Shelters are full of felines who need forever homes, and National Cat Day was founded to make sure they’re not forgotten.
The number of “cat days” keeps growing, with separate dates for national and international cat days, dates honoring black cats, tabbies, calicos and tortoiseshells, and more.
But National Cat Day is one of the OGs, beginning 21 years ago, and it’s endorsed by the ASPCA. The main purpose of National Cat Day, per its founders, is to help homeless kitties find forever homes by inspiring people to adopt.
So we’ll say what we always do: shelters are full of little buddies who are just as lovable and deserving as Little Buddy himself, and all they need is a home, some love and patience to help them feel secure. Once they know they’re safe and loved, their personalities shine through.
If you like feline-centric fiction, Mollie Hunt released her 12th Crazy Cat Lady Mystery novel today. It’s called Cold Case Cat and you can read more about it here.
Meanwhile over at Catwoods, Leah writes about — and includes great photos of — her “Halloween cat,” Shelley. She also revisits the Facebook hoax posts we wrote about a few weeks ago, in which users claim the big cat was spotted in places as varied as Louisiana’s bayou, the Houston region, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Finally, the satirists at McSweeney’s have a new post titled “A Brief Questionnaire Before You Adopt This Rescue Cat,” which takes aim at overzealous shelter/rescue operators who make the process of child adoption look easy by comparison, and are constantly at capacity because they’ve made perfect the enemy of good.
Wanna adopt this cat? Hand over a list of every person you associate with along with their addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers, prepare for a 30-day in-home evaluation by a shelter staffer, and agree to feed kitty a diet of sushi-grade tuna!
Credit: Denitsa Kireva/Pexels
While it seems outlandish, I encountered some contracts that were only slightly less onerous before I adopted Bud, and it’s obviously the McSweeney’s team has too.
Now I understand a bit more why some shelter staff are so cautious. They see some of the worst behavior, after all, including people who return cats because they’re too affectionate, animal abuse cases, and cats on death’s door because their humans ignored decades of research and tried to turn their obligate carnivore pets into vegans.
They want to make sure the cats go to good homes, which is admirable, but they shouldn’t overlook potential adopters who are well-intentioned and looking for a little pal.
The purveyors of the deceptive posts want you to click, share and argue with other users about the veracity of the photos.
Not only is he the rarest puma in existence, he’s more well-traveled than most humans.
The mountain lion in question has a black coat, unprecedented for his species, and has been popping up all over Facebook. He’s photographed from the passenger seat of a truck cab, his tail in an unbothered curl, crouched amid the brush near a rural road.
Some posters claim they spotted the formidable feline in Mississippi. Others attribute the image to a sister-in-law who lives near Houston or a daughter in Charleston. A user in Louisiana claimed they took the photograph near the bayou, while another places the cat in Wyoming and claims he’s the first-ever documented “shadow cougar.” (Our friend Leah of Catwoods drew our attention to the images last week after seeing posts placing the cat in the south.)
In case it isn’t obvious, all the claims are full of it.
There is no such thing as a melanistic (black) mountain lion, and the big cat in the photo has the physical characteristics of a leopard, an animal that is not native to this hemisphere, let alone this continent.
The real story here is that Facebook remains a fountain of misinformation and Meta (its parent company) doesn’t care. Unscrupulous users will do anything to get attention and the clicks that come with it, and the average Facebook user is happy to indulge them, driving clicks by resharing the hoax content and juicing its algorithmic value by engaging in endless arguments with fellow users about the veracity and provenance of the photos.
Alleged big cat sightings are perfect for this sort of thing because they pique people’s natural curiosity, there’s a whiff of danger — especially when the poster claims the animal was spotted locally — and most people aren’t aware of telltale differences between cat species.
In many ways, the blurrier and more indeterminate the photo, the better: like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, the idea of phantom cats is most fertile in the imagination.
These days you don’t even need a photo to get in on the click-baiting action. I asked Gemini to create an image of a jaguar-like big cat walking along a rural road at night, and this is what the LLM gave me:
In the image prompt, I asked it to make it look like an amateur photo taken with a midrange smartphone camera, but if we really wanted to get artistic, it’s simple enough to add noise, maybe some motion blur and digital artefacts to the image to make it look more like an authentically crappy, rushed shot of an unexpected animal.
Here’s the result of some simple efforts to en-crapify the “photo” further:
To give the image urgency and encourage people to engage with it, I can make it local and claim it was recent. Errors of grammar, spelling and punctuation add a nice seasoning of authenticity, along for feigned concern for others as the reason for sharing:
“Folks – just wanted to tell ya’ll to mind your pets an make sure of you’re surroundings bc theres a big cat on the lose!! my cousins GF took thus friday nite on Route 9 a few mile’s south of Dennies. a real honest to goodness black panther! BE SAFE!!!”
There’s a dangerous animal on the loose in your area! You know what you have to do: share it so others can bring their pets safely inside and stop their kids from playing outdoors, at least until it looks like the predator has moved on.
It’s your duty as a good American!
Since it doesn’t seem to matter if a quick reverse image search can settle the question of where an image came from, it’ll be interesting to see if anyone lifts the above image and text.
At the very least, maybe a few people who do think to run a search will find their way here, read about the hoax, and save themselves from getting drawn into online debates about the existence of cryptid cats.
It’s the first time a mountain lion has been spotted in New York since 2011. Authorities aren’t sure if the cat is an escaped — and illegal — pet, or if it made an epic journey from the west coast.
For the first time in 14 years, there’s a puma on the loose in New York.
The wild cat was spotted on a Rochester woman’s Ring doorbell camera padding along the sidewalk in front of her home at about 4 am on Wednesday morning.
A representative from the state Department of Environmental Conservation cautiously said the agency is working on confirming the species of cat in the footage.
But the feline’s size, gait and tail are dead giveaways, despite the dark footage and fleeting glimpse: it’s a puma.
In the brief clip, the wild feline walks past a tree, giving the DEC an important context clue. Michael Palermo, a wildlife manager with the department, said his team measured the tree, allowing them to closely estimate the animal’s size by comparing the footage to their measurements.
“If, in fact, it is some large cat, we would want to question, how did it get here? It’s not impossible for a wild cougar to travel to New York; it’s happened before,” Palermo said. “Was it a captive one that may have been legal as a licensed facility, and if so, did it escape? We still need to do some work to verify anything like that.”
While pumas were once native to New York and thrived in the forested mountains of regions like the Catskills (“cat creek” in Dutch), the last verified sighting in New York was in 2011. That cougar crossed through the Empire State after an epic journey from the west coast, a stronghold for the species.
Some people who posted to a Rochester community group on Facebook are already freaking out, and pumas are widely misunderstood, so it’s important to note the facts:
Pumas are not African lions, are not closely related to them and do not behave like them
They’re not aggressive toward people. In fact, they try to stay away from humans and will go out of their way to avoid confrontation
The exceptions are when people threaten a puma’s cubs or corner the animal, giving it no opportunity to escape
Americans are 150 times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a puma. There are only 27 reported cases of people killed by pumas in more than a century. By contrast, an estimated 4,300 to 10,000 Americans have been killed by dogs in that same time span. (Higher estimates include people who did not die immediately from dog bites, and people who died of infections or complications from bites.)
While some people and media reports erroneously call pumas “big cats,” they are not members of the panthera genus. They are felines more closely related to domestic cats and small wildcats. Accordingly, pumas can purr and meow, but they cannot roar
Pumas are also known as mountain lions, cougars, panthers, painters, screamers, catamounts, pangui, onca parda, cuguacuarana, katalgar, chimbica, shunta-haska, fire cats, California lions, ghost cats, and red tigers, among many other names.
In fact, the species has more names than any other animal. That’s because it’s adaptable with a historically wide and varied range. There are some 40 names for pumas in English and more than 80 in Spanish, Portuguese and the languages of indigenous Native American tribes.
The species is officially known as puma concolor, or “puma of one color” thanks to its typically biege fur that, unlike tigers, jaguars, leopards and even house cats, does not have stripes, spots or rosettes.
While it’s extremely unlikely the mystery cougar would pose a threat to people, Rochester police — who have fielded several reports of sightings in recent days — advise locals to keep their pets indoors and to exercise caution while walking their dogs.
Update: The DEC has officially confirmed the cat is a puma, although it was obvious from the footage.
In the meantime, a Rochester man says he saw the wild cat — and people running away from it — on Wednesday night.
Although that sighting has not been substantiated by authorities, it does illustrate the need to educate the public about these animals.
“You know, a mountain lion, it be ‘rawr.’ They be crawling and… serious,” Curtis Jones told WHAM, an ABC affiliate in Rochester.
“I am going to keep this bat right here, man, just in case,” he told a TV reporter. “I am going to protect us, I ain’t going to let nothing happen to us, nothing. OK?”
Let’s hope common sense somehow finds its way into the Facebook algorithm amid all the misinformation as the locals discuss the sightings online.
If you’re from the area, we beg you: please do not attack, shoot or chase after the puma with a baseball bat. The animal does not consider you food, is not a danger to you, and is probably scared and hungry.
That deserves special emphasis if, as the DEC’s staff have said, the puma is more likely an escaped captive than a long-wandering traveler from the western US.
Jones said he saw the puma “slithering” and hear it “rawr,” but it’s worth noting, again, that pumas are members of the genus felinae, meaning they’re genetically and behaviorally much closer to house cats and can meow and purr, but cannot roar. Despite their size, mountain lions are not true “big cats.”
As for Jones, we hope him and his neighbors give the cat a wide berth and let the authorities safely capture it, have a veterinarian evaluate, and figure out where it belongs.
“I don’t play with lions, I don’t play with tigers, bears, nothing in the wild, I don’t play with those, I promise you,” Jones told the station. “I don’t even do rollercoasters. I’m good.”
The puma, also known as the mountain lion, cougar, screamer, panther, catamount, suçuarana, pangui, American lion and dozens of other names, looks like a big cat but is genetically closer to our domestic Feline friends.
Credit: Merazonia Animal Refuge of Ecuador
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Elizabeth Lucas
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Click images for full high resolution versions. Baby puma image credit Elizabeth Lucas. Prints available here.
It’s easy to mistake house cats for larger wildcats when photos and videos are blurry and lack familiar items to establish a sense of scale. The same phenomenon is responsible for UFO sightings and cryptid creatures like the Loch Ness Monster.
Recently several reports have been making a big deal about blurry videos of black cats, claiming they’re “black mountain lions” or “black panthers” roaming in places like Missouri and Louisiana.
The footage of the first video was shot in Missouri, where pumas once ranged, were extirpated in the 20th century, and have returned in small numbers in recent decades. Like most photos and videos of cryptid or unidentified animals, this one is blurry, taken from a distance, and lacks any object near the animal to provide a sense of scale. The second video is simply a black house cat with her kitten in rural Louisiana.
Our brains are pattern recognition machines and when the information we’re looking for — be it spatial, detail or contextual data — isn’t present, our minds tend to fill in the gaps. That’s the reason why we see faces in clouds, creatures in shadows, men on the moon and the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches. (The technical term for “perception imposing meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus” is “pareidolia,” from the Greek for “instead of” and “image.”)
Compounding the problem is the fact that the word “panther” is one of the most confusing of felid descriptors, a word that vaguely refers to physically large cats but doesn’t refer to any particular species, coat pattern or color.
Big cats can be voids too, like this stunning black jaguar in Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Above: A jaguar, a leopard, a puma (mountain lion) and a melanistic jaguar. Although jaguars and leopards look nearly identical, jaguars are stocker with thicker limbs and have blotches inside their rosettes, while leopards do not.
The word panther can refer to a puma, a jaguar or a leopard, but only the latter two species can have melanistic (black) coats.
Contrary to popular belief, even a black cat’s fur is not entirely black — you can still see the rosettes and spots of their coat patterns up close and in certain light conditions.
This jaguar’s rosettes and spots are visible in direct light. Jaguars in the wild are rarely seen so close or in “perfect” conditions, making it difficult to see coat markings of melanistic members of the species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
However, jaguars don’t range in Missouri, leopards are not native to the Americas, and if someone indeed spotted one of the very rare pumas in Missouri, it could not be black because melanistic pumas do not exist.
Mountain lions (Puma concolor in taxonomic nomenclature) are physically large and are the second-biggest cats by size and weight in the western hemisphere after jaguars, but they are not technically “big cats” because they are not part of the pantherinae subfamily. Pumas cannot roar like big cats, but they’re capable of the classic wildcat “scream,” and they can even meow like small cats.
By process of elimination — and the cat’s physical shape — we can conclude the Missouri video shows a house cat that looks larger because there’s nothing nearby to give us a sense of scale.
This piece of a grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 on eBay in 2004 because bidders believed the Virgin Mary’s face miraculously appeared on it. Credit: eBay
It may seem unlikely that someone confuses a house cat, which weighs an average of 10 pounds, with a puma, which weighs on average more than 100 pounds, with the largest males pushing 220 pounds.
But it happens all the time even in close encounters, like the incident this summer in which a man riding a dirt bike swore he was ambushed by a puma only for DNA to establish beyond doubt that his attacker was a domestic kitty. For what it’s worth, he still swears it was a mountain lion.
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