Little Buddy the Cat tells humans how they can mark this day dedicated to the most awesome species on Earth.
Happy National Cat Day! To help us learn about this important day and what it means, we turn it over to Little Buddy the Cat:
“Ahem. Is this thing on? Okay. Good!
National Cat Day was founded to help buddies all across America find homes. Did you know about three million of us enter the shelter system every year? That’s a lot of cats who don’t have homes, couches, food bowls, toys, favorite blankets, regular meals, and most importantly love. They don’t have humans to tell them how amazingly cute they are, and to transform into Furniture Mode for napping on.
“Scuse me, but how am I supposed to sing the blues about being in the big house without a harmonica?” Credit: Pexels
The best thing to do on National Cat Day is to adopt a cat, but even if you don’t have room for Additional Buddies in your domicile, there are other ways you can help!
Volunteering at your local shelter
Feeding a cat (like me) extra treats
Donating to your local shelter
Buying toys for an athletic feline (like me!) who likes to play
Foster cats or kittens for your local shelter
Letting a particularly handsome furry fellow (like me!) lay down in your lap, absorb the warm and have a nice nap
Raise awareness of stray/homeless cats, so maybe someone you know might provide a good home for a buddy
Give a good girl or good boy (like me) some catnip and silvervine, then scratch our heads and tell us how awesome we are
tl;dr version: Help other cats, spoil your own cat(s). That’s what today is for!”
Larger Buddy has been playing some stupid game about building cities, but this one’s pretty cool ’cause everything’s named after me or other cats, and there are lots of homes for little buddies.”
A shelter operator has received death threats amid confusion over the facts after animal welfare authorities raided a Los Angeles County shelter on Friday.
The initial news headlines were apocalyptic — more than 700 dogs and cats were found in deplorable conditions according to authorities, who said the California property where they executed a search warrant represented the most extreme animal hoarding case in history.
A day later the numbers have been revised down to a still-significant 250 dogs and 66 cats, and the owner of Rock N Pawz shelter in Los Angeles County says she and her facility have been smeared, resulting in a flood of death threats directed at her.
The story is a reminder that facts aren’t always established as quickly as we’d like them to be in the age of 24/7 news and social media, and the advent of photorealistic AI can add to confusion and stir public outrage by distorting the reality of fluid situations.
A woman holds a dog found on the Rock N Pawz property. Credit: Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control
What we know for sure is that officers from the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control executed a search warrant on the property in Lake Hughes, an unincorporated community in the Sierra Pelona Mountains, about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles proper. The investigation was prompted by repeated complaints from neighbors, who said there were overwhelming odors coming from the shelter and claimed there were regular dog fights and incessant loud barking.
A local news station, KTLA, reported authorities on site were wearing respirators with protective gear, and quoted authorities who said they did not believe it was a case of intentional neglect.
“Sometimes people try to do the right thing, and they may bite off more than they can chew,” the Department of Animal Care’s Sgt. Matthew Davoodzadeh told the station. “They end up ultimately not being able to care for the animals in a proper way.”
Authorities have not filed charges related to the case and there have been no allegations of criminal conduct.
Credit: Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control
The influx of animals has strained nearby shelters while veterinarians examine the 316 dogs and cats taken from the property.
In the meantime, shelter owner Christine D’Anda said descriptions of the property and the conditions of the animals aren’t accurate, and took to social media to complain of harassment and death threats directed at her since news of the search warrant hit the web.
The shelter operator asked people to withhold judgment until the facts are established.
On Facebook, users posted images allegedly taken from the property, while others pushed back, alleging the images are either AI creations or were taken from unrelated news stories.
The shelter’s page indicated active rescue and adoption efforts, including fundraisers and an advertised adoption event last weekend.
D’Anda said she will fight the allegations in the legal system.
“There’s nothing that I can do. I’m a very stoic person,” she said. “I’m very sad about the whole situation, and I can’t wait to go to court.”
Or if your sense of humor tends toward the scatological, you can donate to put your ex’s name on a litter box.
Like other nonprofits, animal shelters face steep competition when it comes to scoring charitable donations, so the more a shelter can stand out, the better.
For some that means stories about their rescues and pets-in-waiting going viral. For others, it means finding clever ways to use occasions like Valentine’s Day to raise money.
One of the latest fads involves making a donation to pay for spay/neuter surgery for a street or shelter cat — and having the cat named after your ex. As one shelter puts it, “because some things shouldn’t breed.”
Poor Scram has no idea he’s a stand-in for a despised ex.
If the idea of castrating an ex seems a little morbid to you, you’ve still got options.
For just $5, Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Nine Lives Shelter will write your ex’s name on a litter box.
“Our foster cats and kittens will handle the rest by doing what they do best,” the shelter’s staff wrote on Facebook.
Of course, there’s another option for people who prefer a more positive take: donating out of love for cats in general, because despite the encouraging drop in animal euthanasia over the past two decades — the result of relentless campaigns to get pets and street cats spayed/neutered — a few hundred thousand cats are put down every year. Every time a cat is fixed, that number drops, and existing cats have a better chance of finding forever homes.
Patches was the biggest cat the staff at a Virginia animal shelter had ever seen, and was within snacking distance of the all-time record.
When Patches was surrendered to a Virginia animal shelter in mid-April of 2023, the staff — including longtime veterans of cat rescue — were taken aback.
The six-year-old feline weighed in at a staggering 40-plus pounds and was so big, the shelter staff had to keep him in an office because the largest crates they had were barely large enough for Patches to turn around.
“We thought we had seen big cats before, but he was definitely the biggest that we’ve ever seen,” Richmond Animal Care and Control’s Robin Young told the Washington Post at the time.
Patches was in dangerous territory for his personal health, and if allowed to continue gaining weight, he’d threaten the world record for a domestic cat, which is more than 46 pounds. (Guiness World Records stopped recognizing the heaviest cats decades ago because the organization didn’t want to encourage people to overfeed their cats in pursuit of the record.)
Top row: Patches in the early days shortly after his adoption. Bottom row: Patches after losing a significant amount of weight.
Last week, Patches reached a new milestone, weighing in at 18.94 pounds after more than two years of eating healthy and getting exercise with the help of Kay Ford, a retired businesswoman who adopted him.
It’s an incredible achievement, and one that was hard-fought, as anyone familiar with cats will know. Many well-fed cats can convince almost anyone they’re starving.
Ford’s pitch to the shelter made it easy for them as they fielded a flood of adoption applications for the chonkster, who had attracted plenty of attention as soon as the shelter posted about him online.
Ford told the shelter she was experienced, committed to helping Patches get down to a healthy weight, and would look forward to the challenge. She’d put on a few pounds during the pandemic, she added, and would lose weight alongside her new pal.
“I’ve had cats all my life,” Ford told the Post at the time. “It just seemed like the right thing.”
Ford with Patches shortly after meeting him. Credit: Richmond Animal Care and Control
She agreed to meetings at the shelter to review a weight loss plan and began documenting Patches’ progress on a Facebook page, Patches’ Journey, which now has more than 53,000 people following the feline’s transformation.
His diet isn’t over, and it’s a lifestyle change meant to be permanent, but there are a lot of people who are proud of the (much less) big guy, who now looks like a completely different cat.
Abdul Raheem found peace when he adopted his beloved cat, Bambi. Now he wants other men to know felines are awesome.
There’s something to the idea that people who aren’t fond of felines just haven’t met the right cat.
For me, it was the experience of interacting with a friend’s affable tuxedo — just one, since all my experiences up to that point had been with people who kept an unreasonable number of cats.
For Abdul Raheem, it was adopting a cat named Bambi after he and his wife fostered and fell in love with her.
“She brought me so much just happiness, and she made my mental health better,” Raheem told the Washington Post. “My anxiety was better when I was around her. So I just want to give other people that feeling.”
Raheem and his wife, Shamiyan Hawramani, became regular fosters for a shelter near their home, and Hawramani began filming her husband’s doting interactions with the baby felines.
Raheem with one of his bottle babies. He and his wife have fostered about 200 kittens and cats since the COVID pandemic.
Their friends found the videos amusing, and lots of people online have too. Abdul’s Cats, an Instagram account documenting Raheem caring for fosters, has a large following — including young men, many of whom are thinking about adopting a cat for the first time because Raheem is showing them something that challenges stereotypes.
My favorite anecdote is about Raheem’s enthusiasm for cats spreading to his friends. At first, they got accustomed to the idea of baby cats jumping in their laps and taking curious swipes at controllers on nights when they’d hang out and play video games.
Then they came to the same conclusion Raheem had: hanging out with cats is relaxing. Several of those friends have since adopted their own feline overlords, and Raheem says one friend now has four cats running around his house.
As for stereotypes, I think cat ladies get a bad rep. They’re the ones who do all the hard work of managing colonies, trapping, fostering, volunteering in shelters and placing cats in good homes.
When you think of the sheer volume of work, and the things they’ve accomplished — including a dramatic reduction in euthanized cats thanks to TNR efforts — they are the unsung heroes. They do it because they love cats.
Jordan Poole is one of several NBA players who have professed their love of felines. In the off-season Poole volunteers with his local shelter.
But it’s also good to toss aside labels and outdated attitudes, like the insistence that cats are companions for women only, and that adopting and caring for a feline friend is somehow unmanly.
Like Jordan Poole, the NBA guard who evangelizes the awesomeness of cats to his fellow players, men like Raheem show guys that they can adopt too.
Now if you’ll excuse me, Bud and I have a busy day of lifting weights, watching football, working on the hot rod we’re restoring in the garage, and drinking beer. Then we’re gonna chant Viking drinking songs until we pass out.
