on in orange areas but is mostly switched off in non-orange areas of a cat’s coat,” the authors wrote.
Time magazine has a story examining the problem of stray cats in America’s urban and suburban population centers, why it’s happening, and what can be done about it.
First, might as well get this out of the way: We don’t know if there are “more” cats. The claim that there are more relies on anecdotes, and there’s no hard data to back that up. You have to be highly motivated to invest the time and money into a proper census like the D.C. Cat Count, and it’s an understatement to say most towns and cities are either not willing to do that, or don’t have the resources.
What we do know is there may be more cats in certain areas, with individual shelters in some places reporting record numbers of surrenders and cats scooped up by animal control.
The story quotes rescuers who say they’ve seen more surrendered pets, as well as data from Shelter Animals Count, which tallies self-reported information from shelters and rescues. The latter says 32 percent of cats taken in were owner surrenders in 2024, compared to 30.5 percent in 2019.
“It’s a combination of people surrendering their pets and people not adopting because they’re not sure they can take on the financial commitment,” Animal Care Centers of NYC’s Katy Hansen told Time.
Rescuers say that’s reflected in their experiences trapping the felines, who are friendly and acclimated to humans.
The people surrendering their pets cite inflation, not only impacting the cost of essentials like food and litter, but also more expensive veterinary care.
The story additionally includes this eye-popping detail:
“At Veterinary Care Group, a private equity-owned practice in Brooklyn, the cost of spaying or neutering a cat has soared to $850 per animal. By contrast, at the nonprofit veterinary clinic Zweigart recently founded in Brooklyn, the cost of spaying or neutering a cat is $225 and a mid-sized dog is $300.”
The lesson here: Steer well clear of veterinary clinics that aren’t vet-owned or are obtuse about their ownership. Private equity groups don’t buy clinics out of love for animals.
As for solutions to local spikes in stray populations, the story doesn’t offer any. It mentions TNR (trap, neuter, return) but only in the context of a lawsuit against the San Diego Humane Society for its neuter/vaccination program.
That said, there probably isn’t a one-size-fits-all technique. What works for a small town won’t necessarily work in a city, and there are dozens of factors that could influence the prevalence of stray cats and colonies. Still, city councils and town boards don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Chances are if they look, they’ll find a municipality similar to their own where locals have successfully stabilized feline populations.
As for the Buddies, I’d live in my car before giving Bud up. He wouldn’t be thrilled about that situation, and we’d have to head south because the winters here are brutal, but as long as Bud has his servant, he’s good.
A previous version of this post incorrectly described cat chromosomes. The story has been updated to remove the error.
Allexis Ferrell pleaded guilty to felony animal abuse, but she still hasn’t explained her actions.
A judge struggled to find words for his anger while handing down a sentence to an Ohio woman who ate a cat in front of her home this summer.
On the night of Aug. 16, 27-year-old Allexis Ferrell grabbed a stray cat and began eating it while it was still alive. Footage from freaked-out neighbors shows Ferrell on all fours in a driveway as she devoured the poor animal.
When horrified police officers arrived and asked Ferrell why she ate a cat, the woman — whose mouth was covered in blood — had no answer.
She still hasn’t explained her actions.
“This is repulsive to me. I mean, that anyone would do this to an animal. And an animal’s like a child. I don’t know if you understand that or not,” said Stark County Judge Frank Forchione. “I can’t express the disappointment, shock, disgust that this crime has brought to me.”
The judge says he considers Ferrell a threat to the community.
On Monday, Forchione sentenced Ferrell to a year in prison, which she’ll serve in addition to 18 months’ prison time for two earlier cases involving theft and child endangerment. The one-year sentence is the maximum for felony animal cruelty in Ohio.
The incident made national headlines not only because it was vile, but also because the details weren’t made public until September — after then-candidate Donald Trump claimed immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets.
Unscrupulous social media influencers and clickbait “news” sites added to the confusion by initially tagging Ferrell as one of the pet-eating immigrants, despite Canton’s location some 170 miles northeast of Springfield. Ferrell is an American citizen and was born here.
Oddly, although follow-up stories reported Ferrell’s attorneys petitioned the judge for drug and alcohol abuse treatment for their client, there was no mention of Ferrell being under the influence of drugs or alcohol the night she killed the cat.
Here on PITB we’ve flagged stories that illustrate the disturbing normalization of violence toward cats and other animals, but this incident defies categorization. Hopefully Ferrell is given the help she needs and is prevented from ever owning or interacting with animals in the future.
The find is extraordinary, allowing scientists to directly study the extinct cat’s musculature, fur, head shape, and even its claws and whiskers.
A team in Russia stumbled on the find of the century when they located the stunningly well-preserved remains of a saber-toothed kitten in Siberia.
The kitten, which was found near the Badyarikha River in northeastern Siberia, was about three weeks old when it died, scientists estimate.
Unlike typical finds — a fang here, a mandible or partial skeleton there — this specimen still had its fur, claws, whiskers and muscles, which means scientists have already learned more about the species, Homotherium latidens, than they have with almost any other long-extinct animal.
While the saber-toothed cub is a true felid, it boasts adaptations unlike any surviving member of the panthera genus.
It has wide paws wrapped in heavy fur, a short tail and a stockier, lower-to-the-ground build than modern lions and tigers. Those adaptations, scientists believe, made it easier for Homotherium latidens to traverse environments with ice and heavy snow.
Its head shape is slightly different, with smaller ears than modern big cats, and its neck is enormous, more than twice as thick as the neck of a comparable three-week-old lion cub which was used for comparison. Likewise, its mouth is capable of opening significantly wider, although the team did not compare it to the jaguar, which has the widest-opening jaw among extant felids.
The frigid, arid clime of Siberia made it possible for the cub’s body to endure for so long. The team that made the discovery conducted radiocarbon dating that puts the cat at between 35,000 and 37,000 years old, according to reports.
It’s not clear how the cub died, although its species went extinct about 10,000 years ago, likely as a direct result of fewer prey animals in the frigid zones it occupied. Additional bones belonging to the rear of the cub skeleton were encased in a large cube of ice immediately next to the intact upper body.
The cub’s remains were recovered in 2020, but the results of the research team’s analysis were just released on Nov. 14 and published in the journal Nature. The paper’s authors have a lot more to share about the species’ physical characteristics, they noted in the text, and plan to follow up soon with a second paper going into more detail about what they learned from the cat’s intact musculature.
Top image: An artist’s impression of an adult member of homotherium.
Pain In The Bud 