Witnesses described the harrowing encounter as a woman fell into the silver-furred Buddy exhibit at the Bronx Zoo this week.
NEW YORK – Corey Anderson couldn’t watch as the woman tumbled into the zoo habitat.
The Manhattan man had taken his kids to the zoo and the little ones were pointing excitedly at the silver-furred Buddy exhibit when a woman climbed the barrier to get a better look at the tiny terror, slipped and fell into the enclosure with the apex predator.
“I grabbed my kids, shielded their eyes and had just turned away,” Anderson recalled with a shudder. “The sounds…it was horrific. It sounded like an enraged Elmo demolishing a plate of wings.”
Smartphone footage shot by other guests confirmed the grisly sequence. The woman landed awkwardly but was apparently unhurt as she stood and began to dust herself off, unaware of the intimidating shadow creeping up on her from behind.
“Absolute mayhem,” is the way Franz Muller described it. “Die mächtige katze! Das grauen! I have never seen ankles bleed as much as I have on this day!”
After initially shocking the uninvited guest with a swipe at her bare skin, the silver-furred Buddy proferred a single paw as if expecting something from the woman, “but when it became clear she was empty-handed, the Buddy flew into a rage and launched himself at her lower extremities,” Muller said.
Zookeepers arrived quickly amid the screams of shocked guests and held up a vacuum in warning, the footage shows. When the silver-furred Buddy hissed but showed no signs of retreating, one of the zookeepers flipped the power switch.
“The Buddy stopped, hackles raised, then bolted for the safety of his den,” said another witness, Eleni Xanthopoulou.
The silver-furred Buddy with Lyle, center, and Sir Malcolm Murray, president of the zoo’s board of trustees.
The victim, a 32-year-old interior designer, was rushed to an emergency medical clinic, where she was treated for “multiple lacerations to the ankles, feet and lower legs,” police said.
Bronx Zoo Officials said the silver-furred Buddy would not be punished for the attack.
“He did nothing wrong,” head carnivore keeper Ferdinand Lyle said as he cradled the deadly cat. “He’s such a good boy. Who’s a good boy? You are, aren’t you? Yes, yes, a good boy!”
The silver tabby cat has burst onto the Looksmaxxing scene, cultivating powerful aura with his effortless style.
NEW YORK – Jeffrey “Raddog” Raddatz brought an unblemished record, a 9.7 jawline symmetry score and prestige as one of the greatest Looksmaxxers of all time to the aura battle.
His opponent? A relative unknown named Buddy the Cat with impressive canthal tilt and enviable hair silkiness stats who was nonetheless untested in the brutal world of aura battles, where only the most symmetrical Chads and Chadettes can take the heat.
The crowd, which had already been whipped into a frenzy by a packed undercard, broke into raucous applause when 19-year-old Raddatz mewed to display his high cheekbones, then peeled off his shirt to reveal abs rated 9.3 and 9.1 respectively by Looksmaxxer and Aurascore.
Martin “El Capitan” Prado, 22, holds an aggregate 9.6729 Looksmaxxing score on AuraBattles.com and the Chadversity app. Known for his signature Riz Level Gain and highly rated hair, he’s considered one of the most formidable aura battlers in the western hemisphere.
“Siuuuu!” the Raddog taunted, imitating footballer Ronaldo’s signature celebration as he flexed chiseled pectoral muscles as he goaded his stoic opponent.
By the time Raddatz had finished his blistering attack the crowd was coursing with his zesty aura.
Buddy the Cat, however, had not moved a muscle. The 12-pound tabby remained in a nonchalant curl, eyes closed, his frame rising and falling in a gentle respiratory rhythm.
Onlookers exchanged confused glances at the lack of any response when Raddatz declared premature victory.
“This cat is cringe AF and has, like, no rizzitude,” he announced, just loud enough for the crowd to hear but not so loud as to appear desperate or cause any accidental damage to his own considerable aura.
Then he added a final taunt.
“What’d yah think about that, cat?”
Without so much as a twitch, Buddy answered with a thunderous fart that echoed off the nearby playground equipment and the glass-fronted buildings around the park, amplifying the flatulent sibilance to a powerful hum.
The crowd erupted in shock and disbelief.
“This cat just mogged my man without moving a muscle! Dayyyum!” said one onlooker who was streaming the battle to an audience of more than 3.2 million.
“An unconscious mogging!” another shouted. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Imagine the kind of aura you need to pull that off! This changes everything! It’s like historical and futuristical!”
Raddatz stumbled back in shock, a single tear heralding the imminent downpour as he realized his aura had been completely shattered.
Secretary of Aura Pete Hegseth, famous for his 9.5-rated jawline and widely admired silver mop, poses with teammate Zach Nunn during the 45-and-older doubles tournament at the National Aura Championship in June of 2025.A “looksmaxxing” app popular with Gen Z users instantly destroys their self esteem, then allows them to rebuild it using the magical powers of money and social media popularity.
Ethel Studebaker, who runs the “Explained for Seniors” page on Facebook, said terms like aura farming and aura battles may seem obtuse to adults, but they’re merely the latest spins on old concepts.
“Having ‘riz’ or ‘farming aura’ are just the latest terms for trying to look cool,” she explained. “In the 70s they would have been ‘far out’ or ‘groovy,’ in the 80s they would have been ‘gnarly’ and ‘bodacious,’ and in the 90s they’d be described as ‘fresh’ or ‘diggity diggity dope,'” she explained. “Although the battling itself simply by posing is a bit eccentric, and can be compared to the famous David Bowie-judged ‘Walk Off’ between male models in the movie Zoolander.”
Asked why generations Z and Alpha would prefer posing flamboyantly in “battles” rather than engage in time-honored methods like beating the crap out of each other, Studebaker was blunt: “Because they’re a bunch of good-for-nothing weaklings who stare at their phones 20 hours a day and can’t lift a box of Wheaties.”
Peters demonstrating his bone-smashing method for viewers on TikTok looking to emulate his legendary facial symmetry.
Braden Peters, the 20-year-old known as Clavicular, praised Buddy but said he would need considerably sharper facial symmetry to “hang with the top tier riz artists.”
“The road isn’t easy,” Clavicular noted. “Some of us have been at it for years doing it the hard way, spending tens of thousands on face creams and hammering our faces with chisels to achieve those elusive last few symmetry points. But the results speak for themselves.”
The little one was in a bad way, but she’s since recovered and is growing into a strong, healthy cat with a doting human dad.
Maybe there’s something to the idea that people who claim they don’t like cats just haven’t met the right cat.
In this video a man named Sam shares the story of how he rescued and adopted his kitten, Scythe. The gray kitten had been abandoned or somehow separated from her mother at just four weeks old and was in a bad way.
At first Sam thought the little shape on the side of the road was a dark-colored rock and was shocked when it popped up and started moving toward him. It was a tiny kitten, her eyes gummed up and shut, following the sounds of his van’s engine. (External playback on the Youtube video has been disabled by the channel’s owner, but you can see Sam and Scythe in action here.)
Scythe immediately after Sam rescued her from a desert road.
Sam took her inside the van where his air conditioning was blasting and cleaned her up a bit. The next day he took her to the vet, but could tell she was suffering.
“She was just looking up at me, so small and scared,” he said. “I hated feeling so helpless, knowing I couldn’t do anything to make her feel better.”
Despite the hardship she’d suffered, Scythe warmed up to Sam quickly.
“I remember the first time she felt love,” he said of her reaction when he began gently petting her. “It felt like the most healing thing for her was knowing people cared about her.”
Scythe warms to Sam.
He felt her tugging at his heartstrings, but there were two big problems: he’s allergic to cats, and his job requires him to hit the road for days at a time, often parking in places where the van bakes in the sun.
“I wasn’t thinking about keeping her at first. I had some friends saying ‘Oh, we’ll take her.’ But we had so much fun together, I ended up being like, I can’t give this cat away.”
Sam decided he’d compromise and bring Scythe home, where his parents care for her during his work trips. When he returns, the little cat is overjoyed and can’t wait to play with him.
“I already knew from a few days in that our bond was so strong, and we both began to feel it much more as we traveled together,” he said. “I never thought I’d be a cat dad, but now I can’t believe I ever hesitated to keep her.”
How sweet! It reminds me of me and the Budster, except with a lot less cat-slapping-human action and more gratitude. That’s okay, though. I love my feline overlord too. This is further proof that all it takes it one special cat to convert nonbelievers to the feline side.
Not all pets are created equal, but not all studies are either.
A new study claims we’ve gotten it wrong all these years, that pet cats and dogs aren’t good for young children, while kids who grow up with pet fish, turtles and hamsters learn empathy and develop better mental balance.
The authors of the study claim cats are “the only common pet linked to more mental health problems in children.”
Furthermore, the authors claim, pets like turtles, fish and hamsters are “linked to” positive mental health in children, while data shows dogs have no effect.
To understand what we’re dealing with here, we’ve got to break down “study,” “linked to” and “data” in relation to the report by researchers at the University of Valencia in Spain.
“Study” here means a meta-analysis of data collected by the INMA Project, a collaboration of universities, biomedical institutes and medical conglomerates in Spain. INMA is primarily concerned with researching the impact of environmental pollutants on early childhood development.
The INMA data was not collected specifically for this new study dealing with pets.
Secondly, while INMA did “track” some 1,900 participants from birth through six or seven years old, the “data” itself primarily consists of subjective reports by the parents of the children along with “environmental measurements and clinical tests.”
Credit: isaac mijangos/Pexels
It’s not clear if the original data collection effort had anything to do with the presence of pets in the homes, or if that was just one of many data points gathered in a larger assessment. For example, the INMA questionnaires may have simply asked if the families have pets and what kind of pets they have without any further elaboration or information about whether, or how often, the children interact with the pets. There can be enormous variation in that area alone.
Then there’s “linked to,” a very specific choice of words by the authors. They’re using “linked to” instead of “caused by” because the data they have – if you can appropriately use the word data to describe the results of self-reported questionnaires based on subjective feelings – cannot distinguish between correlation and causation and really says nothing at all except certain animals were present in the homes of young children.
In all, 8.7 percent of the children lived in homes with a cat, which works out to a sample size of 165, all from Spain.
So we’re already on really shaky ground here. I don’t think there’s any real scientific value in information that comes from questionnaires distributed to parents, and certainly not when it comes to topics like mental health and behavioral problems.
The definition of bad behavior varies widely between parents in different families and even mothers and fathers in the same family. Was there a baseline? Did the participants receive instructions on how to describe their assessments so they’d at least roughly resemble uniform reports? Were there other commonalities among the children who lived in homes with cats? We don’t know the answers to these questions.
Credit: David Brown/Pexels
What we do know is that, putting all other concerns aside, the report claims that 165 children live in homes that have cats, or had cats at one time, and some of them have varying degrees of behavioral problems.
That the conclusions are vaporous becomes even more obvious when the authors go on to speculate, with no data, why children who live with, or previously lived with, cats are allegedly more likely to suffer behavioral issues.
They repeat common misconceptions about felines being aloof, claiming the nature of cats “limits emotional bonding” compared to other companion animals.
“Having fish, turtles and hamsters on a constant basis does seem to protect children from mental health problems,” the authors concluded, although again the reasons are pure guesswork.
I’m not sure how anyone can say feline behavior “limits emotional bonding,” then in the very next paragraph claim fish and turtles, animals with which there can be very little or no real interaction, “protect” kids from mental health issues. Not even “help protect,” but full on “protect.”
The authors also point to a common boogeyman, toxoplasma gondii. The parasite can be transmitted to humans dozens and potentially hundreds of different ways, including contaminated water and undercooked meat, but cats are blamed because they’re easily infected by it and can pass it to humans.
To be clear, toxoplasma gondii does not figure anywhere in the data and the researchers did not test the children for infection.
Credit: Cristian Loayza/Pexels
But the bit that sets off the most alarm bells in my mind is the claim that dogs have no impact on the mental health of children.
That should have immediately prompted the research team to go back and figure out where their analysis went funky.
There are so many studies linking cats and dogs, and especially dogs, to tangible improvements in mental health and mood that anyone who claims the opposite has a lot of work ahead of them to demonstrate why their findings are accurate and the abundance of studies that concluded the opposite are flawed. (Dogs are better studied than cats because they’re easier to control, so the abundance of studies on dogs shouldn’t be confused for a stronger impact on human health.)
Whenever I write something like this, I always worry I’m contributing to the anti-science positions of some people who view the entirety of science with suspicion.
Science is nothing more than a formal process for learning about the natural world. It doesn’t have an agenda. It’s important for us to separate our qualms with the methods and standards of particular studies from the idea of science itself. A study may be flawed, but the scientific method remains the best, most time-honored way to expand human knowledge we’ve managed to come up with.
There are also major differences between “soft” sciences like psychology and hard sciences like physics and chemistry. The latter are primarily black and white, true or untrue, while the former deal with uncountable shades in between. It’s hard to quantify human feelings, thoughts and behaviors.
I’m sure the researchers involved in this project mean well, but unless we begin to see other studies placing fish, turtles and hamsters atop the pet hierarchy for their impact on mental health, I think we can file it as an anomaly and move on.
