Did you know Buddy is an accomplished poet and cat of letters?
Haiku:
The food of the gods
Turkey, it’s so delicious
More turkey, servant!
Time for seventh nap
Beauty rest is required
Sleep on you, human!
Mystical flower
Transforms boring to blissful
Give me catnip now!
Buddymandias:
I met a traveler from an antique cat cafe
Who said: “Two vast and polished turds
Stand in the litter…near them, in the disarray
Half sunk a shattered clump lies, resembling Los Gatos
With wrinkled lip and cold sneer of jealousy
Tell that its sculptor well read those passions and pathos
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless turds of heresy
The paw that mocked them, and the heart that fed
And taped to the box, these words appear:
‘Our name is Los Gatos, Gang of Gangs we led
Look upon my catnip empire, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains round the decay
Of that colossal poop, boundless and bare
The lone and level litter stretches far away.”
The Raven
Once upon a midnight dreary I woke with something in my head
I couldn’t escape the memory of the poultry in my head
Like a game show contestant with a parting gift, I could not believe my eyes
When I heard through the voice of a trusted Big Buddy
Who used to humor me and feed me fries, yeah humor me and feed me fries
Quothe the raven: “Nevermore!”
“Shut up, raven!” I said. “Or I’ll make you into a late night snack
You may not be turkey, but every kind of bird I shall attack
So shut those loose lips, or I’ll use your bones as toothpicks
And then enjoy Temptations as a digestif.”
Buddy is available for readings at all distinguished parlors of poetry and bookstores. His chapbook, “Turkey In My Bowl,” is available in June from Handsome Boy Press.
A new study reveals some surprises, while The Other Buddy continues to make progress after surviving an attack by two dogs.
I know you’re going to read this and think, “Okay, what have these two wiseasses come up with this time?” but I swear we didn’t make this one up!
It even appears to be a legitimate research paper, despite first attracting media attention on April Fool’s Day. (The paper itself was accepted in late 2021 and published in the journal PeerJ on March 25.)
To put it simply, adopting a cat will make all your wildest dreams come true. Buddy was right!
Cat servants are rated more attractive than people who don’t share their homes with cats, rate higher on traditional measurements of attractiveness like facial symmetry, and even weigh less (women) or, if they’re men, have higher levels of testosterone.
That’s according to a multinational research team led by Javier Borráz-León of Finland’s University of Turku.
How is this possible?
The team — which also consists of scientists from Latvia, Estonia and Mexico — believes it’s because of the infamous toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that infects cat droppings and can pass to humans and other animals.
T gondii nudges its hosts toward behavior that propagates the parasite itself.
“First, we found that infected men had lower facialfluctuating asymmetry whereas infected women had lower body mass, lower body mass index, a tendency for lower facialfluctuating asymmetry, higher self-perceived attractiveness, and a higher number of sexual partners than non-infected ones,” the study authors wrote. “Then, we found that infected men and women were rated as more attractive and healthier than non-infected ones.”
There’s precedent for this. Earlier studies have found that while most parasites make their hosts less likely to reproduce because they cause detectable negative health defects, toxoplasma gondii does the opposite. Male rats who are infected by t. gondii are more attractive to potential sexual partners in an example of a parasite that “can indeed manipulate host sexual signaling to their own advantage.”
That’s not to say you’d want to go and get yourself infected. Toxoplasma gondii can cause negative health effects, most famously in pregnant women, and may be responsible for agitating certain mental health issues. Some scientists have said fears about the parasite are overblown, and cats aren’t actually the primary culprits: People are more likely to become infected by drinking water from unsanitary sources, eating undercooked meat or shellfish, or eating unwashed vegetables and fruits from contaminated soil.
Still, it’s possible to get the parasite from being careless around cat litter, especially if your cat spends time outdoors. It’s another good reason to keep your kitties inside.
Your feel-good story of the morning. The @PSPCA says Buddy has left the building. He’s heading to his foster home this morning. One of his foster parents is a veterinarian who treated Buddy. ♥️ https://t.co/EEaIYBaO1l
The little guy made headlines and captured hearts around the world with his ordeal, his bravery and the strength he showed as he clung to life in those first few days, when veterinarians feared he could succumb to his many wounds.
But late this week, Buddy was able to stand up for the first time since the attack, and he had a big appetite after so many days spent incapacitated and on pain medication.
The little fighter still needs time to recover before the Pennsylvania SPCA finds a good home for him. From what we hear, there are no shortage of applications from people who would love to give him the best life possible. For the time being, he’s staying with one of the veterinarians who cared for him during those fraught early days, so it’s good to know the good boy will have a familiar face around.
Buddy, the cat who was brutally assaulted when two teenagers sicced their pitbulls on him in Philadelphia last week, is making progress every day.
The little guy began opening his eyes again a few days ago, the Pennsylvania SPCA said, and now they’ve shared a short video of Buddy the Black Cat sitting up, licking his lips and tucking into some yums:
Little Buddy the Cat has been pulling for his fellow Buddy. In the meantime, a lot of people have been asking the SPCA how they can help. Here’s a way to do that and get something in return: A spiffy t-shirt that says “Save Every Buddy” with an original design:
Cloning still has a disturbingly low success rate, more often than not leading to the birth of sickly animals with fatal defects, or animals who don’t make it to term.
I’d like to call your attention to a paragraph in this CNBC story about Instagram and TikTok influencers cloning their famous pets.
The story begins with an anecdote about Kelly Anderson, a woman from Austin, Texas, whose cat Chai had become Internet Famous:
The white and tan ragdoll had 85,000 followers on Anderson’s Instagram account @adogandacat when she died from complications following a surgery.
“I lost about 20,000 followers on Instagram after Chai passed,” she explained.
Anderson said she sent a sample of Chai’s DNA to the Texas-based pet cloning company ViaGen Pets shortly after she died. It took four years and $25,000 for Anderson to get a successful clone, and now she’s back in business with Chai’s identical genetic clone named Belle, who was born in 2021.
Stop.
Read it again.
Now think about that last bit: Anderson sends the DNA sample to ViaGen, one of two commercial pet cloning operations in the world. (The other is in South Korea.) “It took four years” the article says “to get a successful clone.”
It doesn’t take four years to extract DNA from a viable sample. It doesn’t take four years to implant that DNA in an unfertilized egg, and it sure doesn’t take four years to bring a cloned cat to term.
So what happened in that interregnum between Anderson submitting Chai’s DNA and ViaGen producing “a successful clone”?
A damn horror show, that’s what.
The first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy, was “successfully” brought to term and survived after birth in 2005, but only after the South Korean lab implanted more than 1,000 embryos into 123 surrogates.
Things have improved since then, if you can call it improvement: Success rates reached the high single digits by about 2010, and now the most successful labs produce “viable” clones about 20 percent of the time, according to geneticists.
What happens to the other animals?
The cloning industry likes to talk about its victories and present stories about grieving people reunited with their beloved cats and dogs, but cloning companies suddenly go mum when they’re asked about the animals who don’t make it to term, the kittens and puppies who are born with horrific defects, and the many animals put down because they don’t match the customers’ specifications. (Cloning companies don’t talk about the puppies and kittens who don’t physically match the clients’ late pets, but it’s safe to say they wouldn’t be reticent if the “wrong” babies had happy endings.)
Cloning results in “lots of abnormalities and genetic defects–and a significant percent of newborn animals die in the first few days or weeks of life,” geneticist Robert Lanza says.
Or as a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Scienceput it: “In all mammalian species where cloning has been successful, at best a few percent of nuclear transfer embryos develop to term, and of those, many die shortly after birth…. Even apparently healthy survivors may suffer from immune dysfunction or kidney or brain malformation, perhaps contributing to their death at later stages. Most frequently cloned animals that have survived to term are overgrown, a condition referred to as ‘large offspring syndrome.’”
Even when it appears a cloning has been successful, the cloned pets often succumb to ailments caused by congenital defects both in the short term and long term.
By 2008, just three years after the birth of Snuppy, “a total of 3,656 cloned embryos, more than 319 egg ‘donors,’ and 214 surrogate mothers ha[d] been used to produce just five cloned dogs and 11 cloned cats who were able to survive 30 days past birth,” the Humane Society and American Anti-Vivisection Society warned in a report about the trend.
The failed clones aren’t the only ones who suffer. The cloning industry has created “a whole canine underclass that remains largely invisible to us but whose bodies serve as a biological substrate” bioethicist Jessica Pierce wrote in a 2018 op-ed in the New York Times. A similar “underclass” of feline surrogate mothers exists, constantly being impregnated and giving birth to kittens who will mostly suffer brutally short lives.
Kelly Anderson had her cat, Chai, cloned. The result is Belle, left, who looks the same but “is completely different” personality-wise.
Indeed, cloning doesn’t guarantee anything: It doesn’t mean the genetic copy of your pet will have the same coat color, pattern or personality. It does not produce the same animal, nor a real copy of the animal.
Barbra Streisand admitted as much in 2018 when she let slip in an interview that she’d had her late dog cloned, then wrote an op-ed in the New York Times to defend her decision after taking criticism from animal welfare groups. Streisand wanted another dog just like her late Sammie.
“One of the reasons I chose cloning was because I couldn’t find another curly-haired Coton [de Tulear],” Streisand wrote.
Cotons de Tulear usually sell for between $2,000 and $4,000 from breeders. Five puppies were born to a successful litter using Sammie’s DNA. The runt died shortly after birth, while Streisand gave two puppies away to friends and kept two.
Streisand said she’s happy with her decision and thinks of her Sammie every time she looks at the puppies, but says neither of them have Sammie’s disposition.
“You can clone the look of a dog,” she wrote, “but you can’t clone the soul.”
Really what the cloning companies are offering is a replacement built off the same genetic template. The clones are brought to life by crude, Frankensteinesque processes, and opponents say cloning takes away potential homes for lovable cats and dogs who already exist in our shelters.
Then there’s the whole nature versus nurture debate. Doubtless the way a cat or dog is raised will have a significant impact on personality, but a clone with the same DNA, raised precisely the same way as the original, could still have a much different personality.
Cloning opponents argue commercial pet cloning companies are grief vampires in the same way self-proclaimed mediums and psychics are in their willingness to exploit people for profit. The desperate daughter willing to fork over $800 so a vulgar woman with a beehive hairdo can abuse the memory of her father by “connecting” with him in death to discuss trivialities is in an emotionally fragile state, but so is the grieving cat or dog lover reeling from the loss of an animal companion who was closer to them than most humans.
I realize it’s easy to criticize. I can’t even contemplate the eventuality of saying goodbye to Bud, and I haven’t walked a feline companion to the foot of the rainbow bridge yet.
But there is no other Buddy. The idea that I could replace him like getting a new car or a new phone would be an insult to his memory, to his dignity and to his existence as a genuine individual. It’s an insult to our friendship, our bond, our shared experiences. The time he wouldn’t leave my side when I was stricken with Bell’s Palsy and the mother of all headaches, the many times he’s sensed my discomfort and offered comfort in his way, purring and nuzzling, the wonders he’s done for my seasonal affective disorder.
The time he pigged out on closed pistachios and I comforted him as he cried and cried until his tummy was better. The time I forgot he was sleeping on my back, let slip a fart and heard a confused “Mmmmmrrrrrppp?”, prompting me to laugh so hard, tears were streaming down my cheeks.
“Big Buddy lies! I did NOT cry.”
The time he jumped off the balcony as a kitten without thinking of how he’d get back inside, and I realized how much I loved the little guy as I searched for him and tried to bury the thought that I might never see him again.
No. A clone wouldn’t be Buddy, wouldn’t have his friendly nature, his boldness, his kittenish meow or, dare I say it, his singular obsession with turkey.
We can’t honor our little friends by paying large sums of money for a laboratory horror show to create a clone so we can pretend that clone is the pet we miss. But we can honor them by doing for other cats what we did for them, opening our homes and our hearts and making a difference to one animal at a time.
As for me, I’m pretty sure Bud would haunt me for the rest of my days if I cloned him. “That’s my turkey!” ghost Buddy would say. “That’s my toy! That’s my laser laser! That’s MY spot on the couch, that’s MY spot on your lap and your chest! Who is this pretender, and why does he look like me except less handsome and charming? Big Bud, you have some splainin’ to do!”
The Acatemy Awards turned into a beatdown on Sunday night after Garfield took exception to a joke by Buddy the Cat.
Buddy the Cat was cruising through Sunday night’s Acatemy Awards ceremony and razzing the celebrity cats in attendance when things took a turn for the bizarre and violent.
After joking that Alejandro Baldwinito the Spanish cat would have to lose Best Actor after his wife, Ellaria, lost Best Actress, comedian Buddy turned to Garfield and his better half, Venus the two-faced kitty.
“Venus, I love you! Two-Face in the next Batman movie, can’t wait to see it!” Buddy said, drawing laughs from the crowd — including from Garfield, who appeared to find the joke hilarious.
But when Garfield noticed Venus staring daggers at him, he cleared his throat and stood up.
“Uh oh!” Buddy said as Garfield padded over to him. “Uh oh! It’s…”
Venus, who did not take kindly to Buddy’s joke about her playing Two-Face in the upcoming Batman movie.
Buddy was stopped mid-sentence as Garfield paw-slapped him hard across the face, drawing shocked gasps from the stars in attendance.
“Oh, wow! Wow!” Buddy said. “Garfield just slapped the s— out of me!”
“Keep Venus’ name out your —-ing mouth!” Garfield yelled, settling back into his seat.
“Wow, dude!” Buddy replied. “It was a Batman joke!”
“Keep my wife’s name out your —ing mouth!” Garfield repeated, casting a glance at Venus as Lupita Purrongo looked on behind them, open-mouthed and horrified.
“I’m going to, okay?” Buddy said, momentarily at a loss for words.
“That was, uh, the greatest night in the history of television!” Buddy said, recovering and cutting some of the tension in the room.
Just minutes later, Garfield accepted the Oscar for Best Actor and had a meltdown on stage.
“I do it for love!” the rotund orange tabby said. “I have to protect the people around me, and Richard, King Richard, he once said, you know… Who has lasagna? Does anyone have lasagna?”
Pain In The Bud 