The abandoned cat found his way to the basement of a hospital in Russia, where staff members provided him with inappropriate food — and way too much of it.
Animal rescuers in Russia have their work cut out for them after taking in a mega-chonky cat weighing 38 pounds.
The orange tabby, named Crumbs by his rescuers because he leaves none in his wake, is so overweight he can’t walk and has been placed on a strict diet to meet his first goal of becoming ambulatory.
After that, his rescuers said, the real work begins as they try to get Crumbs down to about 10 pounds, which they believe is a healthy weight for a cat of his original size.
Crumbs with one of his rescuers who is helping the morbidly obese feline shed pounds.
Staff at Matroskin Shelter in Perm told Russian media that Crumbs was abandoned by his owners and was living in the basement of a hospital in the city.
It wasn’t clear if Crumbs was already obese when he was surrendered, but hospital staff were not providing him with the kind of protein-rich meat cats need to stay healthy. Instead, they plied him with cookies and calorie-dense soups, apparently putting no limits on his food consumption.
“Kroshik’s story is an extremely rare case when someone loved a cat so much that they fed him to such a state,” shelter volunteers said.
Crumbs is in for a shock as he adjusts to his new diet, but the more difficult challenge may be the treadmill sessions that await once he’s able to move under his own power.
Barsik suffered the indignity of being labeled “The Fattest Cat In New York” and even made the front cover of the New York Post, but the former chonkster and his new human had the last laugh:
The problem of overweight cats has received more attention in recent years, with veterinarians warning people not to intentionally overfeed their cats. Unfortunately, some people have taken to fattening up their felines for the sake of social media success, looking to copy others whose extraordinarily “chonky” cats have earned equally massive online followings.
In Poland, Gacek the cat was removed from his street-side tiny house and taken indoors because visitors to the city of Szczecin would not stop feeding the overweight celebrity chonkster, despite signs pleading with them to stop. (It also didn’t help that people tried to steal Gacek after he became internationally famous.)
Above: After Gacek went viral for being the top-rated attraction in his home city of Szczecin, Poland, a steady stream of admirers made the pilgrimage to see him in person, offering tribute in the form of snacks.
Here at Casa de Buddy, I had to put His Grace on a diet because he was pushing about 12 1/2 to 13 pounds, up from his natural weight of about 10 or 11 pounds. That might not seem like much, but Bud isn’t a very large cat despite his belief that he’s a hulking tiger. Two pounds is as much as 20 percent of his ideal body weight.
As you might imagine, the little guy was not happy about his significantly reduced snack allotment and made sure to communicate that to me loudly and often.
“I am NOT chubby, I am meowscular!”
There have also been success stories. Barsik, once dubbed “The Fattest Cat In New York” after tipping the scales at an astonishing 41 pounds, made a second round of headlines after he shed a significant portion of his weight. Nowadays he’s looking happy and healthy as he’s able to run and jump like a cat should.
Buddy does his best seal impression! Nearby, our local SPCA deals with a horrific hoarding case.
I snapped the photo below when Buddy heard the upstairs neighbors making noise. Little dude looks like a seal! (The animal, not the singer. Bud’s singing voice is terrible!) All he needs are some flippers:
The acne spot I wrote about earlier is healed, but as you can see there’s still a tiny spot on his chin where his fur hasn’t completely grown back yet. Thankfully it’s no longer causing him any discomfort, and he’s back to asking for chin scratches while purring happily.
Of course he won’t be happy if I share an unflattering photo without a flattering one, so here he is looking cute:
Note the huge meowscles and ripped physique!
In some sad news, there’s an ongoing hoarding case in White Plains, NY, just a few miles from Casa de Buddy.
Police responded to an apartment building in the city after neighbors began complaining of “horrific” smells coming from the unit and discovered an older woman living with at least 40 cats in appalling conditions.
The cats, who are all suffering from ailments including respiratory and eye infections, were everywhere — including inside furniture and atop the kitchen cabinets where a few of them were able to get away from the feces-packed floor.
Cats crowd the limited space above the kitchen cabinets to escape the feces-encrusted floor of the apartment. Credit: Westchester SPCA
Staff from the SPCA of Westchester County have had to wear hazmat suits to operate inside the apartment. They’re in the process of removing the cats and have set up food and water stations for those they haven’t trapped yet while they try to clean some of the fecal matter and garbage, but they say the number of cats could rise as they find more hiding in the apartment. One cat was pregnant and gave birth to a single kitten on the feces-caked floor. The kitten was quickly removed and is under the close care of veterinary staff but is sickly and “clinging to life,” the SPCA said.
Incredibly, authorities have not charged the human occupant of the apartment. They say she meant well at first but the situation quickly spiraled out of control, as it often does when people who aren’t equipped to care for multiple cats take it upon themselves to “rescue” strays. No one sets out to become a hoarder. It usually happens when initial good intentions become unmoored from reality, but I do wonder how people who find these situations slipping from their control aren’t horrified by the suffering of the animals. Mental illness has to play a part.
Regardless, the situation is dire for the cats and the SPCA anticipates many thousands of dollars in veterinary costs on top of supplies and man hours involved in trapping the cats, getting them veterinary care, cleaning them up and working with them to help them overcome the trauma of their experience so they can become ready for adoption.
The SPCA of Westchester County was Buddy’s first veterinary office where he got his first shots and the snip as a kitten. They were very kind and gentle with the little guy, and at the time I’d just been laid off from my job so it really helped to have a place that provided quality veterinary care for significantly less than private vets. They do good work, and we wish them luck as they deal with a difficult task.
A UK woman said she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the cat behind on the Greek islands.
Jessica Addis met the friendly stray on the Greek island of Kos.
The UK woman vacationed on the Aegean island for sandy beaches, crystal blue water and the stunning ruins of classical Greek temples, but she fell in love a little white cat with ginger tabby markings.
Addis named the little one Zia after a sleepy Greek village on the slopes of Mount Dikaios, and began feeding the stray every day during her time on Kos this past September. Zia, who lived under a palm tree and depended on the kindness of tourists, liked her new human friend so much that she followed Addis back to her suite and began greeting her every morning.
Addis with Zia on the Greek island of Kos in September. Credit:
Leaving Zia at the end of her vacation wasn’t easy for Addis.
“I gave her the last of the cat biscuits and food and a last fuss, before I left,” she told Newsweek. “It broke my heart to leave her not knowing what would happen to her.”
When she asked hotel staff if anyone would care for the friendly moggie, she got a noncommittal answer. Greece lacks the extensive shelter infrastructure and trap, neuter, return (TNR) efforts of other western nations, and the result can be seen in the streets and the edges or human habitation, where a large population of strays eke out an existence by eating from garbage cans and hunting what they can.
“The hotel was closing for the season at the end of October, so I knew she then wouldn’t have the tourists to feed her,” Addis told Newsweek.
She said she was “heartbroken” thinking about Zia on her own without anyone to care for her or feed her during the off season.
“I knew straight away I needed to get her back to the U.K. I told my partner as we were on the bus to the airport that I was going to get Zia home. As soon as I got home, I started sorting everything to get her back to me.”
She enlisted the help of a Greek rescue group whose members wrangled Zia into a carrier, got her vaccinated, microchipped and onto a UK-bound plane with the appropriate paperwork. In all, it cost Addis $1,020, money well spent.
Addis with Zia after the latter was brought to the UK with the help of a Greek animal rescue group.
She welcomed Zia to her forever home over the holidays, but says the Greek kitty still hasn’t quite grasped that she’ll be fed and cared for.
“She is happy, content and has a belly full of food,” Addis wrote on a social media post that contained a slideshow of her with Zia on vacation in Greece, then later in her home in the UK. “Zia loves treats, playing with her bird feather catcher and having endless naps snuggled up with her blanket. Although she still thinks she’s stray, as she always wants food! She now has a loving home for the rest of her life.”
A popular X account posts “cute” cat videos that aren’t always so cute, another consequence of people misunderstanding cats and their behavior.
This dude thinks he’s speaking to a cat in her native tongue, but what he’s doing is the equivalent of running up to a bunch of Klingons and shouting “I shall impale you on the edge of my bat’leth!” while mistaking it for a friendly greeting.
It looks like someone hired this guy to rescue the kitty, who like so many of her kind are prone to do, climbed up too high and then decided she didn’t like her odds on the way down. I don’t think his intention was to scare the hell out of her, but that’s exactly what he’s done:
That’s not “Hi, kitty, I’m here to rescue you! Be calm, we’ll get you down in no time!”
It’s “I’m here, I speak your language, and I have bad intentions!”
If you listen with headphones or turn the volume up, you can hear the poor cat crying in distress, the kind of cry that felines make when they’re seriously freaked out and worried for their safety. No wonder kitty backed up. Her fur is raised and her posture aligns with her vocalizations and the rest of her body language.
Like most things posted to Twitter X, this is utterly lacking in context and we don’t know what happened next. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rescue attempt went horribly wrong. I hope not, but man, that’s not how you rescue a cat.
The video was posted by the account “place where cat shouldn’t be,” or @catshouldnt, and a common theme in the images and videos on that feed is cats in distress. They’re mistaken for “cute” situations by viewers, the majority of whom aren’t familiar with feline behavior.
Like, for instance, this photo. The tuxedo kitten is undeniably cute and he doesn’t look distressed…yet. But getting out is going to be a lot more difficult than getting in, and when people are willing to do just about anything for clicks, attention and the associated dopamine hit, cats often end up with the short end of the stick.
Bud would be jealous of this cat. Thankfully he’s too, uh, meowscular to fit. Yeah, that’s it. Too meowscular. Nothing to do with a few extra pounds…
Staff are demoralized, volunteers are spooked and the shelter has been buried in negative reviews after a TikToker picked a fight over an adoption fee and her army of followers went vigilante.
The voicemail is chilling not only for the explicit threat the person on the other end makes, but for her chipper tone as she casually threatens the lives of the people working at a west Michigan animal shelter.
“So anyway,” the caller says at the end of the unhinged message, “I’ll blow this number up and I’ll blow your location up as well. Hope you have a wonderful day!”
It’s one of three bomb threats the shelter has received since TikTok influencer Chloe Mitchell began the saga of what she calls “the $900 cat.”
Mitchell adopted a kitten from Michigan’s Noah Project, a small no-kill shelter, in early March. Staff say she didn’t balk at the adoption fee and they thought she was happy with the sweet kitty she took home, but the next day Noah Project’s phones began ringing incessantly with callers heaping abuse on the shelter’s volunteers and staff.
Apparently in the throes of adopter’s remorse, Mitchell uploaded a video to TikTok, the popular Chinese social media app, and raged about the adoption to her three million followers, screaming into the camera as she accused the shelter of identifying her as an easy mark and making a tidy profit off the kitten’s adoption fee.
Sickly kittens and sizable veterinary bills
Mitchell originally came to the shelter, camera in tow, asking specifically for a cat named Heart. The influencer filmed her visit and gushed to her viewers that she’d fallen in love with Heart, a mixed-breed kitten with Savannah heritage.
Heart, or as Mitchell calls her, “the $900 cat.” Credit: Noah Project
Shelter staff explained the kitten was from one of two litters that were brought in with serious ailments after a woman purchased a pair of queens from a breeder.
The former breeder cats went into heat and had babies, predictably, and the situation quickly grew out of control. When the woman realized she couldn’t care for the cats and their many ailing babies, she brought them to the Noah Project, which took on the Herculean task of caring for kittens that had problems ranging from anemia to developmental deformities like swimmer’s leg, also known as deformed leg syndrome.
Noah Project staff had to rush three of the kittens to an emergency veterinary hospital. Another required a leg amputation. Two kittens died, and the remaining babies had to be nursed back to health over three months, with special diets, medication and care on top of the normal costs associated with spaying/neutering, micro-chipping and vaccines.
Taking on that many sick kittens would stretch the resources of any animal shelter, let alone a small rescue, and the Noah Project set the adoption fees at $900 per kitten to help recoup the considerable costs.
Whipping an army of followers into a frenzy
Mitchell wasn’t phased by the fee, shelter staff said, but things quickly turned sour when she went home and posted the dramatic video, sparking the ire of her followers.
After that first video racked up almost six million views and almost 28,000 comments, Mitchell turned the experience into her own miniature “season” of online television, making half a dozen monetized videos in which she accuses the non-profit of lying to her about Heart’s breed and scamming her with the adoption fee.
Collectively, the videos have more than 30 million views, and Mitchell’s increasingly pitched rhetoric has whipped her three million followers into a frenzy.
In the video above, Mitchell acts out an alleged conversation with the shelter and confuses coat pattern for breed, saying “Feline experts have approached me online to say that she is in fact not an African Savannah and is more of a tabby-looking animal.”
“And they’ve stayed that I did get wrongfully charged that $900 in your shelter, which isn’t looking to re-home animals [but] make a profit off of them, and that’s not okay… I was taken advantage of, and that really sucks, I gave you my money for a reason that you were being truthful about her breed.”
Prompted by Mitchell’s insistence that the shelter was “scamming” adopters, her followers turned vigilante, review-bombing the Noah Project on Google and harassing its staff by phone. The shelter, which has been named the best rescue in west Michigan by its local newspaper several years in a row among other plaudits, saw its five-star Google review rating evaporate as negative reviews piled up, and the angry calls keep coming in. (“Unethical scammer! …shady, greedy business!” one of Mitchell’s followers wrote, while others dubbed Noah Project a “retail rescue” that “prioritizes profits over placing animals in a loving home.”)
The experience has been bewildering for shelter volunteers who aren’t accustomed to being the target of international ire.
“One woman [who answers phones at the shelter] doesn’t want to come back this week because it was so bad for her,” said Mashele Garrett-Arndt, Noah Project’s director. “It’s hard to explain to someone in their 60s or 70s. They don’t understand how [followers] can be so loyal to a person in a video. They don’t understand how people can be so cruel.”
Volunteers and staffers have taken the brunt of the abuse from Mitchell’s followers. Several don’t feel comfortable returning to the shelter because of the threats, Garrett-Arndt said.
The callers have said “they hope we die. They hope that we suffer and lose our jobs, they hope our families suffer. Horrible, horrible things,” she said.
As a result of the abuse and the threats, the Noah Project went to the local police, who are now keeping watch over the shelter. They’ve also hired private security, installed cameras covering the property, and have taken to scheduling staff to man the building overnight to watch the premises.
In an effort to end the squabble, Garrett-Arndt reached out and offered to refund Mitchell’s adoption fee, but said the influencer will no longer return the shelter’s calls.
Despite that offer, there’s no end in sight to the drama: Mitchell repeated her accusations that the shelter was trying to “profit” from her in an interview last week with MLive, a website that serves readers of a dozen newspapers across the state, and did an interview with the local Fox affiliate, WXMI, for a news segment that aired Monday.
Mitchell claims the shelter never mentioned the medical issues as the reason why the adoption fee was higher than usual, and says shelter staff told her Heart was “a super rare African Savannah” as rationale for the fee. She suggested she’ll continue her campaign to shame Noah Project until the shelter “proves” Heart is a Savannah, a mix of a wild serval and domestic cat.
“All of this will go away if they send me the certified paperwork ensuring she [is] in fact an African Savannah and I was rightfully charged $900,” the TikToker told WXMI.
But in her initial video Mitchell admitted she didn’t know what a Savannah cat was, and in another video she says she doesn’t care if Heart is a particular breed.
“I trusted you and I gave you my money for a reason, believing that you were being truthful with me about her breed, which didn’t matter to me at all, because I just love this animal,” she says in the video.
The constant stream of new videos about the situation and the behavior of Mitchell’s enraged followers has had a dramatic impact on the rescue.
“It has just been consuming our lives for the past four weeks,” one staffer told WXMI.
No one gets into animal rescue to make money, despite Mitchell’s claims that Project Noah’s staff are using animals in some sort of get rich quick scheme, and Garrett-Arndt told MLive she’d gladly open the shelter’s books to Mitchell or anyone else with concerns to show exactly how much was spent on vet bills and the other expenses involved in saving the sickly kittens and their mothers.
Pleading poverty and punching down
In her first video taking issue with Heart’s adoption fee, Mitchell pleads poverty and suggests the shelter saw her as an easy mark.
“I could just not eat,” she says with a theatrical expression, complaining that the fee is “two thirds of a Yorkie” and a quarter the price of a Louis Vuitton bag.
“I spent $900 on a fuzzy scratch ball that’s going to puke all over my furniture,” she says.
But Mitchell is not the typical college student working a part-time job and eating Ramen noodles to stretch her budget. As a volleyball player at Michigan’s Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, she’s well known as the first collegiate athlete to profit from the NCAA’s new NIL (name and image likeness) deal, which pays college athletes when their names and likenesses are used in broadcasts, promotional materials, video games and other revenue-generating activities tied to their sports.
Mitchell went on to found a company that guides other athletes on NIL deals, and she makes a considerable amount of money on TikTok. Creators on the platform who have three million followers can expect to earn about $15,000 a month from viewership alone, and articles going back to 2021 state Mitchell receives lucrative sponsorships on her videos.
“Five-figure deals are her baseline” for sponsored posts, a story on MLive notes, saying Mitchell was earning up to $20,000 per sponsored post at the time, when she had fewer followers than she does now.
If Mitchell scores a conservative two sponsored posts per month, that could put her earnings at $55,000 a month from TikTok alone, not including money earned from her NIL deal. Very few college students earn that kind of cash, yet Mitchell claimed the $900 adoption fee was “life-changing money.” In addition, she refers to her new pet almost exclusively as “the $900 cat.”
She dismissed the idea that she was creating problems for the Noah Project, telling WXMI that she doesn’t think she’s responsible for what her followers do.
“I never asked for the internet to go call them or to leave Google reviews in my defense whatsoever,” she said. “I’m not asking to be defended, I’m just asking to be heard.”
With 30 million views on her videos about “the $900 cat” saga, she’s been heard. The shelter? Not so much.
“To call people scammers, that’s a huge thing,” Garrett-Arndt told PITB. “You don’t just say someone scammed you. For her to say that about Noah Project, that hit hard for everyone.”
Garrett-Arndt said Noah Project’s social media staffer is hard at work trying to rectify the one-star reviews Mitchell’s followers left on the shelter’s Google listing, and said it’s taken considerable time to combat the damage to the shelter’s reputation.
Time spent dealing with negative reviews, filing police reports and reassuring spooked volunteers means less time dealing with the rescue’s primary mission — saving animals.
Garrett-Arndt said she consulted an attorney about taking to TikTok to tell the shelter’s story, and the attorney warned her that doing so could provoke an even stronger reaction from Mitchell, who has an enormous megaphone.
She said she doesn’t want to anger Mitchell for fear of what the influencer could do in the future, but believes the whole saga was manufactured for the benefit of the influencer’s TikTok account and followers. When the story blew up, she ran with it and wouldn’t return calls from the shelter in an attempt to fix the situation.
“She needed content, so it’s like ‘Let’s go get a cat,’ and then it got out of hand,” Garrett-Arndt said. “She has three million followers, but we have to stand our ground. The truth will come out.”
In the meantime, Mitchell — perhaps with an eye toward creating more viral content — says she’s getting a DNA test for Heart and has threatened to contact the other adopters who took home cats from the same two litters.
“Five other people paid the $900 adoption fee and not one of those people had an issue with it,” Garrett-Arndt said of adopters who took home the other kittens from the sickly litters.
The offer of a refund still stands, and staff at the Noah Project hope there’s an end to the madness.
“Why wouldn’t she come back to us? We’ll refund her,” Garrett-Arndt told PITB. “If you’re that unhappy about the $900, bring the cat back. Adopt another cat so we don’t have to [deal with] this and we don’t get dragged through the mud.”
Pain In The Bud 