Tag: news

Powerful Politicians Come And Go, Scandals Erupt And Fade, And Larry The Cat Remains

As Larry marks 15 years as the chief mouser in the UK’s seat of power, No. 10 Downing Street, Britain’s most famous feline is a constant amid rapid change.

At first it didn’t look as if Larry the Cat’s tenure would last long.

The striking white and tabby mix came highly recommended from Battersea Cats and Dogs, a London shelter whose staff said he was one of their most skilled little hunters. Larry, they said, would adjust well to the busy surroundings of the prime minister’s office and residence.

Adjust he did, but not in the way then-Prime Minister David Cameron, No. 10’s staff, and the UK press thought he would. Larry began his tenure by taking long naps on the residence’s front windowsill, paying frequent visits to his “lady friend” Maisie — a mouser living in another government building several doors down — and establishing a territorial rivalry with Palmerston, the Foreign Office’s mascot and mouser.

“In a separate development, it can be revealed that Larry has a girlfriend,” a droll BBC report from 2011 confirmed, while reporting on a cat-themed quiz night fundraiser at No. 10 to ensure the chief mouser’s yums cupboard remained stocked. “Maisie, a cat who lives at the nearby St James’ Park keeper’s cottage, has struck up a relationship with Larry, a spokesman for the Royal Parks has confirmed.

“There is, though, no prospect of kittens, as Larry went under the knife some time ago,” the report continued, speculating that the chief mouser’s love life could explain “why Larry spends most evenings out – and most days fast asleep in 10 Downing Street.”

It didn’t take long for the press to begin running tongue-in-cheek stories about Larry failing to deliver on promises just like every other political animal, and for a while it looked like No. 10 would need another chief rodent exterminator.

But then Larry began covering himself in glory by defending his new domicile not only from rats and mice, but also from a fox, territorial incursions by Palmerston, ill-intentioned politicians and other undesirables.

As the years passed, Larry’s legend grew. He outlasted Cameron, then Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, who admitted she was a dog person and wasn’t fond of Larry, even denying him the use of her office chair for naps. Then there was Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer.

Starmer is Larry’s sixth prime minister, and no one will be surprised if his tenure ends while Larry’s endures. Meanwhile, Palmerston was “retired” to the countryside and only recently returned to politics when he accompanied his human, Andrew Murdoch, to Bermuda when the latter was appointed governor there. Such is the price of incurring Larry’s wrath.

Now at 18 years old, with 15 years as chief mouser under his collar, Larry represents something rare in modern politics: stability and predictability. With the passing of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, illness and scandal in the royal family, and the usual ephemeral nature of UK politics, Larry has become more important than ever as the stalwart in the country’s seat of power.

Larry’s given the cold shoulder to Irish and Scottish politicians, nuzzled up for scritches from former US President Barack Obama, and forced President Donald Trump to wait before departing No. 10 while taking refuge from the rain under the president’s limo. The famous feline rarely leaves the public guessing when it comes to his thoughts on visiting political figures.

He’s “the most miserable animal you’ll ever meet,” a snubbed Ian Murray, the Scottish Secretary, said after Larry refused to pose for photographs with him. (Murray, it should be noted, was relieved of his post in September, and now holds the lofty title of minister for “culture, media and sport.” Perhaps he and Palmerston can commiserate.)

But that’s part of Larry’s appeal. The chief mouser’s unimpressed reaction to powerful figures has endured him to the public, who shower him with fan mail, treats and toys.

His unintentionally comedic adventures and ability to nap under any circumstances won him the affection of the notoriously fickle UK press, who enjoy watching, photographing and writing about his antics while waiting for the less popular humans inside to update them on the big news of the day.

That’s not hyperbole, by the way: a 2024 Ipsos poll found Larry is more popular than every prime minister to share his home, and the margins aren’t even close.

It also hasn’t escaped the notice of the press that Larry “rules the roost,” and has attentive staff who open the door at No. 10 any time he wants to go in or out. The famous door is actually a blast-proof, steel replica of the wooden original, custom manufactured after the IRA fired a mortar at the residence in 1991. Thus there’s no cat flap, and staff monitoring the door from inside open it as soon as the building’s most enduring resident decides he wants back in.

The prime minister may be the UK’s most powerful political figure on paper, but Larry’s tenure, run of the place, array of servants and adoring fans all prove he’s the real power at No. 10.

Now Larry’s legend will expand even further as the UK’s Channel 4 has commissioned a documentary series on cats from writer-comedian David Baddiel. The series, which is currently filming, will feature Larry in one of its episodes.

Happy 18th birthday, Larry! We hope you see many more years filled with treats, adventures, historic furniture to nap on, and politicians to push around. And if you achieve world peace while you’re at it, no one would be surprised.

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons/UK government

Beloved Bodega Cat Killed By Autonomous Taxi In San Francisco

In disrupting another industry, AI has moved into a realm where its use has physical consequences.

I’d planned on taking a break and easing up on posts after the glut of cat-related news the past few days, but this story is disturbing, timely, and sadly we’ll almost certainly hear about more of these incidents in the near future.

KitKat, a nine-year-old tabby who called Randa’s Liquor Store in San Francisco’s Mission District home, was killed late Monday night by a vehicle owned by Waymo, an autonomous ride-hailing service.

Witnesses said they saw the Waymo hit the cat and pulled him out from under the self-driving car. They say KitKat was sitting on the sidewalk at the time. It’s not clear if the Waymo vehicle drove up onto the sidewalk or if its bumper was the impact point.

A witness who filed a report with 311 via smartphone said the Waymo vehicle “did not even try to stop.” The car continued on to its next pickup.

Several people rushed the injured tabby to a 24-hour emergency veterinary clinic, but his injuries were too severe and he died five minutes before his human arrived.

KitKat outside Randa’s Market. Credit: Randa’s Market Instagram

KitKat was extremely popular with people in the neighborhood, patrons of the neighboring bar and sandwich shop, and passersby. They described him as a feline who liked to patrol the sidewalk and pop into the bar and sandwich shop to “supervise,” making sure all was well in his little realm.

“Everyone’s heartbroken,” Jessica Chapdelaine, who tends bar next door and lives in an apartment above the liquor store, told Mission Local. “He’s the baby. He was everyone’s best friend and he was just the sweetest boy.”

Waymo didn’t respond to requests for comment by Mission Local, TheSFist and other media. The Google-owned company had not addressed the incident on its website’s press page, nor on its X account despite several users bringing it up, as of Thursday morning.

“You can’t even drive in the dark in normal weather without killing a cat,” one user wrote, while others weren’t nearly as diplomatic.

The San Francisco Standard provides a bit of context on the autonomous vehicle issue in California:

“The state had logged 884 autonomous vehicle collision reports as of Friday, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles (opens in new tab). A dog was struck and killed by a Waymo in Bernal Heights in 2023. A week later, a Labrador survived getting hit by a Cruise self-driving car; the company no longer tests its cars in San Francisco.”

On the other hand, there have been several dramatic incidents involving autonomous vehicles that have successfully avoided collisions with other cars, people and animals, even when given a fraction of a second to respond. In an incident in LA from earlier this year, a home security camera caught footage of a Waymo stopping instantly to avoid a dog that ran out into the street directly in the car’s path:

A human driver almost certainly could not make a safe decision in that time interval, but a machine can confirm there is no car immediately behind it and execute the stop within a few milliseconds.

Still, as more ride hailing services roll out autonomous fleets and expand into more cities — as the major players in the still-developing industry are already doing — this will become more of an issue. Waymo operates fleets in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin (TX) and Atlanta, and plans to roll out its service in Miami and Washington, D.C., in the near future.

The obvious question is whether AI-driven vehicles are safer than cars with people behind the wheel, for drivers and pedestrians. The answer seems to be yes, especially as the technology improves. Machines don’t text while driving, don’t get distracted fiddling with radios and don’t get behind the wheel after drinking. Sensors and software have improved dramatically in just a few years.

But that won’t be enough. There’s a psychological hurdle in giving up control. It’s the same reason why so many people are terrified of flying even though we’re statistically much more likely to die in car collisions. When you’re behind the wheel, you have control over your fate — or the illusion of control, anyway.

A close-up shot of hardware and some of the sensors on the Jaguar I-PACE Waymo autonomous vehicle. Credit: Waymo

Parallel to the questions about safety are concerns about whether any corporation should be permitted to put driverless cars on the road, especially when the companies with the resources to commit to a major venture like this are the familiar Big Tech conglomerates run by the same handful of tech oligarchs.

Should they be allowed to wipe out yet another industry, taking away work from people who drive taxis or for rideshare companies? Do we need the government to step in and place some guiderails on tech that has developed at an unprecedented pace and threatens to upend huge swaths of society? Should we demand a much more robust regulatory process and risk falling behind other countries in the AI race?

These are questions we’ll all have to grapple with, and there are no easy answers.

RIP KitKat.

All images of KitKat credit: Randa’s Market/Instagram



Did A School Really Go Into Lockdown After A Teacher Confused A Chonky Cat For A Mountain Lion?

The latest viral cat story offers a lesson in healthy skepticism in today’s news environment.

Viral news accounts on social media and less scrupulous news sites have been buzzing this week about a school lockdown in Moses Lake, Washington, which was reportedly caused by a teacher confusing a particularly fat cat for a puma.

I saw red flags immediately while reading the story. While it did give a specific location, it was suspiciously devoid of other details, and the wording on all the posts and stories was dubiously similar. Additionally, a Google news search doesn’t turn up anything recent from reputable press.

Then there’s the photo, which looks a little too good to be true.

This photo is a Getty stock image and does not depict the domestic cat in the school lockdown story, despite accompanying it in dozens of news posts.

So did a school really go into lockdown after a case of mistaken feline identity?

Yes, but it happened in November of 2023, and the photo of the obese cat making the rounds in stories this week does not depict the cat in question. The original story was published by a local news site on Nov. 22, 2023, and says the school went into lockdown at 10:30 that morning, but was quickly lifted after staff confirmed there was no puma stalking the school grounds.

“…educators soon learned that the mountain lion was in fact, a “fat cat eating a rat,” according to the school memo to parents. 

‘While we take all reports seriously, this was the first report we’ve ever had of this nature,’ the school wrote in a statement. 

Despite the benign nature of it all, safety measures resumed to safeguard students and staff. Classes resumed as normal after a short period of time. “

As for the photo, the particularly rotund moggie’s image is a stock photo from Getty. It was used in a story about feline obesity in 2017 and an April 2018 story from the New York Daily News about public outrage in Jefferson, Iowa, where the police were shooting feral cats instead of dispatching animal control or working with local shelters.

Since the image is from a photo agency and predates the original story about the Washington school lockdown by at least six years, we can rule it out as an image of the feline mistaken for a mountain lion while settling down to a feast of fresh rat.

A deceptive image used to promote the story on Facebook.

So what happened here, and why are so many news sites and channels reporting this incident as if it just happened, accompanied by a deceptive photo that is not credited to Getty?

It’s classic clickbait. That is to say, some administrator or editor saw the old story picking up traffic or noticed a blip in certain search strings, and republished the story as if it’s new while omitting the original date.

Others noticed and followed suit to get the clicks while the getting’s good, fighting over the scraps that fall from the Zuckerbergian table in the form of ad revenue. The story is simple, sharable, has been paired with an amusing image, and is exactly the sort of thing people love to post and comment on via social media.

It’s a reminder to all of us to be skeptical about what we read, and to never take anything on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok et al at face value. In fact, it’s best to ignore anything on those platforms presented as news or fact. Everyone’s got their own preferences, but here at Casa de Buddy, we like the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Guardian, Associated Press, al Jazeera, the BBC, and aggregators like RealClearPolitics.

That doesn’t mean they’re above reproach or that everything they produce is a sparkling example of journalism, but they’re institutions that operate under the traditional rules, staffed by professionals who take pride in trying to get stories right. I’ll take that any day over a random Facebook account run by some shady guy in Macedonia or Belarus, who will post anything as “news” as long as it brings him clicks and ad revenue.

Vigilante Mob Targets Wrong House While Looking For Serial Cat Killer, Plus: Maine Coon Renders Buddy Liliputian!

The gathering, originally billed as a vigil, turned violent when the mob began breaking windows, tore down part of a fence, and pepper sprayed a father who tried to shield his children from the crowd’s wrath.

A mob of protesters, enraged by the actions of an accused cat killer, terrorized an innocent family on Sunday night.

The crowd gathered in Santa Ana, Calif., for what was billed as a vigil for the slain cats and a condemnation of their alleged killer, 45-year-old Alejandro Oliveros Acosta. The Santa Ana man was arrested last week and charged with felony cruelty to animals after “dozens” of felines in the neighborhood disappeared under suspicious circumstances, per police.

With emotions running high, the crowd followed its more unruly members to a house they mistakenly identified as Acosta’s. The homeowner said he was related to Acosta’s wife but didn’t know anything about the cat killings until Acosta was arrested. He told the protesters he hadn’t seen Acosta since the arrest and asked them to calm down, but they broke windows, attacked him with pepper spray and terrorized children living there.

“The peaceful protesting wasn’t so peaceful. They’re scaring kids here. It’s scaring the whole family. There are kids, seven kids in this house. Two little babies, one that is autistic,” the man told KTTV. “You know, breaking our fences… pepper spraying us for no reason. If you did what you did, I didn’t know anything about it. You know, when we found out [about the cat murders] we were shocked.”

It took Santa Ana police an hour to respond, according to multiple news reports. Even after the police told the protesters that they had the wrong house and were breaking the law, the mob refused to leave and accused the victims of being complicit in Acosta’s alleged crimes. Officers had to manually break up the crowd by physically removing individual protesters.

On Monday, police took the unusual step of publicly commenting on the fallout from Acosta’s arrest, pleading with people to “allow the judicial process to take its course.”

“I don’t think it needs to be like this. I think it should have remained a vigil,” one protest participant told KTTV, a Fox affiliate in Los Angeles. “I knew it’d be a protest, but I didn’t think it would get violent. I don’t think anybody should be touching property.”

Needless to say, we don’t need people making the animal welfare community look like a bunch of lunatics, and vigilante “justice” is wrong. As humans, we’re at our worst when we engage in mob behavior, which obliterates reason, civility and empathy.

Although a lot of people seem to have difficulty with this simple concept nowadays, everyone is entitled to due process, and we’re a nation of laws where alleged crimes are litigated in court, not on the street, on front lawns or online.

Zeus the mighty, meowing from atop Olympus

A cat named Zeus has been turning heads lately, and for good reason: he’s huge even by Maine Coon standards.

Zeus is fluffy, imposing, and so big that he can help himself to food left on a counter just by getting up on his hind legs.

At almost 30 pounds, he’s practically three Buddies in mass. I texted a photo of Zeus to Buddy, and Bud responded with a photo of his own, claiming he’d just finished a grueling bench press session:

Bud hitting the gym to pump iron and stuff.

Hmmm.

Something tells me Buddy’s going to complain that I didn’t bestow him with the name of a Greek god. Is there a diminutive, glib deity to be found in the Olympian pantheon?

‘Swift And Lethal’: Cats Have No Defense Against Bird Flu, And It Keeps Showing Up In Their Food

Bird flu is killing cats domestic and wild, in captivity and in nature. Experts are sounding the alarm, warning people not to feed their cats raw food, allow them to drink milk, or let them roam outside where they can easily catch the virus by going after small prey.

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, the clinical name for bird flu, is a danger to all animals, but for cats it’s a virtual death sentence.

Only a handful have survived infection thanks primarily to early diagnosis, intervention and round-the-clock veterinary care. In the vast majority of cases, the virus burns through its feline victims in three or four days.

Bird flu has become even more deadly for felines of late. Of the 126 domestic cats killed by H5N1 since 2022, according to the US Department of Agriculture, half of them have have died in 2025 — and it’s only been three months.

Notably, that total doesn’t include captive wild cats and big cats, such as the 20 pumas, bobcats, tigers and other felids who succumbed to the virus at the Wild Felid Advocacy Center, a sanctuary in Washington state. Nor does it include cats living in the wild, like two pumas in the same state that died in December.

To appreciate the true scope of the problem, the more illuminating statistic may be 82 million, which is the number of chickens “culled” — killed — in the US since 2022 because they were infected or raised at facilities where other birds tested positive for the virus.

Factory farming compounds the matter: more than 1.6 million egg-laying hens and 337,000 “pullets” — chickens less than a year old — were “depopulated” at a single facility in Texas last year. As staggering as those numbers are, Texas’s Department of Agriculture noted the figure merely “accounts for approximately 3.6% of the company’s total flock.”

Per the USDA:

“To provide context on the overall size of the U.S. poultry flock, there are more than 378.5 million egg-laying chickens in the United States. In 2023, more than 9.4 billion broiler chickens and 218 million turkeys were processed in the United States.”

If there ever was an example of putting too many eggs in one basket, this is it. American food supplies are vulnerable with so much concentrated in the hands of so few companies, a lesson the general public is learning the hard way now after eggs peaked at record prices last month. Things have cooled off a bit since then, but shoppers aren’t getting any benefit as grocery chains continue to charge a premium: the nationwide average for a dozen eggs was $5.90 in February, but stores in some states are still charging $10 or more.

It also raises questions about the sustainability and ethics of eating animals. Humans slaughter more than 75 billion chickens every year, and projections indicate there will be three billion more of us by the mid-2080s.

Meat from infected chickens can still end up in your cat’s bowl

Media reports about culling give the impression that those birds are removed from the food chain, but that’s not entirely true. The pet food industry has always cut corners by harvesting meat not fit for human consumption, a category that includes everything from the carcasses of sick animals, to “meat by-products” that can include beaks, hooves, eyes, hearts and other organs.

So while the culled chickens won’t show up in shrink wrap at the grocery store, they are making it into the pet food supply chain. Most pet food is “rendered,” cooked at such high temperatures that potential pathogens have been destroyed.

But an increasingly bigger slice of the market has been claimed by companies selling “premium” raw food — and that’s been the primary infection vector for domestic cats, particularly indoor cats who otherwise would have little or no exposure to the virus. (Cats who spend time outdoors can catch bird flu by preying on infected animals, just as wild cats do, and barn cats have caught it by drinking the milk of infected cattle.)

Cats are mostly lactose intolerant, and should not be given cow’s milk, despite the common misconception that it’s healthy for them.

“The animals that were depopulated could potentially have ended up in the food chain for pets,” Laura Goodman, an assistant professor at Cornell University’s Baker Institute for Animal Health, told NBC News. “It’s not uncommon for substandard meat to end up in the pet food chain.”

That’s what happened to Tim Hanson’s beloved cat, Kira, who died in February after eating raw food from a company called Wild Coast. The company has recalled the product, Boneless Free Range Chicken Recipe. It’s one of four recalls in the last month alone.

Hudson is suing Wild Coast for the veterinary bills — about $8,000 — and said he was devastated that Kira, whom he called “the happiest cat,” is gone. He said he thought he was doing right by her by feeding her the expensive raw food, but now urges people to avoid feeding their cats raw food at all costs.

“I don’t want any more cats dying,” he said. “Hopefully people can learn from Kira’s passing.”

Top image via Pexels. All other images via Wikimedia Commons