shelter cats – Page 4 – Pain In The Bud

Rescued Cat Gorged On Cookies Till He Was ‘Too Fat To Walk,’ Now He’s On A Diet

The abandoned cat found his way to the basement of a hospital in Russia, where staff members provided him with inappropriate food — and way too much of it.

Animal rescuers in Russia have their work cut out for them after taking in a mega-chonky cat weighing 38 pounds.

The orange tabby, named Crumbs by his rescuers because he leaves none in his wake, is so overweight he can’t walk and has been placed on a strict diet to meet his first goal of becoming ambulatory.

After that, his rescuers said, the real work begins as they try to get Crumbs down to about 10 pounds, which they believe is a healthy weight for a cat of his original size.

Crumbs the Cat — Crumbs with one of his rescuers who is helping the morbidly obese feline shed pounds.

Staff at Matroskin Shelter in Perm told Russian media that Crumbs was abandoned by his owners and was living in the basement of a hospital in the city.

It wasn’t clear if Crumbs was already obese when he was surrendered, but hospital staff were not providing him with the kind of protein-rich meat cats need to stay healthy. Instead, they plied him with cookies and calorie-dense soups, apparently putting no limits on his food consumption.

“Kroshik’s story is an extremely rare case when someone loved a cat so much that they fed him to such a state,” shelter volunteers said.

Crumbs is in for a shock as he adjusts to his new diet, but the more difficult challenge may be the treadmill sessions that await once he’s able to move under his own power.

Screenshot_2020-11-15 barsik-cat-2020-1-1 jpg (WEBP Image, 915 × 610 pixels) — Barsik suffered the indignity of being labeled “The Fattest Cat In New York” and even made the front cover of the New York Post, but the former chonkster and his new human had the last laugh:

The problem of overweight cats has received more attention in recent years, with veterinarians warning people not to intentionally overfeed their cats. Unfortunately, some people have taken to fattening up their felines for the sake of social media success, looking to copy others whose extraordinarily “chonky” cats have earned equally massive online followings.

In Poland, Gacek the cat was removed from his street-side tiny house and taken indoors because visitors to the city of Szczecin would not stop feeding the overweight celebrity chonkster, despite signs pleading with them to stop. (It also didn’t help that people tried to steal Gacek after he became internationally famous.)

Above: After Gacek went viral for being the top-rated attraction in his home city of Szczecin, Poland, a steady stream of admirers made the pilgrimage to see him in person, offering tribute in the form of snacks.

Here at Casa de Buddy, I had to put His Grace on a diet because he was pushing about 12 1/2 to 13 pounds, up from his natural weight of about 10 or 11 pounds. That might not seem like much, but Bud isn’t a very large cat despite his belief that he’s a hulking tiger. Two pounds is as much as 20 percent of his ideal body weight.

As you might imagine, the little guy was not happy about his significantly reduced snack allotment and made sure to communicate that to me loudly and often.

chubbybuddy — “I am NOT chubby, I am meowscular!”

There have also been success stories. Barsik, once dubbed “The Fattest Cat In New York” after tipping the scales at an astonishing 41 pounds, made a second round of headlines after he shed a significant portion of his weight. Nowadays he’s looking happy and healthy as he’s able to run and jump like a cat should.

Today We Celebrate The House Panthers And The Voids

A Virginia man created National Black Cat Appreciation Day, a celebration of melanistic house panthers, in honor of his late sister, who loved her 20-year-old black cat named Sinbad.

Happy National Black Cat Appreciation Day!

A few years after the death of his 33-year-old sister, June, Wayne Morris wanted to do something in her honor. June adored her black cat, Sinbad, who died at 20 years old, just two months after she passed.

So the Virginia man teamed up with Rikki’s Refuge, a sanctuary where he volunteered, and created National Black Cat Appreciation Day in 2011. Morris chose the day of June’s passing, August 17, in her memory, and that first year marked it by holding a fundraiser for Rikki’s Refuge.

Morris was delighted by black cats as well. He often posted about Norman and Batman, his own melanistic miniature panthers, advocated for the adoption of black felines, and painted whimsical scenes of cats, which were auctioned to raise money for Rikki’s.

Morris often posted about his cats, including Batman, seen here. Credit: Wayne Morris

Wayne Morris founded National Black Cat Day.

Morris also liked to show off his other black cat, Norman. Credit: Wayne Morris

Morris painted scenes involving black cats, which were auctioned off to raise money for feline rescues. Credit: Wayne Morris

Batman. Credit: Wayne Morris

(Above, clockwise from top left: Batman, Wayne Morris, Norman, Batman again, and one of Morris’s paintings.)

Wayne Morris died in 2022, but the day he founded has continued to grow in popularity. In the 14 years since its inaugural celebration, National Black Cat Appreciation Day has spread via fundraisers for shelters across the country, as well as sites within the online catosphere, like this one.

Morris was motivated beyond honoring his sister and raising money for his favorite rescue. Black cats — also affectionately known as voids — have suffered unfortunate reputational damage over the centuries.

Melanistic felines are actually considered good luck in Japan, China and most of Asia, where they can be found in temples and their likenesses are used as maneki neko, the ubiquitous “lucky cats” in homes and businesses. (Black maneki neko are said to ward off evil spirits, diseases and people with bad intentions, while the golden cat statues are associated with wealth and the white neko are thought to bring good health.)

But in much of the western world they’re associated with bad luck, “evil” forces in folklore, and they’ve been invoked in outbursts of moral panic over things like witchcraft.

Black_jaguar_edin_zoo — Big cats can be voids too, like this stunning black jaguar in Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A black cat — or a statue of one — was said to be involved in Satanic rituals in Spain by Konrad van Marburg, an inquisitor known for his brutal zealotry. While the effect of that accusation has been exaggerated for years in internet discussions and posts (Pope Gregory IX’s papal bull dealt with a small area of Germany and did not declare that black cats were Satanic), it naturally comes up in superstitions about the animals.

A 2020 study of 8,000 adoptions found black cats were less likely to be adopted and more likely to be euthanized. That study and others found there was “scant evidence” for the dramatic margins suggested by anecdotal accounts circulating online and in some publications, but confirmed the problem is real. Research also suggests that negative perceptions of black cats isn’t correlated to religious preferences, but is tied to general belief in the supernatural.

Interestingly, additional research has hinted at a decidedly more modern and petty reason people may hesitate to adopt black cats: they think voids are more difficult to photograph, which is an issue for people who want to show their pets off online. (We’ve written about that particular hang-up before, and noted it’s possible to take beautiful photographs of voids by being mindful of factors like lighting and contrast between fur color and the background.)

Regardless, the combined effect of the superstitions and negative associations has harmed black-coated felines, and National Black Cat Appreciation Day is also an attempt to push back and show people that black cats are just, well, cats.

‘No One Goes Hungry On Our Watch’: A Pet Food Pantry And A Tribute To An Incredible Cat

Misty the Cat “was an agent of chaos and misrule,” had a Krameresque entrance style and was deeply loved by his people.

With inflation taking a major toll on families over the last few years, one of the most frequently cited reasons for surrendering pets is that their people can’t afford them anymore.

A vet tech in Ohio is trying to prevent that from happening to people in her area with The Little Black Cat Collective, a pet food pantry she founded in honor of her late rescue cat, Lila, who died at 16 years old.

Laura Zavadil founded the pantry — which also helps people with dogs, guinea pigs, ferrets and rabbits — in 2021, and since then it’s grown, serving “30 to 40 families and more than 200 animals each month,” she told her hometown newspaper, the Vindicator of Warren, Ohio.

“I wanted to do my part to help the community through struggles,” Zavadil told the paper. “The pantry’s main goal is to get the needs of these animals met and help the people, but also — considering the limited amount of shelter space in the area — if it means the animals can stay in the home, that’s just icing on the cake.”

Remembering Misty the Cat, whose death “drained all the colour from the world”

Speaking of honoring deceased pets, Keith Miller has a heck of a tribute to his cat, Misty, in The Guardian.

It’s been six months since Keith Miller’s beloved cat (pictured above), came up to him “with a series of unusual cries, stretched his mouth wide like a yawning lion, shivered, collapsed and died.” Misty, Miller wrote, “was a fortnight shy of his ninth birthday,” and his absence has been keenly felt.

Tributes are difficult to write, and tributes to pets may be harder still. It’s tough to feel you’re doing justice to an animal you loved while conveying their personality, and in the back of your mind you’re thinking of the people who don’t get it, who don’t have pets and might find your tribute saccharine or melodramatic.

Miller strikes just the right notes and makes the reader feel Misty’s loss without knowing the little guy.

“I have thought a lot about this particular cat and this particular loss. I think what most pains and enrages me about it has something to do with the role Misty played in our life: a larger-than-life vibe, faux-heroic and mock-epic (and so often richly comic). He used to skid on the floor when he came into a room, like Kramer in Seinfeld. He was an agent of chaos and misrule, knocking objects off surfaces with gallumphing carelessness one day, dead-eyed precision the next. He was gormless yet prodigious, a fluffier cousin of Homer Simpson. He didn’t shyly solicit affection, as his sister does; he demanded it by right, thrusting his jaw up and out like Mussolini to accept strokes on his throat and chest.

All in all, he didn’t really have the makings of a tragic character. And he wasn’t a will-o’-the-wisp, either, on loan from another world, as most cats are. His unscheduled exit wasn’t just an emotional body blow; it was a violation of the rules of genre.”

The Mussolini bit resonated with me, since I’ve referred to Bud as “a furry little Genghis Khan” on occasion, and often joke that he’s a tyrant ruling over the place with an iron paw. Miller’s homage to his pal isn’t overly long, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

Magnificent Mouser: Larry The Cat On The Verge Of Outlasting His 5th UK Prime Minister

The Chief Mouser of No. 10 Downing St. is still going strong after 13 years on the job.

At first it didn’t seem like Larry the Cat would last.

The then-four-year-old moggie was adopted from a London rescue because of his apparent predatorial skill and in November of 2011 was appointed Chief Mouser at No. 10 Downing St., the UK prime minister’s office and residence.

The prime minister and his staff hoped the highly-touted feline would rid them of a persistent rodent problem. It was so bad that when a mouse scurried into view during a state dinner in late 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron tossed a fork at it in frustration, and staff set about looking for a more comprehensive solution than the usual traps.

Larry arrived to great fanfare but had to remind the humans who’s boss first. He was almost an hour late to his public introduction because he was napping, then took a swipe at a news reporter trying to get in a live shot with him.

In his first weeks on the job, the imperious tabby made a big show of dozing off in public view, often on the window sill of No. 10. During his waking hours he was much more keen on visiting his “lady friend,” next door mouser Maisie, than he was on performing his official duties.

Larry_the_Cat_(cropped) — Larry the Cat. Credit: No. 10 Downing St./Wikimedia Commons

The chief mouser eventually found his hunting groove, and almost thirteen years later four prime ministers have come and gone, but Larry remains.

Rishi Sunak, the fifth prime minister of the Larry Era, called elections for July 10 and if his conservative party — currently behind in the polls — doesn’t maintain control of the House of Commons after the votes are counted, Larry will wave goodbye to Sunak and welcome the sixth prime minister under his watch.

Larry’s outlasted David Cameron, Theresa May, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. Sunak assumed office in 2022.

At this point, No. 10 Downing St. should probably be renamed Larry’s House.

He seems to have a knack for knowing who’s going to stick around and who won’t last. When Truss bent down to pet Larry shortly after assuming office in late 2022, Larry gave her the cold shoulder. Truss lasted only 50 days, the shortest tenure of any prime minister in UK history.

The famous little guy is now 17 years old, but the staff who feed and care for him, and the veterinarians who help keep him in mouse-hunting shape, say he’s hale and healthy.

If the next prime minister is smart, he or she should look to Larry for advice on enduring popularity — and political survival.

Header photo of former US President Barack Obama and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron with Larry the Cat credit: Peter Souza/Official White House photo.

The_President_and_First_Lady_in_the_U.K._(48051460716) — Larry, perched on the window sill on the left, photobombed former Prime Minister Theresa May during a visit by former US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump. Credit: White House press photo/Wikimedia Commons

Larry on patrol — Larry was looking strong as he patrolled his territory in December of 2023. Credit: Justin Ng/Twitter

Is That A Cat Or A Seal?

Buddy does his best seal impression! Nearby, our local SPCA deals with a horrific hoarding case.

I snapped the photo below when Buddy heard the upstairs neighbors making noise. Little dude looks like a seal! (The animal, not the singer. Bud’s singing voice is terrible!) All he needs are some flippers:

The acne spot I wrote about earlier is healed, but as you can see there’s still a tiny spot on his chin where his fur hasn’t completely grown back yet. Thankfully it’s no longer causing him any discomfort, and he’s back to asking for chin scratches while purring happily.

Of course he won’t be happy if I share an unflattering photo without a flattering one, so here he is looking cute:

Note the huge meowscles and ripped physique!

In some sad news, there’s an ongoing hoarding case in White Plains, NY, just a few miles from Casa de Buddy.

Police responded to an apartment building in the city after neighbors began complaining of “horrific” smells coming from the unit and discovered an older woman living with at least 40 cats in appalling conditions.

The cats, who are all suffering from ailments including respiratory and eye infections, were everywhere — including inside furniture and atop the kitchen cabinets where a few of them were able to get away from the feces-packed floor.

White Plains cat hoarding case — Cats crowd the limited space above the kitchen cabinets to escape the feces-encrusted floor of the apartment. Credit: Westchester SPCA

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Staff from the SPCA of Westchester County have had to wear hazmat suits to operate inside the apartment. They’re in the process of removing the cats and have set up food and water stations for those they haven’t trapped yet while they try to clean some of the fecal matter and garbage, but they say the number of cats could rise as they find more hiding in the apartment. One cat was pregnant and gave birth to a single kitten on the feces-caked floor. The kitten was quickly removed and is under the close care of veterinary staff but is sickly and “clinging to life,” the SPCA said.

Incredibly, authorities have not charged the human occupant of the apartment. They say she meant well at first but the situation quickly spiraled out of control, as it often does when people who aren’t equipped to care for multiple cats take it upon themselves to “rescue” strays. No one sets out to become a hoarder. It usually happens when initial good intentions become unmoored from reality, but I do wonder how people who find these situations slipping from their control aren’t horrified by the suffering of the animals. Mental illness has to play a part.

Regardless, the situation is dire for the cats and the SPCA anticipates many thousands of dollars in veterinary costs on top of supplies and man hours involved in trapping the cats, getting them veterinary care, cleaning them up and working with them to help them overcome the trauma of their experience so they can become ready for adoption.

The SPCA of Westchester County was Buddy’s first veterinary office where he got his first shots and the snip as a kitten. They were very kind and gentle with the little guy, and at the time I’d just been laid off from my job so it really helped to have a place that provided quality veterinary care for significantly less than private vets. They do good work, and we wish them luck as they deal with a difficult task.