As the world ends, Manel doesn’t lose sight of his most important priorities: making sure his cat is safe and well-fed.
Shhhh, don’t meow!
With A Quiet Place: Day One and Apocalypse Z: The Beginning Of The End, it looks like the “protagonist and cat surviving the world’s end” thing might be a growing subgenre.
While Day One lit up theaters in spring and early summer, Apocalypse Z is a zombie flick out of Spain, currently sitting atop Amazon’s Prime Video charts as a major crossover hit.
It stars Francisco Ortiz as Manel, the owner of a small solar power business and servant of a talkative cat named Luculo. Manel’s brother-in-law works for the Spanish military, and as reports of a deadly and spreading virus hit the news, his sister relays privileged information from her husband warning Manel to hide during mandatory evacuation and find a way to join the family on the Canary Islands, where Spain’s military and civil leaders have fled.
After weathering the initial wave of the virus by huddling in his apartment in Galicia, Manel seeks out a way to make the 2,400km (about 1,500 mile) journey to safety.
One thing I loved about this movie was Manel’s absolute devotion to Luculo. When he tries to stock up at a store being ransacked by panicked locals, the first thing he does is grab cat food. When he finds a set of wheels at one point — a sporty motorcycle — he straps Luculo’s carrier securely to the back of the seat.
No matter how impractical, no matter how much danger it puts him in, Manel refuses to abandon his pal, even though the little guy can’t keep his mouth shut.
Manel with Luculo the cat in his carrier, strapped to the back of the motorcycle.
While watching Day One, all I could think about was how conveniently silent Sam the cat was, and how dead I’d be trying to survive with Bud in the same situation.
Luculo is incapable of being quiet, although he’s not as loud or insistent as Bud is. He’s named after the Roman statesman and conqueror Lucinius Lucullus, described as “the greatest glutton of antiquity, who stunned Rome with his lavish feasts” and his dedication to bringing recipes for the tastiest dishes from the provinces back to the capital.
“He came, he ate, he conquered” might be an appropriate motto for Lucullus, and his feline namesake is similarly food-obsessed, often seen scarfing down yums as if the apocalypse is just a minor obstacle between meals.
Manel refuses to leave his buddy behind, going to great lengths to keep Luculo safe as the world goes to hell around them.
Apocalypse Z isn’t a walk in the park, given the genre, but it’s significantly less gory than The Walking Dead, The Last of Us or even Zombieland. The film’s infected are Danny Boyle-style zombies, the terrifyingly fast baddies from 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, rather than the slow shufflers of Romero-influenced productions. Accordingly, they’re much more dangerous and enable more intense action sequences.
Finally, because this is a cat blog and I’ll most certainly get emails and comments if I don’t address the tabby in the room: nothing terrible happens to Luculo. His greatest ordeal is having too many admirers, who are shocked to see a guy who’s survived so long with his pet cat.
Luculo does quite a bit of hissing at the zombies, who stand between him and his beloved yums.
Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End is the first part of a bigger story, as the title suggests. It rocketed to the top as the most-streamed movie in more than 90 countries, so we should be hearing news about a sequel soon.
If you’re a fan of genre movies and escapism, Apocalypse Z is a fun way to spend a few hours.
Apocalypse Z is available now to stream on Amazon Prime Video. The stream will default to an overdubbed version, but we highly recommend enabling English subtitles and switching the audio track to its original Spanish.
When the abandoned garage she was sheltering in caught fire on a cold day in 1996, Scarlett the cat was determined to get all five of her babies to safety.
The night of March 30, 1996, was unseasonably cold, and as temperatures dipped below freezing, a young cat and her litter of five found shelter in an abandoned garage in Brooklyn.
Unfortunately for them a few humans had the same idea, huddling for warmth in the garage as they smoked crack.
Prodigy’s “Firestarter” was at the top of the charts at the time, an apt soundtrack for what would happen next — the crack-addled humans started a fire that spread quickly and took the young feline mother by surprise.
That momma, who would later be named Scarlett, scooped up one of her kittens and brought it to safety before immediately heading for the flames again.
Scarlett, badly burned and bandaged, with her kittens at the North Shore Animal League. Credit: North Shore Animal League
FDNY firefighter David Giannelli was among the first responders at the engulfed garage and realized the small calico was rescuing her babies, running back into the flames to carry them out one by one.
When Scarlett had retrieved the last kitten, Giannelli watched her as she nuzzled all five of them to count them because she could no longer see — her eyes were sealed with burns and blisters.
Satisfied that her kittens were out of harm’s way, Scarlett collapsed.
She paid a heavy toll for her actions. Her whiskers and the fur on her face was singed off, her ears were disfigured and she nearly died from smoke inhalation.
Giannelli brought the unconscious cat and her babies to New York’s North Shore Animal League, where veterinarians saved her life and put her on a path to recovery while also housing her with her beloved kittens.
Four of Scarlett’s kittens survived and were adopted out in pairs. Scarlett herself was adopted by New Yorker Karen Wellen, who was chosen out of thousands of applicants who wrote to the shelter. Wellen, who had suffered a medical emergency of her own, was specifically looking to adopt a special needs cat.
Scarlett’s kittens went to nearby families, who kept in touch with Wellen and scheduled reunions between her and the kittens she risked her life for.
“This cat is definitely the queen of the house,” Wellen told a TV news crew during a segment about Scarlett in the late 90s. “Whatever she wants is hers.”
Scarlett was a house cat for the rest of her life, living comfortably until she passed away on Oct. 11, 2008, at 13 years old.
Wellen with Scarlett.
Little Scarlett’s story is not only an example of extraordinary bravery, it’s testament to how much mother cats love their kittens and should give us pause before we separate mothers from their babies too early. The absolute minimum is eight weeks, but many shelters will only allow kittens to go home with adopters at 12 weeks old or older, which they say gives them enough time with their mothers and siblings to learn crucial social skills, like sharing, not playing too rough, and proper self-grooming.
In recent years, many shelters and rescues have enacted policies of requiring that kittens are adopted in pairs. Even when they’ve got loving homes with humans who dote on them and provide them with plenty of attention, having another kitten around to grow with and learn from has a huge positive effect on a young cat’s development.
Buddy’s my first cat, as regular readers of PITB know, and if I could do it all over again, I’d have adopted one of his litter mates too. And who knows? Maybe in the future we’ll learn that keeping feline families together is optimal. Scarlett is testament to the fact that mother cats will sacrifice their own lives to save their babies. If that’s not love, what is?
From the military camps where they stop mice from wreaking havoc to social media where they help raise money, Ukraine’s felines are enduring the war alongside their people.
Roman Sinicyn and his men were living in an abandoned house in a destroyed village for a month.
Although each of the Ukrainian soldiers contributed to their survival and fought the Russians, perhaps their biggest hero was Syrsky the Cat.
The fearless feline evicted a rodent infestation in the platoon’s temporary headquarters, hunting the mice mercilessly as his humans engaged in firefights with invading Russians. By day Syrsky made the soldiers’ temporary lodgings livable and by night he soothed their trauma with healing purrs.
The cheese-loving moggie’s moniker is a double-entendre: he’s named for Ukrainian Army Land Forces Commander Oleksandr Syrsky, and for the Ukrainian word for cheese, syr.
A new story from Politico EU details the important role of felines as the costly war enters its third year. Russian missiles, bombs and artillery have flattened villages, sending civilians fleeing and often separating them from their families and their pets.
The bewildered cats and dogs, accustomed to easy lives indoors, are suddenly thrust into a world of death, explosions, mine fields and other horrors.
As the war endured past its early phases, former pets began seeking out humans where they could find them — in military camps and in the rodent-infested trenches where they hunkered down against the constant thunderclaps of Russian artillery.
During peak war season in the summer, Vladimir Putin’s bedraggled military fires up to 20,000 artillery rounds a day according to the Associated Press, with that number dipping to “only” 7,000 per day as the war machine slows in brutally cold Slavic winters.
Oleksandr Liashuk, a Ukrainian soldier, with his cat Shaybyk. Credit: Oleksandr Liashuk
Just like they did 10,000 years ago when they first domesticated themselves, cats proved their worth by chasing out mice and rats, but this time they didn’t have to convince humans to allow them to stick around. They were welcomed with open arms and hands bearing snacks, serving as hunters and therapy animals to men enduring a living hell.
“When this scared little creature comes to you, seeking protection, how could you say no? We are strong, so we protect weaker beings, who got into the same awful circumstances as we did, just because Russians showed up on our land,” Oleksandr Yabchanka, a Ukrainian medic, told Politico.
It’s amazing how a return to primitive circumstances has so quickly pushed humans back toward reliance on animals who made it possible for our species to survive in the first place.
Without dogs, early hunter-gatherers would have been much worse off on the hunt and their groups would have been much more susceptible to ambush when they slept. Indigenous societies eking out existences on the tundra would have no reliable animals to pull sleds. Without oxen to pull plows, farmers wouldn’t be able to produce enough food for civilization to thrive and grow.
And the people of nascent human settlements, taking the first great leap forward for our species with the invention of agriculture, would have starved out over long winters as mice and rats gnawed away at their food stores — if not for cats, our furry friends.
In 2024 humans can’t live without cats once again. Felines patrol Ukraine’s World War I style bunkers, killing hordes of mice. Mice that otherwise devour MREs, chew through comm link and power wires, damage weapons and make soldiers miserable.
A Ukrainian soldier with a stray kitten. Credit: Ukraine Ministry of Defense
Some cats become unofficial unit mascots and good luck charms, but many others are claimed by individual soldiers who find normalcy and relief in their company.
One soldier/cat pair are viral sensations thanks to videos of the alert cat riding along with his human, scanning the terrain ahead. Another story detailed a patrol whose men just avoided an ambush thanks to their company’s cat, who spotted the enemy first and frantically warned that something was wrong.
In that way, cats are serving the propaganda effort as well, helping the public to connect to the men and women defending them.
Military cats have become signals for Ukrainians to rally around, but Russians are doing it too. Russia is a famously cat-loving country, and Putin’s government has latched onto stories about the felines accompanying his men into battle — an effort that Politico notes is meant to humanize Russian soldiers and create the impression that it values them even as it continues to conscript unwilling civilians and ship them to the front line “meat grinders” with a few weeks’ worth of training, meager supplies and minimal ammunition for their rifles.
In that respect, the soldiers of Ukraine and Russia have at least two things in common — they love their feline companions, and they’re enduring hell as well as a high risk of death because of one small man’s delusions of greatness and legacy. Western media tends to ignore the humanity of Russian conscripts, and the pro-Ukrainian side of the internet calls them “orcs,” painting them as the mindless and disposable drones of a bloodthirsty dictator.
But they’re human too, with their own hopes and fears, and mothers back home worrying about them. They don’t want to be there. It seems fanciful to imagine Russians refusing to continue the invasion when Putin has squads behind the front lines with guns pointed at his own men to prevent them from deserting or refusing to fight. But maybe the men in the trenches can come together over shared interest and shared love of cats, and help put an end to three years of misery.
No. 10 Downing Street’s chief mouser shows he’s capable of defending his home from all manner of animal intruders.
Larry the Cat has been the official chief mouser at the UK’s prime minister’s home since 2011.
Now he should be bestowed with a new title — chief foxer.
The famous tabby was lounging guarding No. 10 Downing Street on a recent evening when a fox approached the property. Larry slow-walked the canid intruder back to an adjacent garden, but wasn’t satisfied when the fox lingered, so he laid the smacketh down to show foxy who was boss.
The thick-headed vulpine interloper tried a third time to get closer to the house, but Larry wasn’t having it.
The encounter was a reminder that Larry can handle business when sufficiently motivated.
Larry is a former stray rescued by London’s Battersea Dogs and Cats and was four years old when he got the job on the strength of the shelter’s claim that he was an excellent hunter who would solve No. 10’s rodent problem. Bringing in a capable kitty became a priority in 2011 when the rats on site became so bold, they’d walk right past reporters and TV cameras outside the prime minister’s official residence and office.
The long-tenured mouser got a bad rep in his early days, when critics complained he “does little besides sleep” and spend time with his “lady friend,” Maisie, while also depositing hair on Prime Minister David Cameron’s suits.
But it’s Larry who’s had the last laugh as his tenure has outlast those of three prime ministers — Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. He’s now on his fourth PM, Liz Truss.
According to his official profile on the UK government’s website, “Larry spends his days greeting guests to the house, inspecting security defences and testing antique furniture for napping quality. His day-to-day responsibilities also include contemplating a solution to the mouse occupancy of the house. Larry says this is still ‘in tactical planning stage.'”
Larry the Cat. Credit: 10 Downing St.
Larry the Cat. Credit: 10 Downing St.
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron play with a cat named “Larry” at 10 Downing Street in London, England, May 25, 2011. Larry was adopted by 10 Downing to handle rodents. Liz Suggs holds the cat. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Pain In The Bud 