OwlKitty is back and this time she’s sliding into Leonardo DiCaprio’s DMs.
The last time I saw Titanic was in a movie theater 25 years ago when the film was just released, its theme song was befouling airwaves and its director, James Cameron, was playing at deep sea explorer in the Mariana Trench. (Cameron would return for an expedition more than a decade later, matching the depth of a science team who made the dive decades earlier, but doing it solo. His interest had been sparked by the work he did on Titanic.)
I remember feeling restless as the movie dragged out, then incredulous as women and girls all around me sniffled, dabbed at their eyes with tissues and even sobbed! Teenage Big Buddy could not comprehend it.
But this version of Titanic? It’s more my speed, coming in at an economical 1:07 running time and featuringOwlKitty in place of Kate Winslet:
As you can see, Winslet isn’t entirely gone from this cut. She just plays second fiddle to OwlKitty, Leonardo DiCaprio’s first love.
Who’s the Queen of the World now?
Want more OwlKitty? Check out her star turn in Jurassic Park, where she replaced the T-Rex and rampaged around the doomed island looking got catnip and treats.
A Redditor shared a video of her cat who was apparently delighted when he realized she spoke meow.
We’ve all done it. Whether we’re bored, curious or just exasperated, every cat servant has meowed back to their furry overlord at some point, and the reactions of our feline friends run the gamut from pleasantly surprised to utterly confused.
The latter would be an apt description for Buddy’s reaction the first time I meowed back at him. I do recall a friendlier “conversation” in meow between us when he was a kitten and laying adorably on his back atop my desk, playfully reaching out at my fingers with his tiny paws as I typed.
However, it feels like our first real meowningful exchange came one day during a conflict: I needed to get some articles done on deadline, and Buddy was insistently pointing out it was dinner time.
Like all cats, if he doesn’t see some action starting 15 or 20 minutes before Official Meal Time, he makes sure I know Yum O’Clock is rapidly approaching. That’s exactly what he was doing as I pounded the keyboard, trying to tie up a pair of 750-word stories.
“Mmmmmrrrrrrrowww?” Buddy questioningly meowed, looking up at me. “Mmmmmrrrreeeowww? Mrrrrrrrrroooowww!”
Translation: “Uh, Big Bud? Dude? My yums aren’t here. Where’s my food, dude? Where’s my food? Where’s my FOOD?!?!”
He kept at it, increasing the volume, frequency and urgency of his meows to the point where you’d think he was dying, and I couldn’t ignore him any longer.
“Mrrrrrowww!” I mockingly meowed back to him. “I’m Buddy, and my dinner might be late! Mrrrrowwww! So terrible!”
He sat there dumbfounded, and I used those fleeting seconds as best I could. Then he decided that, yes, I was mocking him, and he made his displeasure known.
“MMMMRRROOOWWW! Mrrrrrrrppp!”
“Mrrrrooowww! My dinner isn’t here yet! The world is ending!”
Back and forth it went until he flopped onto my desk, breaking my line of sight with the monitor, and began protesting even more insistently.
This short video from Reddit shows a woman having a meowversation with her cat, who has a decidedly Buddesian look to him:
This kitty’s even got a white bib similar to Buddy’s!
He seems shocked that his human is finally singing The Song of His People, growing more insistent with each exchange.
“So she does speak the sacred tongue of Meow! It is a miracle! Wait, has she been listening to me complain about her all this time and I didn’t know it?!?”
Both reactions are amusing: Human servant laughing uncontrollably, cat having a revelatory moment.
Longtime readers of this blog will remember I once posted an audio clip of Bud and I having a conversation in meow. WARNING: Bud’s roar is extremely tiger-like and may trigger some listeners. If you’re uncomfortable with the sounds of savage and intimidating animals, please consider skipping this recording:
Oh who are we kidding, he sounds like a mix between baby Elmo and an 8-week-old kitten calling to his mommy for milk.
“She’s not showing you her baby because it’s a cat. A feline! A house pet!”
I’m just going to present this here without comment, because nothing I can say can possibly make this any better than it is. If you’re unfamiliar with the original saga of breastfeeding cats at 40,000 feet, read our previous post here.
Cats aren’t dolls or stuffed animals to be posed at our whim for the benefit of online strangers.
I know I’ll probably catch some heat for this, but the below video, which a Newsweek writer gushes over and 8.8 million people favorited, is an example of animal abuse. It may not be violent, it may not be particularly overt, but it’s animal abuse all the same.
I get why people are saying this is “adorable” and think it’s sweet, but anyone familiar with cats can see clearly the kitty does not like being picked up, then placed in a bed on her back. She protests, then moves to get away, but her “owner” clamps her down and presses an admonitory finger to her nose.
Little Pishy’s ears twitch and her eyes dilate. Her owner slides her into position, then holds her down before tucking her in beneath a heavy comforter. Then the woman takes both of the Pishy’s paws, places them deliberately above the comforter just the way she likes them, and finally wags her finger in the cat’s face again before she’s finished, as if to warn her: “Don’t move a paw.”
Just before she steps away, she strokes Pishy’s paw a few times with a finger, an affectionate afterthought on her terms.
This is not love. (Still image from TikTok video.)
Let’s be blunt here: The cat is not enjoying any part of the whole charade. She would almost certainly rather sleep like a cat, and not be treated as an infantilized, anthropomorphized stuffed animal. Her “owner” is dictating everything from the position in which she sleeps to where she can keep her paws.
“She stays in bed like this alllll night ;),” the TikToker brags in the video description.
Of course she does, because she’s probably scared to find out what will happen if she doesn’t. This isn’t a person who considers her cat a living being with her own feelings. She’s a person who sees her cat as a prop and a way to earn the adulation of strangers on the internet.
The same thing applies to all the “cute” videos of cats forced to wear clothing, glasses and hats, and posed in human-like positions. Last week, a short clip of two cats watching an iPad went viral. The cats are snuggled together in a miniature chair, posed like miniature humans. The larger cat has a paw around the smaller cat’s shoulders, and the tablet is balanced between their free paws.
Instead of gushing over the seemingly perfect 8 seconds we see, it’s worth thinking about what we don’t see, and how that manufactured scene came to be. I can assure you it does not involve animals who enjoy being posed like dolls for the benefit of an audience they don’t know exists, on a medium they don’t understand.
Cats dressed and posed as Robin Hood, Bob Ross, Spiderman, the monster from Stranger Things, some sort of naval admiral or Founding Father, and a Stark from Game of Thrones. I think.
A cat who doesn’t understand what a costume is, not enjoying his Freddie Kruger outfit.
I keep coming back to the best advice I ever got about taking care of a cat: The strength of the human-feline bond depends in large part on how much the human takes the cat’s feelings into consideration.
We’re much bigger, stronger and some of us subscribe to the archaic “might is right” way of thinking. Imagine the reverse: Five hundred pound cats as large as tigers, subjecting us to tongue baths at their whim, posing us like dolls and forcing us to sit, stand and sleep in feline positions because it’s “cute.”
I am by no means an expert in cat care, and I don’t pretend to be some sort of cat whisperer or cat guru, but one thing I’ve always done is let my cat decide when he wants affection and interaction. I’ve never grabbed him and held him in my lap, or tried to dress him in miniature samurai armor for social media snaps.
When he meows for a head scratch or lays down on my chest and purrs as he listens to my heart beat, it’s because he wants to be there, and he knows I won’t grab him and force him to stay when he wants to get up.
If I treated him like a doll and tried that tuck-in move with him, he’d claw the hell out of me, and I’d deserve it. He’s my Buddy, not my property or my puppet.
What do you think? Am I overreacting, or are you disturbed by these videos as well?
Kitty’s somewhere in the big pile of stuffed animals, but where?
A woman named Gosia had a clever solution to a landlord visit in an apartment where pets aren’t allowed.
She hid her patient and trusting cat, Larry, in a pile of stuffed animals. Can you spot the little guy? Finding him was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be, although PITB readers are usually a lot better than I am at Where’s Waldo? Cat Edition:
Just so we’re clear, this would never work with Buddy. As soon as there’s a knock or a buzz, he dashes for the front door and waits there impatiently for me to open it so he can see who’s on the other side, meowing excitedly the whole time.
But assuming I was able to somehow get him to stay and tolerate serving as the keystone in a stuffed animal pyramid, I doubt he’d make it one minute before forgetting he’s supposed to hide, bounding over to the landlord and chatting away like he always does.
Pain In The Bud 