The gathering, originally billed as a vigil, turned violent when the mob began breaking windows, tore down part of a fence, and pepper sprayed a father who tried to shield his children from the crowd’s wrath.
A mob of protesters, enraged by the actions of an accused cat killer, terrorized an innocent family on Sunday night.
The crowd gathered in Santa Ana, Calif., for what was billed as a vigil for the slain cats and a condemnation of their alleged killer, 45-year-old Alejandro Oliveros Acosta. The Santa Ana man was arrested last week and charged with felony cruelty to animals after “dozens” of felines in the neighborhood disappeared under suspicious circumstances, per police.
With emotions running high, the crowd followed its more unruly members to a house they mistakenly identified as Acosta’s. The homeowner said he was related to Acosta’s wife but didn’t know anything about the cat killings until Acosta was arrested. He told the protesters he hadn’t seen Acosta since the arrest and asked them to calm down, but they broke windows, attacked him with pepper spray and terrorized children living there.
“The peaceful protesting wasn’t so peaceful. They’re scaring kids here. It’s scaring the whole family. There are kids, seven kids in this house. Two little babies, one that is autistic,” the man told KTTV. “You know, breaking our fences… pepper spraying us for no reason. If you did what you did, I didn’t know anything about it. You know, when we found out [about the cat murders] we were shocked.”
It took Santa Ana police an hour to respond, according to multiple news reports. Even after the police told the protesters that they had the wrong house and were breaking the law, the mob refused to leave and accused the victims of being complicit in Acosta’s alleged crimes. Officers had to manually break up the crowd by physically removing individual protesters.
On Monday, police took the unusual step of publicly commenting on the fallout from Acosta’s arrest, pleading with people to “allow the judicial process to take its course.”
“I don’t think it needs to be like this. I think it should have remained a vigil,” one protest participant told KTTV, a Fox affiliate in Los Angeles. “I knew it’d be a protest, but I didn’t think it would get violent. I don’t think anybody should be touching property.”
Needless to say, we don’t need people making the animal welfare community look like a bunch of lunatics, and vigilante “justice” is wrong. As humans, we’re at our worst when we engage in mob behavior, which obliterates reason, civility and empathy.
Although a lot of people seem to have difficulty with this simple concept nowadays, everyone is entitled to due process, and we’re a nation of laws where alleged crimes are litigated in court, not on the street, on front lawns or online.
Zeus the mighty, meowing from atop Olympus
A cat named Zeus has been turning heads lately, and for good reason: he’s huge even by Maine Coon standards.
Zeus is fluffy, imposing, and so big that he can help himself to food left on a counter just by getting up on his hind legs.
At almost 30 pounds, he’s practically three Buddies in mass. I texted a photo of Zeus to Buddy, and Bud responded with a photo of his own, claiming he’d just finished a grueling bench press session:
Bud hitting the gym to pump iron and stuff.
Hmmm.
Something tells me Buddy’s going to complain that I didn’t bestow him with the name of a Greek god. Is there a diminutive, glib deity to be found in the Olympian pantheon?
The filmmakers spent four years with matriarch Athena and her herd.
Athena learned the seasonal migratory path from sanctuary to sanctuary from her mother, who in turn learned from her mother, in an unbroken chain that goes back as long as elephants have walked the savanna we call the Maasai Mara.
Every bend, every life-sustaining water hole, every spot where the most nutritious plants grow — and especially the final resting places of her relatives, those who didn’t survive the long journeys to water and shade during drought seasons.
The 50-year-old matriarch, one of the Earth’s last “super tuskers,” has seen her family through so many difficult times that the members of the herd don’t question her even when her decisions could mean life and death for them.
She is their matriarch, and their trust in her is absolute.
During times of drought, all animals converge on the same watering holes. Credit: Apple TV
Athena is also the herd’s protector, which means being wary of humans is her default. It has to be, since humans have poached her kind to the brink of extinction to feed the insatiable Chinese ivory trade.
Filmmakers Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble spent four years with Athena and her herd while filming The Elephant Queen, and earning Athena’s trust was a laborious process.
At first, the wise matriarch wouldn’t let the documentary team anywhere near her family. That slowly began to change as they showed her they meant her no harm.
“But we could see that with her herd, with her family, she was a really calm, beautiful, temperate matriarch,” Deeble explained after a film festival screening of the documentary “And we would just spend time with her.”
‘Over the course of several weeks, Athena had allowed the small crew closer and closer, until they were about 40 meters from her. One day, Athena walked away to let her calf stand between her and the crew. That’s a rare occurrence for a mother.
“At that stage two things can happen,” Deeble said. “Either she can realize that it was a mistake, and if we’re in the middle of them we’re going to get trampled, or, and what I like to think happened, she was just testing us. Because after a while, she made a very low rumble and the calf looked up, and she wandered very calmly around the front of the calf. And from that day on, she allowed us amazing access.”’
The Elephant Queen first finds Athena’s herd during a time of plenty, when water and food are abundant, and the herd’s babies — curious Wewe, a boy, and little Mimi, a female and the youngest member of the herd — get to splash around and explore their new world.
Satao, a male “super-tusker,” arrives at the watering hole for hydration and to find a mate. Credit: Apple TV
But every year there comes a time when the water hole starts to dry out and the herd must begin a long march spanning more than 100 miles to reach a more reliable source of water.
The year Stone and Deeble began following the herd, the drought was so severe that Athena made the difficult decision to march for a far-off sanctuary, the closest known permanent water hole fed by an underground spring.
It’s a long, exhausting journey, and newborns can’t make it, so Athena is forced to delay their departure for as long as she can to give Mimi and Wewe enough time to feed and grow stronger.
Elephant calves are dependant on their mothers’ milk for two years. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The gestation period for African elephants is about two years, and the entire herd is protective of the babies. The adults cooperate to shield them from predators and the sun, using their bodies to do both. They’re also extremely cautious around hazards like rapidly drying mud holes, which can trap young elephants.
The Elephant Queen’s stars are its titular species, but the documentary does an outstanding job not only showing us the other animals who inhabit the elephant kingdom, but also making clear the many ways those animals depend on elephants for their survival.
From geese, frogs and terrapins who rely on elephants to dig water holes, to dung beetles for whom elephant waste is a bounty, to kilifish whose eggs hitch a ride on the massive animals toward the next water source, the entire ecosystem is balanced on the broad backs of the gentle giants.
As narrator Chiwetel Ejiofor (Doctor Strange, The Martian, 12 Years ASlave) notes, elephants are tactile creatures, and when they nudge a terrapin or knock a frog off a tree branch, it’s curiosity, not malice, that motivates them. They’re herbivores, despite their enormous size, and gain nothing from harming other creatures.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
It’s impossible to watch a documentary like this without looking into the eyes of elephants like Athena and wondering about the intellect behind them, the thoughts and emotions that motivate their actions.
In one scene, as Athena leads her herd through a parched landscape with nothing but dust and dead trees in every direction, she stops. There’s no water or food. There’s only an elephant skull, the remains of a family member who died on one of the treacherous journeys toward refuge during drought season.
The elephants crowd around the skull, gently running their trunks along its tusks the way they do every day to greet one another. Even with the body long since decomposed, with nothing but a skull remaining, they recognize one of their own.
Some will dismiss the idea that the elephants are mourning, claiming that ascribing emotions to animals is anthropomorphizing them. But if they’re not mourning, what are they doing? If they’re not remembering an individual they loved, why would they stop when it’s crucial to find water and food?
Indeed, the only other time Athena calls a halt is when one of her pregnant sisters goes into labor.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Documentaries like The Elephant Queen don’t exist solely for entertainment value. Despite intense efforts to protect elephants, poachers still kill an estimated 20,000 each year.
Just 100 years ago, 10 million elephants inhabited almost every corner of Africa. A 2016 study put their number at 415,000, and while there have been successes in conservation efforts, it’s difficult to ascertain whether they balance out the relentless poaching and habitat loss.
The Elephant Queen acknowledges threats to the continued existence of elephants, but doesn’t dwell on them. There’s good and bad to that: in some ways it’s a missed opportunity to galvanize viewers, but it also ensures the film is family friendly, without gore or violence. The film doesn’t sugar coat the fact that nature is unforgiving, but you’re not going to see a poacher raid on a herd.
The Elephant Queen is an Apple TV documentary and premiered on the streaming service after a limited theatrical run. I stumbled upon it as a subscriber after it appeared prominently in the app.
And while it was released in 2019, its message is still as relevant today. Whether you’re fascinated by elephants or appreciate wildlife in general, The Elephant Queen is a great example of how powerful documentaries can be, especially in transporting us to real places that exist in our world, but remain out of reach for the majority of us.
The quest for clicks and attention is a race to the bottom, and “petfluencers” are willing to dive deep to differentiate themselves from the thousands of others trying to build an audience.
Clothes, sneakers and hats. Vitamin supplements, energy drinks and probiotics. Backpacks and costumes.
What do all those things have in common? People are buying them for their pets, not themselves, and they’re part of the reason people in the UK spent more on pets in 2024 than childcare, hobbies or dating, according to Nationwide UK.
The problem is, they’re not doing it for their pets. Experts, including veterinarians and animal behaviorists, tell The Guardian that most cats, aside from hairless varieties like Sphynx cats, don’t like wearing clothing, nor do they like wearing costumes, or taking baths with heavy perfumes and essential oils.
Portrait of Hipster White Cat wearing sunglasses and shirt
Influencers — or petfluencers — stage elaborate “pampering” scenes, and make their pets wear different clothes to show off their shopping “hauls.” Some pose their animals like dolls and find ways to coerce them to remain still. Audiences think it’s cute. It’s not.
As for me, I’ve got a handy chart when I’m unsure if Bud will be cool with something:
Make him wear clothes. Result: Get clawed to death
Give him baths with essential oils. Result: Get clawed to death
Make him wear sneakers. Result: Death by bite to the jugular
Force him to eat supplements or guzzle energy drinks. Result: Shredded skin and lots of blood, perhaps some light homicide.
While the animals themselves aren’t thrilled with these new trends, they probably won’t go away any time soon. There’s just too much money involved.
The average pet owner in the UK spent the equivalent of $163 per month on their companions, and only half of UK households have pets compared to 66 percent in the US. Although there’s not an apples to apples comparison of total expenses on pets per month by household in the US, Americans spend $68 a month on cats on average, according to research by ValuePenguin. For dogs, it’s about $110 a month.
‘Salty liquorice’ cats owe their unique coats to a missing snip of DNA
It’s always an interesting occasion when nature gives us something new, and the salmiak cat is definitely unprecedented in the world of feline aesthetics.
The unique cats, named after a popular liquorice candy from Finland, have a coat pattern that results from a gradient on individual strands of fur, starting out black and getting lighter toward the tip. It gives their coats a singular peppered look, and in photographs the unusual felines almost look as if they’re rendered in monochrome stippling.
Credit: Ari Kankainen
The Finnish candy the cats are named for.
The salmiak cat wasn’t the product of any breeding program, and reports in Finnish media say strays with the new coat pattern/color first emerged in 2007.
To find out how the salmiak emerged, a team of Finnish, British and American scientists sequenced the genomes of two salmiak cats. They found a mutation in genes that express coat color that resulted in a missing sequence of DNA, and they confirmed the mutation is recessive. That means to get salmiak kittens, both parents have to have the mutation.
Flow’s Cat has improved things for his fellow voids, who are drawing more interest from adopters.
This video is bonkers!
A cat who is definitely not Buddy stared down a bear and made the ursine interloper retreat in fear in a confrontation caught on camera.
The stand-off happened in Pike County, Pa., and the cat’s name is T’Challa, after the titular hero of Marvel’s Black Panther franchise.
“I think perhaps this young bear woke this kitty cat up because he was not happy that he was sharing his deck with him when he woke up and he expressed himself,” said the homeowner whose security cameras caught the exchange.
After T’Challa made a series of feints, the bear — who is orders of magnitude larger — beat a hasty (for a bear) retreat.
Well done, T’Challa! Someone get that good boy a treat!
Go with the Flow
Part of what makes Flow so spectacular — aside from the breathtaking visuals, clever narrative and the strange world it portrays — is how endearing its star, Cat, is.
The little guy shows enormous resilience as he survives a biblical flood, gets chased by a flock of angry secretary birds, learns to swim, and finds his confidence in situations that would terrify any feline. He’s incredibly expressive, revealing his emotions with every twitch of his tail and whiskers, as well as his distinctive meow and, most of all, his bright yellow eyes.
He’s also the first feline star to win an Oscar and a Golden Globe, as well as many other film awards for the universally praised film.
Now he’s got another accomplishment to his name: he’s improved the way people view black cats, who have long been the victims of absurd human superstition and have a hard time finding forever homes because of the stigma.
Credit: Live RIGA
Animal welfare organizations are reporting heightened interest in black cats (good), but not a manic rush to adopt them as has happened when other species and breeds are popularized in films. (Bad, because those pets are often discarded when the novelty wears off.)
In other words, Cat may have inspired something close to parity in adoptions in some places.
Cat is beloved in director Gints Zilbalodis’ home country of Lithuania. The capital, Riga, is now adorned with street art of the little guy, including a statue sitting atop a major monument in the heart of the city.
The plan would allow bodega owners to certify their cats, eliminate city fines for keeping them, and help find homes for working felines if their stores shut down
Cats have been a fixture in New York City’s bodegas for decades, but technically they’re illegal.
The fact that they’re so widespread, and owners of the small groceries/delis don’t try to hide them, underscores the absurdity of the situation. The fine for keeping a cat in a bodega in New York is $200 for the first offense, capping out at $300, but the fine for a rodent infestation starts at $300 and can rise to as much as $2,000 for repeat offenses. That’s in addition to the cost of bringing in pest control to get rid of the rats, which can easily add hundreds or more to an expensive problem.
So given the option between a maximum $300 fine with a clean, rodent-free shop, and potentially crippling fines — plus infestation — for rodents, thousands of bodega owners opt for the former. It’s a no-brainer.
Kota, a bodega cat from Brooklyn. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The cats are also favorites of customers, and bodega owners don’t hesitate to talk to media when their cats go missing, nor do they turn down Dan Rimada, who runs the extremely popular @bodegacatsofnewyork Instagram page.
Now Rimada is the man behind a petition that seeks to eliminate fines for the store-dwelling felines, establish a voluntary shop cat certification, and help bodega owners get veterinary care for their little helpers.
Rimada proposes soliciting seed money from city government as well as deep-pocketed donors in the pet food industry — “think Purina, Chewy, PetCo” — to establish a veterinary care fund for the city’s working cats.
“Through years of hands-on experience, I’ve witnessed both the charm of well-cared-for bodega cats and the harsh reality of neglect when standards aren’t met,” Rimada wrote in the petition, which has almost 5,000 signatures as of Feb. 28. “In conversations with rescue organizations and experts in public policy, business, and technology, we’ve designed a realistic, community-driven solution.”
Credit: @bodegacats_/Twitter
The fund would help cover the costs of care, with additional “micro-loans” available for emergencies.
Rimada envisions it as a triple win for the shop owners, rescuers who will be compensated for their time, and most importantly, the cats. If city leaders are willing to engage, Rimada says he hopes to conduct a year-long pilot program to see what works and what would need tweaks, with input from rescuers, veterinarians and the people who care for the cats.
The petition and resulting plan was inspired by cases like that of Kobe, a Hell’s Kitchen bodega cat who almost died of a urinary infection when the owners of the bodega balked at paying veterinary bills.
“I don’t think it needs to be like this. I think it should have remained a vigil,” one protest participant told KTTV, a Fox affiliate in Los Angeles. “I knew it’d be a protest, but I didn’t think it would get violent. I don’t think anybody should be touching property.”
Pain In The Bud 