Americats need great leadership. Who but Buddy can lead ‘Murica into the shining future?
Today is Tuesday, Nov. 8, and Buddy needs YOU to vote!
As patriotic Americats know, our beloved President Buddy was impeached after jealous rivals claimed his brilliant plan to move the Earth closer to the sun to fight Coronavirus would have been disastrous, and enlisted the help of “scientists” who scared felines into believing our planet would be in danger despite President Buddy assuring everyone that we’d all have nice weather.
Also, there was the small matter of a “scandal” involving turkey embezzlement, but that was never proven in a court of law.
Real patriotic Americats know Buddy was the best president of all time, and it’s their duty to lay the groundwork for his triumphant return in 2024 by voting in his hand-picked candidates today! If turkey raining down from the sky, treats aplenty and mandatory siestas 10 times a day sound like good policies to you, then obviously you’re a smart kitty, you’re patriotic, and you should vote Buddy!
If you like the idea of Roombas for every cat, catnip dispensaries on every corner, a new government agency dedicated to developing new toys, and a badly-needed infusion of new boxes, you should vote Buddy! Because you’re smart!
If for some reason a Buddesian-aligned candidate is not listed on your ballot, you should write in “Buddy the Cat” and send a strong message that you’re an intelligent, patriotic voter.
Paid for by BUDDY 4 PRESIDENT and THE UNITED PATRIOTS FOR BUDDY ASSOCIATION. ‘Murica!
Two new reports estimate the cost of caring for a cat over a typical 15-year lifespan.
Two stories published in recent days give wildly varying estimates of how much it costs for the privilege of serving a cat.
First we should note that both reports assume the cats are adopted in kittenhood and the average lifespan of a cat is 15 years. That’s in line with current data showing well cared-for, indoor-only cats live between 12 and 18 years, with outliers on both ends. It’s not uncommon to hear about cats living well into their 20s just as some cats sadly pass on before their time, whether due to natural causes, illness or accidents.
A Texas cat named Creme Puff is the Guinness World Record holder for longest-lived house cat, holding on for an astonishing 38 years until her death in 2005.
Caring for a house panther can cost between $4,250 and $31,200 over kitty’s lifetime, according to an analysis of associated costs by The Ascent, a vertical of financial literacy site The Motley Fool.
The estimates break costs down into recurring expenses — which include food, treats, litter and veterinary care — and fixed expenses like scratching posts, toys, additional cat furniture, bowls, grooming tools and similar items.
Not surprisingly, the biggest expense is food, the cost of which has been exacerbated by inflation, rising fuel costs and lingering supply chain issues that caused a cascade effect during the pandemic. Everything from sourcing metal for cat food tins to meat availability was impacted as ports were closed and meat processing plants were shuttered at various points since early 2020.
An unrelated estimate from OnePoll, based on a survey commissioned by pet food company Solid Gold, put the lifetime estimate of cat servitude at $25,304. Like the Motley Fool analysis, OnePoll’s respondents cited food as the primary expense, followed by veterinary care.
The wide range from the Motley Fool analysis could be attributable to geography, how well the cat is fed, and how many extra things caretakers do for their cats. A person who lives in Manhattan, splurges on bespoke feline furniture and buys ultra-premium cat food at almost $3 a can is going to spend significantly more than an eastern European cat servant who feeds raw or home-cooked food and builds their own ledge loungers and scratching apparatus.
“Welcome to Teh Bank of Kitteh, you may make a deposit but not withdraw!” Credit: @catsandmoney/Twitter
Here in New York the cost of cat food in local grocery stores has spiked dramatically, but online prices have remained steady. Keeping in mind we’ve never really endorsed any particular brand or vendor on PITB, I switched from occasionally buying food online to Chewy auto-shipments during the pandemic because Bud’s favorite food was becoming very difficult to find locally, and that arrangement has worked out cost-wise as well.
Bud’s a true Pain In The Bud when it comes to “leftovers” so his primary wet food is Sheba Perfect Portions. It’s reasonably priced, comes in variety packs and helps avoid waste since each meal comes in its own 1.3oz recyclable blister-like plastic package. (Recycling is especially important with these single-serve packages, tiny as they are.) His dry food is Blue Buffalo Wilderness Adult Chicken recipe, although occasionally I’ll buy the weight control version of the same dry food when it looks like Little Man has gotten a bit chubby. He doesn’t protest, thankfully.
I feed him two 1.3oz wet meals a day and fill his dry bowl less than halfway at night so he can have his late snack and doesn’t have to wake me up if and when he gets hungry overnight. Sometimes I’m dimly aware of him sliding off me, padding over to his little dining nook and munching on dry food before hopping back onto the bed and dozing off again.
Overall it works out to about $21 a month, so I’d call it an even $25 with treats. You can schedule your auto-ship at any interval you choose, edit it at any time, and prompt the shipment immediately if you’re running out of food, so you can save more by ordering a few months’ worth of food at a time and taking advantage of free shipping on orders of more than $50.
Has inflation impacted cat food prices in your local area? How much does it cost to feed your cat(s) every month?
As much as Bud can be a wimp fearless protector of the apartmental realm, he’s also very friendly when he feels confident, and he loves Halloween.
Every Halloween since kittenhood, little man has answered the door with me, standing right by my side as I hand out candy. He’s just as curious about the kids as they are about him.
“Your kitty is so cute!” one girl of about 10 said tonight as Bud looked up at her.
“Thanks!” I said. “He loves answering the door.”
The little girl, dressed as a witch, was the third trick-or-treater to compliment Bud tonight. That may not seem like much, but we had surprisingly few kids this year. I expected a lot more since the last two Halloweens were muted by the threat of COVID, but for whatever reason the little ghouls and goblins have not returned to pre-COVID levels.
For what it’s worth, when I was a kid we used to love going to apartment buildings, which offered the best time-to-candy ratio. You could knock out an entire floor of 20 apartments in 10 or 15 minutes, then walk up the stairs and do it again. By the end of the night, you were guaranteed to have overflowing bags of candy.
Things have really changed in two decades. My brother, my friends and I would just go out by ourselves in our Batman, ninja and robot costumes. Mom would tell us to be careful, but we weren’t chaperoned. Nowadays every trick-or-treater has a parent in tow. I’m not sure if that’s a smart precaution or a sad reflection on our society.
Alas, Bud didn’t wear a costume this year. Usually I’m able to get him to tolerate a simple bandana or his little tuxedo, at least for the time it takes to answer the door. I couldn’t find either of them this year, so I tried to bribe him into wearing a little penguin hat from an old costume.
Despite the payoff in snacks, Bud tugged the hat off three times. It was a bit too small, and he’s too smart. The hat didn’t have a chance.
Happy Halloween! I hope all PITB readers and their feline masters are having a great night. Have fun polishing off the leftover candy!
For the first time, veterinarians and regular cat parents have a tool that can tell them if their cats are hurting.
Although there’s been lots of talk claiming cats don’t have facial expressions humans can parse — or even the muscles to noticeably change expressions — that’s not actually true.
It’s more accurate to say feline facial expressions are far more subtle than their human or even canine equivalents, and it takes an expert — a veterinarian or behaviorist with specialized training — to accurately read them.
This is a brand new frontier for veterinary science, and it’s all thanks to the feline grimace scale, a system developed by researchers at the University of Montreal in 2019. Using video clips of cats in various moods and stages of pain or pain-free expression, the researchers built a system that could reliably determine how a cat is feeling. (You can read more about how they did that here.)
“I call it the Rosetta Stone for interpreting how a cat is feeling,” veterinarian Liz Bales says in a new video at dvm360. “It turns out that very subtle changes in cat’s facial expressions can tell us whether or not they’re in pain. It includes the position of the ears, the opening of the eyes, the expression on the mouth, how the cat is holding its whiskers, and how they’re holding their head.”
Each of the five elements of feline facial expression are scored on a three-point scale, then added up. The result provides an accurate assessment of how a cat feels.
“It’s amazing, and it allows us to interpret feline pain in a way we never could before,” Bales says. “The hard part is, it can be a little bit tricky to learn. It is learnable, but I specialize in this and I’m still struggling to get it right every single time.”
Despite the challenge, she says, it’s well worth learning.
“The applications of this are so far and wide, and I think as the technology grows and it becomes easier and easier to use the grimace scale, the more exciting it’s going to be.”
Thanks to an app named Tably, cat servants don’t have to know how to read the most subtle feline facial expressions anymore. By running a photo of your cat through the app’s algorithm, Tably can read your cat’s expression for you.
Tably gauges cats’ moods in addition to their pain levels. We used the web app to evaluate Buddy last year. Thankfully he was happy!
Bales says she envisions a near future in which pet parents monitor their cats’ health and mood daily, and the scale becomes the standard for end-of-life care. With a “validated, consistent way to measure pain, we can look into more pain drugs for cats, what’s working, what isn’t.”
“A cat in pain looks like a resting cat to most people, but now we have this tool,” Bales says. “And I think as the tool evolves and we give cats a way to really speak for themselves through this Rosetta Stone of the grimace scale, then the more we understand that we can do for them, the more we’re going to do for them.”
We wrote about the feline grimace scale and Tably last year, and noted it had a lot of promise for veterinarians and us cat servants. At the time Tably was in beta and had a web app that allowed anyone to use the technology.
Unfortunately the web app seems to have disappeared, and the app is now available only to iOS users. Since we switched from an iPhone to Android, we can’t access Tably for the time being. (Let’s hope an Android version is forthcoming.) But if you have an Apple device, the app is definitely worth checking out.
Do you have a plan for your cats if the unthinkable happens?
I’ve already made my family swear to me that, should something happen to me, one of them is to take Bud and treat him as an extension of me.
That’s because, as handsome and delightful and meowscular as the little guy is, he can also be a little terror at times, and God forbid he ends up in a shelter, scared and confused, then lashes out at a staffer and gets condemned to the needle.
We’re talking about a cat who has attacked his cat sitter repeatedly, smacked an admirer for petting him too long, and — while he has improved dramatically over the years — has bitten and scratched me many times, usually when he’s freaked out about something.
I love him. Someone else may not. He has to stay with someone who loves me enough to treat him like a part of me, someone who knows how much he means to me.
Although I’m not a fan of linking to TikTok, this video is a reminder why it’s so important to make arrangements. Sunny here found herself at Orange County Animal Services after her human mom died, and she’s not doing well. In addition to losing the human she loved and only home she knew, she’s now in a scary new place with new people and animals, confined to a tiny enclosure.
Photographer Albert Harris, who shot the video, said the shelter has received an application to adopt Sunny since he posted the video online, so let’s hope the distraught kitty finds a new home quickly:
Sunny needs your help. And it’s not 💩 on the blanket. It’s just treats but she is stressed not to eat them. She is at Orange County Animal Services! #catsoftiktok#sheltercat#cattok
Pain In The Bud 