Would your cat resemble a sphynx if you shaved its fur? Buddy the Cat investigates!
Dear Buddy,
Do all cats look like sphynxes underneath their coats? What I mean is, if someone were to shave off all your fur, would you look like a weird wrinkly little alien thing too?
Wondering In Wyoming
Dear Wondering,
Who told you that? Is Big Buddy planning to have me shaved? Is he gonna condemn me to one of those “groomers” and have me transformed into some undignified, naked, dumb-looking creature?
I will end him!
Buddy
Dear Buddy,
Whoah, hold up there, champ! No one’s got anything planned for you, it’s just a hypothetical. I’m genuinely curious about the no fur thing, that’s all. And I asked you because you’re the expert on every topic!
Wondering in Wyoming
Wondering,
Okay, okay, but I’m not letting my guard down. As the wise man George W. Bush once said: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me…uh, you can’t get fooled again!”
I thought about your question and became more curiositized as well because sphynxes are weird and I don’t want to look like those freaks. Get mistaken for one and the next thing you know, they’re bringing you back to their mothership.
Above: These sphynxes are plotting your doom! They want to beam you up to their ship, test your skin for potential scratching post material, and eat your brains.
I can assure you that I would not resemble a sphynx if somehow I was overpowered (a tall order that would require a small army), drugged and shaved of my luxurious fur. I would just look more ripped, as there wouldn’t be any long fur to cover up my six pack and my rippling meowscles.
Due to his impressive meowsculature, Buddy would simply look even more ripped if someone with a death wish tried to shave his fur.
As for other cats, apparently they would not look like sphynxes either, because those freaks are uniquely covered in wrinkly skin, which is probably a side effect of the strange atmospheric conditions on their homeworld.
During my detailed investigatory investigation, I found images of domestic shorthairs, Maine Coons, Persians, Bengals, ragdolls and many other types of cats who were forced to endure ignominious “lion cuts” and other ridiculous “grooming” efforts. While many of them looked skinny and much less impressive without their fur bulking them up, they pretty much look like regular cats with a fuzzy, velvety coat instead of fluff.
Not as ripped as me, obviously, but not like sphynxes either.
I hope that answers your question. Remain vigilant, my friend! One never knows when one’s devious human might decide to humiliate one by shaving off all of one’s fur.
This is just one reason why animal advocates are not fond of breeders.
A California woman faces animal cruelty charges after police say she abandoned 134 cats in a U-Haul van without food or water in the sweltering summer heat.
The cats, ranging in age from a week to eight years old, have been removed from the van and the 106 survivors, described as “extremely emaciated,” are receiving veterinary treatment at the Merced County Animal Shelter, according to the Merced County Sheriff’s Office.
Jeannie Maxon/Facebook
A deputy found the van at 5:30 p.m. on Sunday in Santa Nella, a small town about 40 miles south of Modesto. The cats were stuffed in the U-Haul, which was left in a Taco Bell parking lot, and about 20 of them had taken up spots on the dashboard, center console and driver’s seat.
Jeannie Maxon, a 69-year-old woman from Long Beach, Calif., was charged with 93 counts of animal cruelty.
Maxon is the owner of a cat breeding business called Magicattery, which she’s touted on her personal Facebook page and an Instagram page specifically dedicated to the breeding operation. A separate site on its own domain remained up as of Tuesday evening and says the breeding operation specializes in Persian and Himalayan kittens.
A screenshot of Maxon’s Instagram page for her breeding business.
Many of the cats and kittens are dressed up, wrapped in pearls and ribbons, and posted with accessories in the photographs Maxon shared on social media. Maxon was active on Facebook and Instagram until late 2024, according to her visible public activity on both sites.
It’s not clear why she abandoned the cats. California does not have a state licensing system for breeders, but individual towns and cities may require breeders to obtain a license.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Maxon had retained an attorney.
Merced County Animal Shelter said in a Facebook post that the cats will be put up for adoption once they’re all stabilized and receive proper veterinary care.
The cats were found in extremely poor condition and were described as “severely emaciated” by police. They were abandoned without food or water. Credit: Merced County Sheriff’s Office
The former stray has become hugely popular online thanks to his permanently surprised-looking expression.
Much as I love my cat, I’ve never been a fan of being startled awake by the little stinker jumping on my chest or slapping my cheek, only to find him right up in my face, staring as creepy as you please.
I now realize I’m fortunate. Imagine waking up to this dude yowling in your face:
Sheesh.
That’s Fedya, a four-year-old cat who presumably has some Persian lineage or a similar breed. His human, 42-year-old Natalya Zhdanova, found the little guy in her backyard when he was just a kitten. He was in a bad way at the time and she nursed him back to health with help from her neighbor’s kind cat.
His perpetually perplexed countenance wasn’t as obvious in his kitten days and Zhdanova has said she never imagined he’d become an online sensation with more than 300,000 people following the Russian feline on Instagram.
People have said Fedya looks like a real life cartoon character, but I think he looks like an orangutan, specifically an adult male with pronounced cheek flanges. In orangutans, cheek flanges are useful for attracting mates, as they signal a male is strong, healthy and his body is coursing with testosterone.
In cats? Who knows. Maybe they’re a result of Fedya’s swagger. (Fedya, by the way, is a diminutive of the Russian name Fyodor, also spelled Fedor, from the original Greek name Theodore, or Theodorus.)
We wish the big guy well, whether he’s curled up by a fire in Russia or stalking the humid jungles of Borneo!
The short clip shows just about everything wrong with cat shows.
Amid the subdued noise of the show, in which hundreds of people collectively try not to freak out the felines who definitely don’t want to be there, Beethoven — number 176 — was called up.
Anyone who knows anything about cats could tell little dude was not gonna do well.
“Beautiful coat, shiny, nice green eyes,” said a judge, a woman wearing cat ears.
Having exhausted her supply of superlatives, she ran a hand down Beethoven’s tail, then grabbed both his front legs from behind in a way I’ve never seen anyone try to move a cat and tried to spin him around.
Beethoven wasn’t having it.
The void unleashed a symphony of hisses, feints and dodges while trying to get away, but the judge — seriously, has she ever dealt with a cat before? — shoved him, then tried to grab him again as if the pointless evaluation could be saved.
That’s when The Conductor lunged in for a hard right paw-slap, leaving #177– a white chonkster on deck — with a look that said “Oh no he didn’t!”
Contestant 177 needs popcorn. Someone get this cat some popcorn!
“I need the owner here now,” the judge said, like a doctor snapping at a nurse for a scalpel as a patient’s blood pressure plummets on an operating table.
Beethoven was disqualified, but he should have gotten points. He should have gotten all the points.
Oh, people who participate in “cat fancy” will tell you their ridiculous soirees are really just social events for the feline-inclined, as if they don’t privately rage when their cats lose like Patrick Bateman stewing over the fact that Bryce prefers Van Patten’s business card to his own.
But seriously, what the hell is going on at these shows?
Most of them are celebrations of the cat world’s worst excesses, with people lugging their terrified $10,000 Savannahs, $4,000 Bengals, currently out-of-fashion Persians and other breed cats to gymnasiums or hotel ballrooms where they’re mishandled, judged like collector’s items and measured against absurd arbitrary standards written by God-knows-who.
The breed standards read like wine descriptions in obnoxious catalogues: “The tail should be long and sturdy, powerful yet restrained like a rhinoceros in a steel cage. The coat should be of moderate length and silky, yet not so shiny as to invite comparisons to the Arkenstone of Thráin, that wondrous jewel. The head should be angular, recalling the good old days of colonial occupation in Siam when elegant men and women would lounge in opulent royal palaces enjoying stiff cocktails as the locals fanned them. The paws should leave tigerian pug marks, but the toes should not be arranged so close together as to appear inartful…”
The insanity of it makes me want to pose as a judge, grabbing a cat and taking a deep huff from its behind as horrified cat fanciers look on.
“I get notes of summer in New York, rotting garbage and the perpetual smell of urine on the 6 line. Hints of jasmine, cinnamon and Temptations Seafood Medley filtered through the miraculous feline intestinal system! The flavor profile is ecstatic. Oh! The aftertaste! Bitter yet triumphant!”
Except for the non-breed portion of the show, which you get the impression is treated like a non-televised undercard fight at a UFC event, the participants are basically big-upping cats who come from breeders, holding them up as the feline ideal while allowing a few scraps to fall off the table for those dirty little moggies who were the result of two cats voluntarily copulating, not some breeder putting Big Tom and Queen #7 in a cage together until BT puts one in the bun.
Ew, a shelter cat!
You know what I say to these cat shows and their judges? Look at this dude! Look at him! Behold his handsomeness:
Not only is he charming and ridiculously good looking, his office has many leather-bound books and smells of rich mahogany. Cat judges, eat your hearts out!
Iranian clerics and lawmakers claim pets are dangerous, but observers say the country’s religious authorities see pets as a threat to conservative Islamic beliefs.
The Prophet Muhammad heard the afternoon call to prayer one day and was about to rise when he realized his favorite cat, Muezza, was sleeping on his sleeve.
Rather than wake the slumbering kitty, Muhammad cut off his sleeve, stroked her fur and headed off to pray.
That story — and accounts of Muezza regularly napping in the lap of Islam’s most sacred prophet as he preached to followers — make Muezza one of the most well-known felines in human history, and form the basis for Islamic teaching regarding cats. Muslims consider cats the cleanest of animals, worthy companions and, thanks to the way the Prophet Muhammad treated Muezza and his other cats during his life, animals worthy of respect and the protection of humans.
Why, then, do hardline Islamic lawmakers in Iran want to ban the keeping of cats as pets, along with other animals?
Animal lovers in the country of 84 million are alarmed after conservative lawmakers introduced a bill, titled “Protection of the Public’s Rights Against Animals,” that would ban people from “importing, raising, assisting in the breeding of, breeding, buying or selling, transporting, driving or walking, and keeping in the home wild, exotic, harmful and dangerous animals.”
The list of “dangerous animals” includes creatures domestic and wild including “crocodiles, turtles, snakes, lizards, cats, mice, rabbits, dogs and other unclean animals as well as monkeys,” according to Agence France Presse.
A cat loafs in Saudi Arabia’s Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, just a few hundred feet from the Kabah, the most sacred site in Islam. The fact that cats are allowed in such close proximity to the site reflects the Prophet Muhammad’s devotion to felines. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Penalties for violating the ban would be steep:
“Offenders would risk a fine equivalent to 10 to 30 times the ‘minimum monthly working wage’ of about $98 or 87 euros and the ‘confiscation’ of the animal,” the report says. If passed, the law would also require landlords to ban pets on their properties.
The proposal has caused an outcry in Iran, where keeping pets has become more popular in recent years, especially because it’s not just one or two politicians introducing a long-shot piece of legislation: At least 75 of Iran’s 290 legislative representatives have already signaled support for the bill.
Officially, Iranian lawmakers who support the pet ban say they’re obligated to act because pets are “dangerous.” Mohammad-Taghi Naghdali, an Iranian MP, told Persian-language news site Didban-e Iran that dogs in particular can “cause nuisance and harm” to people, citing a recent incident in which a dog killed a child in a Tehran public park.
But observers say the real reasons have to do with the Iranian government’s interpretation of Islamic teaching, as well as fear that keeping pets is a western, liberal (in the classic sense) behavior that poses a danger to the Islamic theocracy.
In 2019, dog walking was officially banned in Tehran, and authorities warned residents to keep their pets out of public spaces.
“Police have received permission from the judiciary branch to crack down on people walking dogs in Tehran,” Tehran Police Chief Hossein Rahimi said in late 2019. “Carrying dogs in cars is also banned and if a dog is seen inside the car, police will confront the owner of the dog.”
In 2016, media reports said “officials were showing up at the homes of pet dog owners claiming that they were from a veterinary unit and these dogs needed vaccinations. The dogs were taken away, ostensibly for the purpose of vaccination and were never seen again.”
Dogs are considered “ritually unclean” according to Islamic hadiths, and some majority-Muslim countries, especially theocracies like Saudi Arabia, ban dog ownership completely with very few exceptions, such as seeing eye dogs for the blind.
By contrast, cats are widely tolerated and even welcomed into holy sites in most Islamic countries. In Saudi Arabia it’s not uncommon to see cats lounging on the grounds of mosques, while Turkey is famously hospitable to felines, with Istanbul earning an international reputation for its well-treated and ubiquitous street cats. In Turkey, cats are welcome in mosques, shops and homes, and tiny shelters for strays can be found almost everywhere.
The late Gli, the most famous feline resident of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
The proposed law has not gone over well with the people of Iran, who are often at odds with the country’s theocratic leaders on almost every aspect of social life.
“I have renamed my cat ‘Criminal’ since I heard this proposed law,” one Iranian wrote on Twitter, while journalist Yeganeh Khodami tweeted: “How many times have cats sought to devour you so that you consider them wild, harmful and dangerous?”
A common refrain among animal lovers is that the country’s leadership is once again focusing on something ultimately unimportant and harmful to Iranians instead of working to fix real problems like a depressed economy, widespread droughts and nationwide belt-tightening caused by international sanctions.
“Why should I imprison him at home?” a Tehran woman walking a dog told Agence France-Presse. “The MPs probably assume that young couples today don’t have children because they have a pet dog, but that’s stupid. It’s not the dogs but the economic conditions that don’t allow us to have children.”
Pain In The Bud 