Scottish Folds are cute, but the genetic mutation responsible for their folded ears also causes lifelong pain, joint problems and misshapen bones.
In 1961, a shepherd named William Ross found a barn cat with a curious feature: instead of the upright, swiveling, satellite dish ears of a normal feline, this cat’s ears were floppy and shapeless, resting atop her head like a tiny knitted cap.
Ross took the cat home and named her Susie. Susie gave birth to a litter of kittens with the same floppy ears, and it all gets a bit murky from there, with a dozen variations of the story online claiming it was Ross himself or a neighbor who “created” the breed.
Regardless of who it was, the floppy ears were transformed from an abnormal feature into the unmistakable characteristic of a breed, and the Scottish Fold was born.
The cute cats quickly caught on and were officially recognized in competitions by 1971.
Now they’re more in vogue than ever. They’re the preferred pets of music superstars Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, who regularly feature photos and videos of their Scottish Folds in social media posts. People across the world are buying them, and they routinely appear in “best breed” lists online, lauded for being cuddly and docile in addition to adorable.
Ed Sheeran with his Scottish Fold cat. Credit: Ed Sheeran/Instagram
But they’ve also been banned by the same cat fancy groups that initially welcomed them, they’re prohibited outright in some countries, and animal welfare groups are begging people to stop emulating celebrities by buying them.
That’s because the same deformity that gives Scottish Folds their distinctive ears is also responsible for weak and brittle cartilage and bones elsewhere in the body, which results in lifelong pain and disability.
“The disease is evident on x-rays of cats from as young as seven weeks of age. Serious abnormalities in joints and bone growth lead to arthritis (painful, swollen joints), short, abnormally thick, and inflexible tails, spinal abnormalities and short, stiff legs. The welfare impacts of Scottish Fold Osteochondrodysplasia can be severe in terms of pain and inability to perform natural behaviours, as these cats can be lame, walk with an abnormal gait, can be reluctant to engage in normal movements such as walking or jumping, and can even become completely crippled.
There is no cure for this progressive condition.”
Sadly, the deformities and resulting pain may be the reason Scottish Folds are considered docile and cuddly: they may simply be in too much pain to move or protest when their humans hug them or pick them up.
Ross and Turner didn’t know it in 1961, but the folded ears and brittle cartilage were the result of a genetic mutation. It wasn’t until 2016 that a group of American and Australian scientists found a mutation in a single gene, TRPV4, was responsible for weak cartilage and bones, leading to the deformities highlighted by the RSPCA in the passage above, as well as “progressive joint destruction.” The condition is called osteochondrodysplasia.
Swift’s cats have appeared in her music videos, feature prominently in her online posts, and were photographed in her arms for her 2024 post announcing she was supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s presidential election.
Cats Protection, a UK charity, raised the issue in 2024, warning that Scottish Folds were becoming even more popular, with breeders struggling to meet high demand. The group issued a public statement asking cat lovers and Swift fans to avoid buying Scottish Folds. Scottish Folds are equally popular in the US, spurring resistance from stateside animal welfare groups as well.
The Governing Council of Cat Fancy, which registers breeds in the UK — and no longer recognizes Scottish Folds — was even more direct.
“We strongly advise members of the public not to try to acquire cats of this breed,” Steve Crow, chairman of Cat Fancy’s governing board, told The Guardian.
Cats aren’t equipped to use human language and there’s nothing wrong with that. Our feline friends already go to great lengths to communicate in ways we can comprehend. The least we can do is meet them halfway.
I would love it if my cat could talk to me.
Sure, he never shuts up, but if he could speak English I’d know why he meows at the same spot at the same time every morning, or what he wants on the occasions when he’s still meowing insistently at me despite the fact that his bowls are full, his box is clean, he’s had his play time, and every possible need and want of his — that I can fathom — has been met.
Most of all, I’d really like to know he understands I’ll be back soon when I go away for a few days, and my (mostly ignored) pleas for him not to attack his long-suffering, way-too-kind sitter.
Alas, Bud cannot speak. No non-human animal has ever demonstrated even basic proficiency in human language. People will point to examples like Koko the Gorilla and Nim Chimpsky, but there’s a reason why funding dried up for that kind of experiment.
It doesn’t work. It never did.
The scientists who end up taking on dual roles as researchers and parents to the animals invariably serve as interpreters, get too close to their subjects and swear that a gorilla pounding shiny buttons for “food tree food submarine” means the ape wants to have a picnic next to the ocean, or “car fly house car star” means she wants to ride a Tesla Roadster to Mars and start a colony with Elon Musk.
Koko, Nim, Chantek and the other apes who were the subjects of decades-long attempts to humanize them — and teach them language in the process — were ultimately not much different than Clever Hans the horse, who was reading subconscious nonverbal cues from his owner and convinced tens of thousands of people that he could do math and understand spoken language.
Hans had scores of experts fooled until the German psychologist Oskar Pfungst figured out how the horse was coming up with the correct answers.
Regardless of which famous example we’re talking about, no animal has ever mastered syntax, and the best that could be said of their proficiency with language, or lack of it, is that they learned they’d get attention and food when they pounded on a talking board or approximated a word in sign language.
Even if non-human primates were able to learn a handful of words by frequently reinforced association with an object, there has never been any evidence that they are actually using the words as language rather than simply understanding “Pushing the button that makes this sound means I get a treat!” (And yes, there is a profound difference. The former reveals the presence of cognitive processes while the latter is a conditioned response.)
Despite decades of intense effort, no animal has ever demonstrated the ability to use human language. At best an animal bangs on a few buttons and people are left to speculate on the intent. Maybe Fluffy likes the way a certain word sounds. Maybe it’s just fun to hammer on buttons the way it’s fun to pop bubble wrap. Most likely, these cats and dogs know that using a talking board is a guaranteed way to get attention, a treat and a head scratch from their caretakers.
Influencers and their talking boards
TikTok, which spawns inane trends with the reliability of an atomic clock, has provided a platform for people who insist their cats and dogs can talk. Using “talking boards” — elaborate set-ups in which words are assigned to their own buttons — they “teach” their cats how to express themselves in English and provide proof in the form of heavily edited, out-of-context clips that require the same sort of creative interpretation pioneered by Penny Patterson, Koko’s caretaker.
Seriously?
I just watched a video in which a woman claims her cat, named after Justin Bieber, was describing an encounter with a coyote by stomping on buttons for “stranger,” “Justin,” “Mike,” and “stranger.”
The woman says she thought Justin was asleep at the time, but now she believes the orange tabby saw the coyote outside and was still stressing about it well into the next day.
While she’s repeating Justin’s “words” back to him, two of her other cats come by and step all over the talking board. I guess whatever they had to say wasn’t important.
Justin’s talking board has 42 buttons, which stresses credulity well beyond the breaking point. More than half of the buttons are used for abstract concepts.
But forget all that for a moment and ask yourself how our own efforts to decode the meow have been going.
Despite our status as intelligent, sapient animals, despite the powerful AI algorithms at our disposal, despite the benefit of being able to digitally record and analyze every utterance, we haven’t come close to a reliable method for interpreting feline vocalizations.
Likewise with dolphins, whale song, corvid calls and the sounds made by other animals at the top of the cognition pyramid.
Mostly, we’re learning we’ve underestimated the complexity of our non-human companions’ inner lives, especially when it comes to the kind of multi-modal communication humans also engage in, but only subconsciously. We say what we want with our mouths, while our eyes, facial expressions and body language say what we’re actually thinking.
Likewise, the meow is an unnatural way for cats to communicate, and it contains only a fraction of the information cats are putting out there. It’s just that we can’t reliably read feline facial expressions, let alone tail, whisker and posture. (Studies have shown most of us, even when we live with cats, don’t get measurably better at this. In fact, we’re often no better than people with limited feline experience, but we think we’re better.)
Putting the burden on our furry friends
If we can’t crack a simple and limited system of vocalizations, aren’t we putting unrealistic expectations on cats? The average person has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, yet somehow we expect cats can latch on to an arbitrary number of them, approximate mastery of syntax that has eluded even our closest cousins, and bridge a cognition gap we haven’t been able to bridge ourselves.
It’s all too much.
I’ve had Buddy since he was eight or nine weeks old, and in more than nine years I still don’t know why he makes this praying motion. We may be best buds, but some things just don’t translate.
There’s a simple truth at the heart of this: Cats did not evolve to speak or parse human language, and that’s perfectly fine.
The little ones already meet us more than halfway because they understand we are hopelessly incompetent at reading tail, whisker or body language, and they understand we communicate with vocalizations.
By forgoing their natural methods of communication in favor of ours, cats are already taking on most of the burden in interspecies communication. Asking them to do more than that, to learn many dozens of words and the rudimentary rules of language, seems like laziness, wishful thinking or insanity on our part. Pretending that certain cats are successful is an exercise in the same kind of cynical opportunism that fuels every other desperate attempt by people trying to turn their pets into influencers. People do it because the reward is money and attention.
Worse, it contributes to the spread of misinformation. TikTok’s talking board videos routinely net millions of views, converting a credulous audience into an army of true believers who are convinced that, with just a little effort, their feline pal can shoot the shit with them.
If people want to construct elaborate talking boards in their homes and pretend their cats are expressing themselves in English, who am I to object? It’s not the smartest use of time, but have at it. What I won’t do is participate in the delusion that felines are a few buttons away from being able conversation partners, nor will I pretend these efforts have any relationship to science.
So to the journalists who keep writing credulous stories about these supposedly talking animals: please familiarize yourself with the example of Clever Hans, and please, I beg you to stop promoting these videos as if they’re anything more than wishful thinking. You are doing your readers a disservice for the sake of a few clicks.
Note: Jackson Galaxy isn’t a fan either, saying he’s “got some serious problems” with the talking board trend. Calling it “problematic,” he points out that cats are not only partially domesticated and the only animal species in history to take that step without human prompting, but humans have never selectively bred cats for specific behaviors or to bring out intelligence traits as we have with canines. (Think of sheep dogs or retrievers, who are the products of thousands of years of breeding for well-defined tasks.) There simply hasn’t been a need to breed cats for behavioral traits since the thing humans traditionally valued most about them — their ability to reliably eradicate rodents and protect human foodstuffs — is innate. No one had to teach cats how to hunt or breed them for the task. It’s only in the last two hundred years or so that certain human societies began breeding cats, and they did so for aesthetic attributes like coat patterns. Galaxy also notes that animals do not express emotions the same way humans do. Like monkeys, who “smile” when they’re terrified, felines express joy, anger and fear with their tails, whiskers, ears and body language. It’s not in their nature to tell us they’re happy or scared by padding up to a contraption and hammering on a button.
Top image of “Justin Bieber” the cat credit Sarah Baker.
Health authorities said thousands of female cats around the world fainted when they heard the news that Buddy the Cat is launching his very own OnlyFans.
After resisting calls from his admirers for years, Buddy the Cat has finally joined OnlyFans.
“It’s a dream come true,” said Nala, 5, a Burmese who describes herself as “Buddy’s biggest fan.”
Other felines posted celebratory messages online after the news broke, with most expressing an intent to subscribe to Buddy’s OnlyFans “no matter how much he charges.”
“A dollar a month, ten bucks a month, a hundred bucks a month, it doesn’t matter. It’s worth it,” said Penny, a puma who said she has posters of Buddy in her enclosure at a wildlife sanctuary. “Buddy is the sexiest beast of them all.”
A sizzling snap of Buddy being sizzling for his new OnlyFans site.
Buddy’s new OnlyFans site promises “sizzling snaps of Buddy napping,” “hot photos of him yawning and stretching,” and regular videos of the mercurial tabby being handsome.
“Finally, my fans can get more Buddy without having to read that stupid blog my human writes,” Buddy wrote in his announcement. “It’s full of ridiculous slander, vile lies and claims that I’m wimpy when everyone knows I’m, like, brave and stuff.”
As of Friday, the new site featured a handful of clearly photoshopped images of the gray tabby with bulging muscles as he lifted weights, and a poorly produced video depicting the diminutive feline “ambushing” a stuffed alligator, with the sounds of a jaguar dubbed into the footage.
“Just catching me some lunch!” Buddy captioned the clip. “Us apex predators don’t eat from a can, we hunt our own meals.”
Buddy the Cat poses in a box, striking a handsome pose as he gazes yonder.
There was no sign that questions about the veracity of the images bothered the egotistical feline’s admirers.
“OMG ADORBZ!” commenter princess2017 wrote.
“My handsome little prince!” wrote another poster, LioNeSS, who also added several heart and turkey emojis.
Soon after Buddy’s OnlyFans launch, it was announced that Smudge, his arch-nemesis, signed a deal to create a show about his life for Netflix. Titled “Smudge: New York’s Most Heroic Cat,” the series will “follow Smudge as he fights for truth and justice against the evil Dubby the Cat, a chubby gray tabby with an inflated ego.”
For the first time, humans have successfully returned orphaned tiger cubs to the wild after raising them and training them to hunt.
For more than 50 years, tigers were absent from Russia’s Pri-Amur region.
Sparsely-populated, mountainous and blanketed in forest, the domain borders the heart of the Russian Far East, offering hundreds of thousands of contiguous square miles for the most robust sub-species of Earth’s most magnificent predator.
Here, tigers can roam without fear of conflict with local farmers, or roads that carve up habitat and pose a danger to animals trying to cross. Prey is abundant, and adaptations for surviving in the local terrain are coded into the tigers’ DNA.
Now that scientists have proven for the first time that tigers can be successfully reintroduced into such an environment, big cat advocates imagine Russia’s Far East as a haven for the large felids. It’s a place where tigers can thrive, mate, reproduce and change the outlook for their species, which has dwindled to only 4,000 or so remaining in the wild.
Credit: Leon Aschemann/Pexels
The project to reintroduce Amur tigers to their native habitat is a cooperative Russian-American endeavor. The team started by building a tiger conservation center in the Amur oblast a decade ago.
The facility is built in a way that orphaned tigers can be raised and taught how to hunt without directly interacting with their human caretakers. That’s a crucial component, because tigers who see humans as potentially friendly or sources of food have drastically reduced chances of surviving in the wild, and are easier marks for poachers.
After 18 months, the cubs are brought to remote locations in Pri-Amur and released. Of the first group of orphan tigers released into the wild, 12 were able to survive on their own.
One gluttonous tiger failed: he crossed over the border into China and began eating domesticated animals, including 13 goats in what researchers called “a single event.”
The fattened tiger then retraced his steps to Pri-Amur, and when he didn’t show fear of humans, the team decided he had to go. They captured him and sent him to a zoo, where he gets all the free meals he wants and contributes to the captive breeding program helping his species maintain genetic diversity.
With 12 out of 13 tiger re-introductions successful, the program provides “a pathway for returning tigers to large parts of Asia where habitat still exists but where tigers have been lost,” said Viatcheslav V. Rozhnov, who leads the reintroduction project.
Amur tigers are the largest cats on Earth. They’ve evolved to survive in regions where winters can be brutally cold and snowy, but they also thrive in spring and summer when the snows melt and prey is abundant. Credit: Pexels
The successful reintroduction has also led to some surprising developments. Two of the cubs, Boris and Svetlaya, were unrelated but were rescued at about the same time and raised in the Russian orphanage for their species.
Using tracking devices they’d placed on the newly-released young tigers, the research team watched as Svetlaya settled into a home range and Boris made a beeline for her, “almost in a straight line,” crossing 200km (120 miles) of terrain to reunite.
The team’s hopes were confirmed six months later, when Svetlaya gave birth to a healthy litter of cubs, the first natural-born tigers to result from the reintroduction project.
Another tigress, Zolushka, also gave birth to a healthy litter when she was reintroduced in an area closer to a still-extant population of Amur tigers. The researchers believe the father was born wild in the region and was not part of the reintroduction program.
The wilderness in Pri-Amur and its environs is so vast, untouched and undesirable to human habitation that it could be home to generations of tigers, securing their future after so many decades of grim news for the iconic big cats.
“The grand vision is that this whole area would be connected,” Luke Hunter, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Big Cats Program. “There’s lots of habitat that could be recolonized by tigers.”
Some observers believe the drone sightings are merely the first stage in an all-out feline takeover of the US. So far, cats have remained mum on their motivations, preferring instead to sow panic among Americans.
WASHINGTON –The caller was breathing heavily and speaking in rapid-fire sentences as if he had only moments to get the words out over the air.
“I’m telling you, Art, it’s the cats — the cats are piloting these drones!” the caller told Coast to Coast AM radio host Art Bell shortly after 1 am ET on Friday.
“Hold on, hold on,” Bell said theatrically. “You’re saying this has nothing to do with aliens or the government?”
The caller sighed.
“The cats may very well be in league with aliens, but I’m telling you, felines are behind…oh God! They’re here!”
The radio broadcast crackled with distorted hissing and yowling, punctuated by the caller’s pleas for mercy.
“Caller? West of the Rockies, are you there?”
The caller screamed a final time and the line went dead.
“Wow,” Bell told his audience of several million overnight listeners. “There you have it, folks. You be the judge, but that sounded like the real deal to me. Cats are piloting the mysterious drones!”
For weeks, Americans have been asking for answers about swarms of suspicious drones operating above homes, businesses, military bases and government buildings at night.
After rampant speculation that the drones could belong to rogue states, or could be part of some secret government flight test, the FBI confirmed Friday that felines are behind the frequent sightings.
A drone flies above a farm and ranch as the sun fades. Drones have been spotted circling chicken and turkey coops, as well as fish markets.
Biden administration officials confirmed to several media outlets that intelligence supported the theory that cats — not Iranians, Russians or some secret Pentagon operation — are operating the drone swarms that have been lighting up the night sky in states like New Jersey and Maryland for several weeks, befuddling local and state officials.
“At first we thought the idea was absurd,” said a high-ranking official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Then we received reports of drone swarms circling several meat-packing plants, a Chewy distribution center in Trenton, and two PetSmarts in northern New Jersey.”
So far, the felines’ motivation remains shrouded in mystery, but experts on the small, furry animals ventured guesses on what may have motivated their sudden interest in aviation and airspace.
“No one’s claimed responsibility, so we’re left to speculate,” said Norah Grayer, a feline behaviorist with NYU’s Gummitch School of Veterinary Science. “But it may be that felines, as a whole, have decided the meow is insufficient for getting their demands across. Humans have become adept at tuning out those vocalizations, so this may be the next step in an attention arms race, so to speak.”
Noted cat expert Jefferson Nebula offered a different explanation.
“Cats are notoriously subject to FOMO, which is one reason why they can’t abide closed doors,” he said. “If someone managed to convince them that we humans were holding out on them, and there are entire worlds of yums we keep for ourselves, well, that would spark the wrath of these otherwise friendly little guys.”
Felines have mastered control over aerial drones despite their lack of thumbs.
For his part, Bell consulted with Michio Kaku, the physicist and science communicator who has been a regular presence on Coast to Coast.
“We physicists have been saying for decades that cats are much more intelligent than we give them credit for,” Kaku said. “This could be retribution for the Schroedinger’s cat thought experiment, or felids may be looking to surpass humanity’s understanding of 11-dimensional hyperspace.”
“Professor, we’ve spoken quite a bit about the Kardashev scale [of civilization progress] in the past,” Bell said. “If we separated human and feline societies, where would we each fall on the scale? Humans are about a zero point seven, are we not?”
“That’s right,” Kaku said. “We physicists believe humanity is on the cusp of a Type I civilization, with things like the internet as a Type I telecommunications system and fusion power on the horizon. However, if you break it down and cats were separated into their own civilization, cats could plausibly already be a Type I civilization.”
“They’re ahead of us?”
“That’s right,” Kaku said. “We physicists believe cats can tap directly into primordial energies and have mastered quantum teleportation. In Star Trek, the Federation is a Type II civilization, and the Caitians — a species of alien cats — are part of the Federation. Yet it’s widely understood that the only reason the Caitians haven’t conquered entire swaths of the galaxy, like the Borg and the Klingons, is because of their strict adherence to their napping schedule and their inherent laziness. These drone swarms may be a signal that real-life cats are fed up enough to disturb their napping schedules, in which case we should all be terrified.”
Header image of drone light show credit Wikimedia Commons
Pain In The Bud 