Is the human a bad influence on the cat, is the cat a bad influence on the human, or are they both just crazy?
NEW YORK — Big Buddy and Little Buddy experienced an awkward moment while watching a cat documentary which claimed feline personalities eventually come to resemble the dispositions of their humans.
The human and tabby were sitting on their couch, eating popcorn and laughing at their own farts when Holly Sikes, a cat behaviorist interviewed in the documentary, broke down the way people and their furry pals mirror each other.
“So, for example, if the cat is a lazy, egotistical jerk who’s always coming up with hare-brained schemes, he obviously learned that from someone,” the behaviorist said. “And that someone is the primary caretaker, the one with whom the cat spends most of his or her time.”
The Buddies looked at each other, shrugging.
“I once had a client whose cat, Quintus Lentilus Batiatus, was an absolute lunatic,” Sikes continued in the documentary. “And it turned out the owner was a LARPer who belonged to a group of wannabe Roman legionaries, which explained why little Quintus had declared war on the German family next door, labeling them ‘barbarians and savages who must be civilized under the banner of the Sacred Eagle.’ I’ve heard of cats styling themselves as Mongol conquerors, Spartan warriors and even kings of Joseon.”
Little Buddy stopped chewing, and with a mouth full of popcorn, turned to his Big Buddy.
“I’m, uh, not feeling this documentary, dude,” he said. “Let’s find something else to watch.”
“Agreed,” Big Buddy said.
The behaviorist continued to elaborate as Big Buddy searched for the remote.
“…and delusions of grandeur, particularly when it comes to fantasies about conquering the world, being famous, or even establishing ties with big cats like jaguars and tigers…”
Little Buddy’s voice was urgent.
“Where’s the remote, dude? Come on! Find it!”
“I’m trying! Where the heck is it?”
“…and we find that in cases where human and feline are closely bonded, they serve as enablers, with each convincing the other that their schemes are brilliant even when they’re gobsmackingly inane…”
Big Buddy grunted triumphantly.
“Found it!” he said.
Human and cat breathed a sigh of relief as the stream stopped.
“So what do you wanna watch next, Bud?” Big Buddy asked.
Little Buddy sat up and stretched.
“Actually, I was thinking of taking another nap and then working on my brilliant plan to intercept catnip shipments bound for pet stores.”
Big Buddy whistled.
“That is a brilliant plan, little guy,” he said.
“It is, isn’t it?” Little Buddy said proudly.
“Good call on the nap too. I’ll set my alarm for 90 minutes. Gotta get that beauty sleep…”
As of press time, the Buddies had settled on a scheme to intercept catnip and turkey bound for pet stores, which they both agreed was brilliantly conceived and guaranteed to work.
An order from Chewy brought food, a new laser pointer and catnip, but Bud was most excited about the box because, well, because he’s a cat!
We’ve covered some heavy stuff lately, so I thought we’d get the week off to a happy start by turning things over to Buddy, who has a very important message.
“I have a new box. Behold my new box, humans! It is new and comfortable, and it smells like catnip and silvervine since my servant ordered a new tub of the stuff. Yes, he has done well. I am pleased.”
Buddy testing out his new box.“Yes, this will do nicely, human.”
The shipment brought quite a few goodies for the Budster including a new laser pointer, two months’ worth of wet food and catnip.
We don’t normally endorse products on PITB, but we’re making an exception for From the Field’s catnip and silvervine blend not only because Bud loves the stuff, but also because it calmed him down and soothed his stomach when he was hurting last month.
I gave him some before I brought him to the veterinary hospital and again four or five days later when he had a little relapse. Both times he was crying and yowling in distress, and both times the catnip-silvervine blend settled him down, relieving his pain enough so he was able to rest comfortably and go to sleep. It’s a horrible feeling when your cat’s suffering and you can’t do anything to relieve the pain. This stuff did the trick and will have a permanent place in the Buddy Cupboard.
Finally, I created a new image of the little dude. What you’re looking at is a render based on a photograph of Bud, which was then run through an AI natural language processor with instructions not to alter the substance of the image, but to give it more of a surreal look. The image below is not actually what I was going for, and sometimes the failures can produce nice images in what Bob Ross would call “happy little accidents.” But it is a way to take a subpar camera phone shot, one in which I liked Buddy’s expression and pose but couldn’t fix the blurry bits, and turn it into something interesting.
Could a doppelganger cat fool you, even if it looked just like your cat?
Among my three most intense recurring anxiety nightmares there’s the classic where I’m back in college, it’s the end of the semester, there’s a class I haven’t attended in months, and I’m going to fail if I don’t grovel before the pissed-off professor.
Then there’s the recurring dream where I’m walking an endless parking lot — in a mall, in an underground garage, on my old college campus — looking for my car, which refuses to be found. Sometimes I’m looking for the Civic I drive now, sometimes it’s the boxy old Chevy Celebrity that was my first-ever vehicle, and sometimes it’s my beloved black Celica that tragically died on I-95 in the Bronx en route to Long Island.
But the worst, the one that triggers the most anxiety and despair, is a dream in which I realize that Buddy isn’t Buddy. The gray tabby in my apartment looks like him and for the most part acts like him, but in my nightmare someone has swapped him out with a different cat for reasons unknown, and by the time I realize it’s not him, I don’t even know how long I’ve been duped.
My despair turns into overwhelming guilt when I realize my Buddy is still out there somewhere, wondering what happened, probably thinking I abandoned him.
Thankfully when I wake I’m reassured by the snoozing form of Actual Buddy where he always sleeps, right on top of me. And yes, I realize he probably gate crashes my dreams because he’s vocal, he refuses to sleep anywhere else, and he’s got a habit of getting up in the middle of the night to rub his head against my face while he purrs and makes biscuits.
“Oh, so sad! Now give me snacks!”
But for one woman in the UK, the nightmare may be a reality and she just doesn’t know it yet.
In the subreddit “True Off My Chest,” the man says the cat “scratched everyone, hissed at everyone, and didn’t use its litter box half the time,” but his girlfriend “insisted she could get it to behave better.”
She left the cat in her boyfriend’s care when she went out of town for a week to visit relatives, and a nefarious plot began to germinate in his mind.
“The first night I went over, it scratched the shit out of my arm,” he wrote. “I joked to the cat that it’s not special and I’ll replace it if it scratches again. The joke stuck with me until I had thought about it enough that it wasn’t a joke.”
After looking around, the man says he found an identical-looking cat at a nearby shelter. That cat had been surrendered when its owner died of a heart attack. Kitty was bewildered and skittish when it found itself without a home and in a shelter.
“The cat [was] a lot friendlier and better behaved, and the [skittishness] would help it resemble the original cat,” the man wrote.
The man claims his girlfriend never figured it out, and says she was even pleased that “her cat” had calmed down and was better behaved. The couple eventually got married, and now the Redditor shares a home with the cat too.
After six years, however, he says he can’t forget what he did.
“Every time I see [the cat], I feel like a total piece of shit,” he wrote.
Among dozens of condemnatory comments, there was this amusing one from another Redditor: “Best of luck if y’all have kids. Finding a lookalike child is way harder.”
Credit: Crina Doltu/Pexels
And that brings me to my next point. I’m not sure I buy this story. I certainly hope it’s not true.
Perhaps it’s easier to find a lookalike among black cats, but what about behavior? What about the cat’s quirks, its unique vocalizations, its favorite sleeping spots? Every cat has preferences when it comes to where it likes to be scratched, whether it’ll tolerate being held, how long or how often it’ll snuggle with its humans.
Cats are individuals just as humans are, with their own preferences, rituals and habits.
Even after seeing many thousands of images of gray tabby cats, I have never seen one who looks just like Bud. It’s not just his unique bib, that tuft of white hair on his upper chest, nor is it his pronounced muzzle. It’s also the derpy look on his face, the way he tilts his head quizzically, his Buddesian gait, his uniquely lazy method of dribbling down from the couch like a liquid.
Behavior-wise, there’s just no way. You’d have to find a gray tabby who never shuts up, sounds like an over-caffeinated Elmo singing in falsetto, and has a language that consists of 90 percent trills and meows that tilt an octave up so they sound like questions.
And you’d have to find a jerk. A stone-cold Fluff of Doom who Must Swipe Everything off flat surfaces. A feline who has no qualms about destroying things, enjoys walking on your face when you’re sleeping, and will occasionally launch himself at your ankles with a battle cry of “BRRRRRUUUPPPP!” because you didn’t give him his treats quickly enough. Hell, even the way he shrieks at me for snacks and tries to block my path like a goalie is unusual.
Imagine the phone call someone would have to make: “Yes, I’m looking for a gray tabby cat with bright green eyes and a tuft of white on his chest. He has to sound like Elmo on espresso, and he absolutely must be a huge jerk. You don’t have any jerks? Well what about in the back? You must have something!”
“I’m a certified OG, yo! I was swiping fragile objects off shelves and pooping under beds before it was cool.”
Of course Bud has a whole bunch of great qualities too, and I wouldn’t change a hair on his head. No “replacement cat” could ever fool me. There can only be one Buddy.
Do you think the Redditor’s story is real? Could anyone ever fool you by swapping one of your cats for a doppelganger?
The behaviorist continued to elaborate as Big Buddy searched for the remote.
Pain In The Bud 