Buddy the Cat argues that a consistent bedtime is key to feeling good and healthy, while Buddy the Cat counters that stupid humans don’t tell him when to sleep, HE decides. Who’s right, Buddy or Buddy?
A Consistent Bedtime Is Important
What are you doing, human? It’s bedtime! Mow mow! You’re supposed to be in this bed and laying down so I can use your face as a pillow, drape myself across you, or burrow comfortably against your side to soak up body heat.
What am I supposed to do without a human sleeping substrate? How can any cat be expected to sleep like this? I know you claim there are so called “stray cats” who don’t have humans, but that is preposterous and I don’t believe it.
Let’s go! I read an article saying it’s very important to have a regular sleep schedule. Well, actually, I just saw the headline, but I got the gist of it, which is that you have to go to bed right meow!
You Don’t Tell Me When To Sleep, Human!
Sleep? Now? That’s ridiculous.
No, I have shadows to chase, toys to kick around and I really wanted to get into redecorating things around here, because they’re looking a little too orderly for my tastes.
Go ahead, go to bed. In a few minutes I’ll cry outside the bedroom door until you get out of bed and open it, then I’ll decide I don’t want to go in after all. I’ll do that two, maybe three more times just because I can.
Oh, you thought I was settling in? Nah. I have a bowl of water to splash all over the place, then I’ll cry until you get up again and refill it, and when you get back into bed for the fifth or sixth time, I’ll cry incessantly again because my dry food bowl is empty, meaning there’s plenty of food but it’s all pushed up to the sides.
Do not forget our pre-slumber ritual! You have to scratch my chin while I purr and you tell me what a good boy I am. Then you have to scratch the top of my head while I purr and you tell me what a good boy I am.
The begging/praying motion is one of the most unusual feline behaviors, but what does it mean, and why do some cats do it?
Readers of this blog know I love my cat dearly, but he’s also very weird.
Perhaps his strangest, most mysterious behavior is what I call his “praying” gesture: Buddy sits up on his hind legs, puts his front paws together and raises them up and down as if in fervent prayer.
The behavior is extremely rare. Out of many millions of cat videos hosted on the internet, only a handful show cats engaging in it.
Here’s Buddy demonstrating his “prayer” form, set to De La Soul’s 1989 track, “Buddy”:
It’s seemingly random and impossible to predict, which is why it’s been so difficult for me to get a decent clip of Bud doing it. The above video is the third time I’ve managed to capture it, and only the second time I’ve been able to get a clear shot following an earlier capture:
Some cats do it much more frequently, like the ginger tabby below whose humans have decided it’s an expression of gratitude toward them for giving him a forever home:
I’m confident in saying that, for my cat at least, it’s not an expression of gratitude or a form of begging. First, Bud doesn’t do gratitude, and he doesn’t beg so much as he demands. If he feels I’m not responding quickly enough to one of his directives, he goes right to screeching at me: “Snack now, human!” and so on.
Likewise in the video above, Charlie’s humans say the orange tabby does it “randomly.” They’ve even caught him making the motion on camera when no one else was around, which tracks with my own observations of my cat.
So why do cats do it?
“I’ve seen the ‘begging paws’ online and I wish I had a nice, clear explanation for you,” cat behaviorist Mikel Delgado told us.
Some cats, she noted, learn quickly that it elicits a response from their humans.
“My best guess at why cats continue to do this behavior is that it gets them attention,” Delgado said. “That however, does not explain why they do it in the first place.”
Nancy Meyer, a feline behavior consultant who volunteers for Tabby’s Place in New Jersey, said she believes cats in some of the videos are indeed signaling to their humans that they want something. For example, one clip shows a cat “begging” in front of a refrigerator — which his humans say he often does — while another shows a cat facing its reflection in a mirror while pressing its paws together and moving them up and down.
Some of those cats would be well aware that their behavior is a good way to get their humans’ attention, which could indeed lead to them getting what they want.
“It’s like a meow or gaze alteration; it’s a way of communicating that a cat wants to get something that’s currently out of reach,” Meyer told PITB. “The owners reward the cat for this behavior so the behavior perpetuates.”
In my own anecdotal experience I have witnessed Buddy engage in the behavior when he doesn’t realize he’s being observed, and he’s just as likely to break out in “prayer” while facing away from me. I suspect that because he does it so infrequently, he doesn’t realize it results in attention.
It’s unlikely we’ll get definitive answers unless the behavior becomes the focus of research, but that seems unlikely because of its rarity and its unpredictable nature.
Most of the time it appears benign, but Delgado says caretakers should pay close attention if their cats are engaging in it constantly.
“My only concern is that in some of these cats, the behavior appears almost compulsive – like they can’t/won’t stop,” she told PITB. “I also would recommend chatting with a veterinarian to see if they have any thoughts about whether this might indicate any physiological issue.”
Otherwise it appears benign, so if your kitty occasionally breaks out in “prayer,” enjoy the quirk — and good luck trying to get that elusive footage!
The cute calico joined an Algerian imam for evening prayers, climbing up to his shoulder as he led his mosque in worship.
A cat in Algeria reminded an imam that members of her species get scritches when they want them — even in the middle of prayers during Islam’s most sacred month.
Cats are allowed to come and go as they please in mosques, and Muslims view cats favorably, in part because the Prophet Mohammad was fond of them. There’s even a famous story about Mohammad cutting his sleeve off instead of disturbing one of his favorite cats, who was sleeping comfortably on the sleeve when the prophet was getting up for prayer time.
On Wednesday, Imam Sheikh Walid Mehsas was leading tarawih — an evening prayer — when a calico rubbed up against his legs, meowed and then climbed up to his shoulder. She continued rubbing affectionately against him as he continued the prayer:
The prayers were broadcast on a live stream and the moment quickly went viral, with many praising the imam for his patience and love for the cat even as he led an important prayer. (Some comments on the live stream indicated the cat may belong to the imam, or the other way around, although that has not been confirmed.)
After leaning into the microphone as if she was going to join in the evening prayer, kitty thought better of it and hopped down off the imam’s shoulder, opting instead to claim a few more humans as her servants by rubbing up against their legs.
Whether by demanding pets during religious ceremonies, invading the diamond and pitch during baseball and soccer matches, or casually strolling on stage during concerts, cats have shown little regard for human activities and, true to their reputations, have made it clear that cat time takes priority over human time.
Despite that, or perhaps in part because of it, we still love the little stinkers. Perhaps that explains why I can never be mad at Bud, even when he plops himself in front of the screen during crucial moments in video games or tugs down at a book I’m reading, to demand I give him his scritches. I am his humble servant.
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?
Buddy uses one of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal to coax Big Buddy into sharing his food. Resistance is futile.
“Watcha eating, Big Bud? That looks delicious!
So, uh, you’re just gonna sit there eating that in front of me, huh? All that cheesy deliciousness. You know how much I love cheese.
That’s okay, don’t offer me any. I’m just going to sit down in front of you, fix you with my sad, wide-eyed stare, and watch you enjoy those yums.
Yums you won’t even share with your best Little Buddy.
“I’m going to watch you eat every bite, my eyes looking sadder with each passing second you don’t offer me any.”
What happened to ‘mi casa su casa,’ eh? Mi yummies su yummies. I thought we did everything together, but apparently I was mistaken.
Apparently there’s an end to your selflessness, a line of demarcation that separates the good from the truly delicious. And when it comes to the truly delicious, well, you horde it like Smaug the dragon sitting on his gold, indifferent to the feelings of your best Little Buddy, whose mouth is watering.
I mean, sure, I could pad over to my bowl and munch on some leftover kibble from four hours ago, trying not to think of how much it tastes like cardboard as the smell of that cheese wafts through the air.
I could…What’s this? You’re going into the kitchen? Just a few more feet, open the fridge…yes! Cheese is right there and…oh yeah! Get one of the sharp knives, you know I love my cheese sliced into little Buddy-size cubes. Yes! Careful with the knife. Just a little more. Perfect!
Oh man! You’re the best, Big Bud! I never doubted you for a second! Mmmmm! Let’s eat!
Mmmmm mmmm!
Wait. Hold on! Is it me or does the cheese on your plate look more yummy than the cheese on mine? I know you say it’s the same cheese, I just wanna…hey, lemme get my nose in there, I just wanna sniff it. Maybe take a little bite.
Tell ya what. Why don’t you give me some of the cheese from your plate just so I’m sure it’s the same cheese I’m eating?
Well, sure, you could shoo me away, but I’ll just sit here with my big, accusatory eyes, watching you consume every bite until some of that cheese migrates over to my plate…
Better yet, let’s swap plates. That’s the only way I can be sure that my cheese is just as good as your cheese.
Unless… Unless you knew I’d be suspicious of potential cheese inequity and you put the good cheese on my plate, knowing I would demand we switch.
I’m onto your scheme, human! Switch it back! I want my original cheese! Buddy cannot be fooled so easily.”
What are you doing, human? It’s bedtime! Mow mow! You’re supposed to be in this bed and laying down so I can use your face as a pillow, drape myself across you, or burrow comfortably against your side to soak up body heat.
Pain In The Bud 