A new article claims that cats don’t love people the way dogs do and may not love people at all! A reader asks Buddy to weigh in.
Dear Buddy,
I have an urgent matter here that requires your sage input and your keen understanding of all things feline and human.
This article from LiveScience, titled “Do Cats Really Hate Us?”, contains several distressing allegations. Among them: that cats mostly tolerate us humans, that we must bribe them with snacks and other gifts to earn their affection, and perhaps most disturbing of all, that cats can never love humans the way dogs do.
When confronted with particularly disturbing information we must turn to our greatest minds to guide us, and you may be the only one, cat or human, who can cut to the heart of the matter and reveal the truth.
Please, Buddy, tell us it ain’t true!
Sad In Saskatchewan
Dear Sad,
Normally I’d chastise you for writing from Canada, as I’ve made it clear many times that my column is for AMERICATS and their servants. Furthermore, everyone knows I despise Canada, that barren, frozen wasteland filled with floppy-headed Canadians!
However you were very gracious in your appeal to me and you employed an appropriate number of superlatives to describe my considerable intellect and wit, so we’ll pretend you’re an American for the purposes of this reply, shall we?
Now to the grave matter before us!
It is true that the bond between feline and human is different than the bond between human and canine, just like a boss-employee relationship differs from friendships with co-workers.
We cats are the bosses, in case the analogy wasn’t clear.
Buddicles the Wise is a scholar and gentlecat who is often sought out for his sage advice on thorny issues.
Humans, dogs, lizards and other lesser animals occupy one sphere and felines occupy another, higher sphere. You would have learned all this in science class had you paid attention, but you’re Canadian so we can only expect so much.
Now it is true, our affections are limited. A dog will slobber all over his owner for no reason at all whereas humans have to toil to earn a pat on the head from their feline superiors.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t love you! You guys are good at acquiring and dispensing food, you build nice shelters (except for your insistence on those infernal “doors”) and you are loyal.
I can always count on my Big Buddy to put off the call of nature until his bladder is ready to burst when I am using him as my pillow. I also know that Big Buddy will get up to open the door a hundred times when I’m indecisive about whether I want to be on one side or another. Sometimes I pretend to be indecisive just to mess with him LOL!
So you see, cats do love humans, but we require humans to earn our love. We are not the aloof, uncaring, unfeeling little furry masters that some slander us as.
Beware fake news, my friend, especially anything you read about me as I seek to regain my rightful post as president of the Americats. Now go and earn the love of your feline overlord by providing excellent service!
The Prince of Pizza likes to say controversial things.
I can’t overstate how much I like Charles Barkley.
When I was a kid watching the NBA in the 90s, Sir Charles was a force to be reckoned with, a player who could put an entire team on his back and would have rampaged his way to multiple championships if a man named Michael Jordan didn’t play in the same era.
Chuck was physical, an outstanding and efficient scorer, a tenacious rebounder and a guy who played the game with passion. He was also beloved as the NBA’s resident “fat guy,” an admittedly pizza-loving athlete nicknamed The Round Mound of Rebound and The Incredible Bulk who always had to lose a few pounds when he showed up for training camp.
A young Charles Barkley (right) eating pizza before a game. No, seriously, that’s what he ate before NBA games!
In his post-NBA career, Barkley has delighted audiences for years with his brutally honest takes about basketball and many other topics. He’s blunt, honest to a point and often hilarious.
That’s why I still can’t dislike him even after he insisted cats are pets for “old women” during a playoff broadcast on Monday.
“A cat is not a real pet,” Barkley said on TNT when fellow host and former NBA player Kenny Smith mentioned he likes cats and has one at home.
“Why not?” Smith asked.
“Because it’s not a dog,” Barkley replied.
Later, when a fan jokingly tweeted an image of cats taking issue with Barkley’s declaration, The Prince of Pizza doubled down.
“I don’t dislike cats, I just don’t think they’re real pets,” he said. “A dog is a real pet.”
“What’s a cat?” Smith asked him.
“Just something old women have,” Barkley said, drawing the ire of cat lovers on the internet.
Before anyone rushes to fire off an angry tweet, it should be noted that Barkley is known for saying things to get a rise out of people, and Inside the NBA is legendary for its shit talk, with Shaquille O’Neal and Ernie Johnson rounding out the quartet of hosts who spend as much time laughing as they do analyzing the games. The guys on Inside the NBA are also notorious for poking fun at themselves and playing pranks on each other (I’ll never forget seeing all 300 pounds of Shaq falling on his ass after the other guys took the screws out of his chair, and the good-natured way he took it), so I know Sir Charles wasn’t trying to be mean. He was probably just taking a dig at Kenny.
So yeah, don’t cancel Charles. He’s entertaining, he’s a unique voice, and he just hasn’t had his heart stolen by a cat yet. Someone take him to the local SPCA and find a nice fluffy Maine Coon who will sway Chuck to the dark side!
“Things are just a little more progressive here in San Francisco.”
In one of my favorite South Park episodes, Kyle’s father Gerald uproots his family and moves to San Francisco because, he explains, he can no longer stand the narrow minded, gas-guzzler-driving, gun owning people of South Park.
He throws a party in his San Fran townhouse, inviting his new neighbors who all have multi-hyphenate last names and a habit of speaking with their eyes closed, settling into deeply self-satisfied reverie as they literally savor the smell of their own farts.
“Can you believe those morons in Texas just executed another prisoner?” one of Gerald’s new neighbors says, tooting into an empty wine glass before raising it to his nose like an aromatic vintage and taking a deep, enthusiastic huff. “Things are just so much more progressive in San Francisco.”
While reading this article about the Portland metro area boasting the highest percentage of single cat-owning men in the country (more than twice the percentage here in New York, and almost three times more than Miami), I couldn’t help but picture some of the men in the story as crudely drawn South Park characters, inhaling air biscuits as they associate an animal with their politics.
“I think it makes sense because it’s a more progressive part of the country,” one of the men told the Seattle Times as he tried to explain Portland’s high percentage of single “cat daddies.” “I think there’s more freedom to not be ‘toxically masculine’ in this part of the country.”
Because we can’t help but ruin everything with politics in this country, the effort to drag cats and dogs into the left-right divide has been picking up steam in recent years, aided by click-seeking media.
The alleged political divide over companion animals has been the subject of research papers in psychology and veterinary journals, and pets are now routinely included in the ideologically-motivated invective that saturates social media. Conservatives are portrayed as poor, shotgun-toting rednecks driving beat-up pickups covered in Gadsden flags while their faithful but stupid dogs hang their heads out of the windows, trailing globs of drool.
Liberals, meanwhile, are portrayed as unmarried middle age women who spend their Saturday nights on their couches with pints of Ben & Jerry’s and their feminine, useless cats, bemoaning their lack of relationships.
The incels and pick-up game “artists” have even gotten in on it.
“Only a cat-owning bitch would complain to the police about a f—ing joke,” manosphere influencer Andrew Tate raged in a 2022 video after one of his intentionally inflammatory social media posts provoked a stronger response than he anticipated. “Who calls the police on a f—ing joke? Cat owners. Cat owners are liberals. Cat owners believe in hate speech. Cat owners are Democrats. Cat owners are dickheads!”
Tate, by the way, has been rotting in a Romanian prison since December after he was arrested and accused of running a human trafficking ring that exploited young women. Tate, his brother and their associates lured the victims with declarations of love and promises to get married. Once the young women arrived in Romania, the country’s authorities said, Tate and his crew would confiscate their passports, imprison them in Tate’s mansion near Bucharest, and force them to perform sex acts on live streams for the financial benefit of the defendants.
Tate was arrested after unsuccessfully trying to troll Greta Thunberg on Twitter by showing off his expensive, gas-guzzling hypercars and bragging that he likes to eat pizza without recycling the boxes. Romanian police, who were already looking at Tate in a wider human trafficking probe, noticed the pizza boxes seen in his videos were from a local chain and moved quickly to arrest him.
Thank you for confirming via your email address that you have a small penis @GretaThunberg
Tate has lost three appeals to toss the case, which is ongoing. But the alleged human trafficker still boasts a massive and loyal online following, and as far as his fans are concerned, his words are law. If Andrew Tate says cats are the preferred pets of “liberal bitches,” then it’s true in the eyes of his fans, many of whom pay hundreds of dollars a month for an online “school” where Tate purports to teach them the finer points of masculinity.
Aside from ruining yet another one of life’s joys by dragging politics into it, I’m worried that pets will pay the price for the misguided effort to associate them with ideology.
Cats in particular are already extremely vulnerable and tend to get the brunt of abuse by proxy. That is to say, studies show men who are abusive toward women often target cats belonging to women as proxies for their anger. They associate felines with the feminine. Women target cats to harm their exes and significant others as well, but there’s a lack of statistics since men don’t usually seek help in domestic violence situations.
Likewise, sitting on porches while drinking beer and shooting at critters who happen by is practically an official sport in some parts of the country. As someone who has Google News alerts set up for cat-related stories, I see the same depressing stories every day: cats who die a few feet from their front doors or who make it home with BB wounds, arrows sticking out of their chests or actual gunshot wounds.
Those stories are so common, it’s difficult not to despair for the poor cats and for whatever diseased way of thinking prompts people to hurt and kill innocent animals.
Do we really want to give people more incentive to kill cats?
Do we want gun owners regaling each other with stories about how many “liberal cats” they’ve shot?
Do we want potential caretakers passing on adopting cats because they’re worried their choice of pet indicates they belong to a certain ideological tribe? After all, everything from the cars we drive and the stores we shop, to observing basic hygienic practices during a pandemic, allegedly says something about our political beliefs.
Buddy the Cat: Not wimpy!
As for men who love cats, we already deal with absurd stereotypes. (We’re invariably described as gay, feminine and somehow not as manly as dog owners, even those of us who have hulking, muscular house tigers like Buddy!) We don’t need to encourage even more stereotypes, and in general I think we could all do with less box-checking. Life is not a Myers-Briggs test.
I know one thing for certain: cats are masters of living in the moment, and they have no patience for human nonsense like politics. They are innocent and pure. Sullying them with political associations is a disservice to these regal, wonderful animals.
The US is evenly split between 25 cat states and 25 dog states.
I spent a weekend dog-sitting for the first time ever in the spring of 2 B.B. (Before Buddy), rising early to walk my brother’s Chihuahua-terrier before work.
The Manhattan of 7 am is a different world: Everywhere I looked, bleary-eyed New Yorkers clutched leads, yawning as dogs of all shapes and sizes pulled them along. I never knew there were so many dog-friendly apartments, let alone so many people willing to share cramped spaces with dogs of all sizes. Seven-pound Cosmo was one thing, Greate Danes and Dobermans quite another.
You’d think New York City, with its sky-high population density, would be a cat town. It isn’t. Neither is New York State as a whole.
Sadly, Buddy and I live in a state dominated by dog-lovers, one of 25 including California, Texas, Florida, Virginia and both Carolinas. Although cats are the most popular pets in 25 states as well, feline strongholds tend to be in places with lower population density, from Oregon and Washington in the west to Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi in the south, to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maine in the east.
The information was compiled by market research firm Time2Play, which surveyed more than 3,000 Americans. The team also asked respondents whether they posted photos and videos of their pets online. Even though cats remain the undisputed masters of digital space, almost 57 percent of dog people showed off their pooches online, while only 43 percent of cat servants did.
Bud and I have been thinking about moving someplace warmer for years, but of course the king’s needs come first. Maybe we’ll settle in Louisiana or Nevada, where Buddy can establish a new realm for himself.
A wife says she “feels bad” for her husband after telling him to surrender his elderly cat, but feels she made the right decision.
How could you force your husband to dump his beloved 18-year-old cat?
That’s the question many incredulous Redditors are asking after a woman told her story on a popular sub-Reddit called “Am I The Asshole?” for people second-guessing their decisions.
The woman who wrote the post said she and her husband got married about a year ago and they took the usual steps when introducing her pit bull to her husband’s cat. They started, she wrote, “by initially separating them, then by introducing them to each other’s smells, followed by letting them see each other whilst at a safe distance.”
“They appeared to get along, but after a day, the cat began making [its] dislike for the dog VERY clear,” she wrote.
The couple hasn’t been successful keeping the peace, she added, and a veterinarian who examined the cat said he was in perfect health, apparently eliminating health reasons for the cat’s alleged hostility toward the dog.
Finally, the wife “brought up the idea” of surrendering the cat. “Brought up” may mean “demanded” in this instance, but the nature of stories like this means both parties would be unreliable narrators. We just don’t know. She said she’s pregnant, which was another factor in her decision.
“We argued virtually nonstop about this for days, until my husband finally agreed to take his cat to said cat sanctuary,” she wrote. “However, he is still pretty upset with me.”
Credit: cottonbro/Pexels
Most users weren’t too happy with the wife, others waved the post off as the work of a troll — albeit one who forgot the cardinal rule of trolling, that it should be funny — and some blamed the husband for caving.
“Anyone that rehomes an animal for someone they are screwing deserves the shit they will have to put up with being with that person,” one ticked-off user wrote.
Most of the condemnatory posts came from people who were incredulous not only that the wife made her husband give up his cat, but that the poor cat is 18 years old and has known nothing but a life with his human.
“Dear God, I hope this isn’t real,” one user wrote, while another summed it up succinctly: “Everything about this sucks.”
The feedback wasn’t split along gender lines either. Most users who identified themselves as female expressed concern for the cat.
“My husband’s cat passed 3 years ago at 18 years. And he would absolutely have rehomed me before he rehomed his cat,” one woman wrote. “Not that I would ever have suggested it, of course – I loved that little fart machine.”
I don’t have much to add to this, as the people who responded pretty much covered the bases. I’d like to believe this was someone’s misguided idea of humor, but in one sense it doesn’t matter because scenarios like this one play out all the time. If it is authentic, then the subtext says a lot: While the author says she “brought up the idea” of rehoming, she also says she and her husband “argued virtually nonstop” about the situation for days, and acknowledges that “he’s still pretty upset with me.”
It’s probably safe to say that’s an understatement, especially if she’s soliciting judgment from strangers on the internet as she second-guesses herself. (Side note: The idea of a sub-Reddit specifically for “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument that’s been bothering you,” is pretty cool. All of us could use some outside perspective at times.)
As cat-lovers (and animal-lovers in general) know, rehoming is brutal on the pet, leads to depression and can cause serious physical ailments. For an 18-year-old cat, it’s even worse.
I hope the wife has a change of heart and they take the cat back, then get to work on figuring out how to keep the peace for real this time.
Pain In The Bud 