cat obit – Pain In The Bud

With inflation taking a major toll on families over the last few years, one of the most frequently cited reasons for surrendering pets is that their people can’t afford them anymore.

A vet tech in Ohio is trying to prevent that from happening to people in her area with The Little Black Cat Collective, a pet food pantry she founded in honor of her late rescue cat, Lila, who died at 16 years old.

Laura Zavadil founded the pantry — which also helps people with dogs, guinea pigs, ferrets and rabbits — in 2021, and since then it’s grown, serving “30 to 40 families and more than 200 animals each month,” she told her hometown newspaper, the Vindicator of Warren, Ohio.

“I wanted to do my part to help the community through struggles,” Zavadil told the paper. “The pantry’s main goal is to get the needs of these animals met and help the people, but also — considering the limited amount of shelter space in the area — if it means the animals can stay in the home, that’s just icing on the cake.”

Remembering Misty the Cat, whose death “drained all the colour from the world”

Speaking of honoring deceased pets, Keith Miller has a heck of a tribute to his cat, Misty, in The Guardian.

It’s been six months since Keith Miller’s beloved cat (pictured above), came up to him “with a series of unusual cries, stretched his mouth wide like a yawning lion, shivered, collapsed and died.” Misty, Miller wrote, “was a fortnight shy of his ninth birthday,” and his absence has been keenly felt.

Tributes are difficult to write, and tributes to pets may be harder still. It’s tough to feel you’re doing justice to an animal you loved while conveying their personality, and in the back of your mind you’re thinking of the people who don’t get it, who don’t have pets and might find your tribute saccharine or melodramatic.

Miller strikes just the right notes and makes the reader feel Misty’s loss without knowing the little guy.

“I have thought a lot about this particular cat and this particular loss. I think what most pains and enrages me about it has something to do with the role Misty played in our life: a larger-than-life vibe, faux-heroic and mock-epic (and so often richly comic). He used to skid on the floor when he came into a room, like Kramer in Seinfeld. He was an agent of chaos and misrule, knocking objects off surfaces with gallumphing carelessness one day, dead-eyed precision the next. He was gormless yet prodigious, a fluffier cousin of Homer Simpson. He didn’t shyly solicit affection, as his sister does; he demanded it by right, thrusting his jaw up and out like Mussolini to accept strokes on his throat and chest.

All in all, he didn’t really have the makings of a tragic character. And he wasn’t a will-o’-the-wisp, either, on loan from another world, as most cats are. His unscheduled exit wasn’t just an emotional body blow; it was a violation of the rules of genre.”

The Mussolini bit resonated with me, since I’ve referred to Bud as “a furry little Genghis Khan” on occasion, and often joke that he’s a tyrant ruling over the place with an iron paw. Miller’s homage to his pal isn’t overly long, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

We take a break from our usual inanity, humor and Buddy’s mind-bogglingly terrible advice column to call your attention to this beautiful tribute to a special cat.

Tom Wrobleski, an opinion writer for the Staten Island Advance, said a tearful goodbye to his cat, Malkovich, on Jan. 11.

“I’ve cried more for that cat over the last three weeks than I have over some people that I’ve lost in my life,” he writes.

Tom says Malkovich was supposed to be his kids’ cat, but ended up bonding with him:

Mal would meet me at the door when I came home, flopping down and giving me his belly. He followed me into the bathroom. He curled up next to me in bed. He would flop in the hallway upstairs and rub his face on my foot.

Don’t let anyone tell you that cats don’t bond, that cats don’t love, that cats are stand-offish. Mal loved me. And I loved him. He was my buddy. My best boy. The top cat.

He became part of the fabric of our lives. He even grudgingly tolerated Lucy, the neighborhood stray we adopted in 2017.

Mal’s illness snuck up on Wrobleski, as so many cat health problems do because our furry friends are so stoic.

“We thought that Mal was getting a little chubby in recent months. It turns out that he was ill, with fluid gathering in his abdomen,” he wrote. “The news from the vet was dire: Mal had cancer throughout his body. There wasn’t a lot we could do.”

malkovichfiltered — The author’s favorite photo of Malkovich the cat. Credit: Tom Wrobleski

The rest of it is really sad and would have made Buddy and I cry if we weren’t so manly and tough. Wrobleski writes about how much he misses Mal, and how much Mal changed his life during the 11 years he was a part of the family. (They adopted the little guy when he was four years old, and he lived until he was 15.)

His pain at losing the little guy is evident in every word and anecdote.

Be warned, though, that if you’re not as tough as Buddy and I, you probably will shed some tears, which Buddy and I definitely did not do. In fact, immediately after reading Wrobleski’s tribute to Malkovich, Bud and I watched a football game, drank Budweiser and shopped for a good old American pick-up truck while practicing our Sam Elliot voices.