Tag: pyramids

Buddy — Er, Budhotep — Is Apparently Descended From Royal Pharaonic Felines

Sheba and a geneticist who specializes in cats are looking for felines descended from ancient Egypt’s royal buddies.

“You may call me Budtum Ra Budhotep Bhufu Amun Buddeses, human. Now serve me!”

Bud’s already enormous ego just got a little bigger after I used Sheba’s Pharaoh Cat Finder to analyze his pharaohness.

The online tool says he’s up to 75 percent pharaoh:

I didn’t do it entirely out of altruism to give the little guy an ego boost. The winner of the Pharaoh Cat contest gets a lifetime supply of Sheba, and Bud’s been eating Sheba for 10 years. We’ve never endorsed any particular cat food here on PITB, partly because every cat is different, some have special nutritional needs and what works for one furry overlord may not work for another.

But as food motivated as he is, Buddy cannot scarf down more than half a can of wet food at a time, and he’s an enormous pain in the Bud when it comes to leftovers, so Sheba’s Perfect Portions saves me from wasting food.

While the online Pharaoh Cat Finder tool looks like it may be RNG combined with clever marketing,  there’s a genetic basis for the search. The company is working with Dr. Leslie A. Lyons, a geneticist who specializes in the DNA of our furry little friends at the University of Missouri’s Feline Genetics and Comparative Medicine Lab.

The legendary funerary mask of pharaonic feline Buddankhamun Budstet Ra Budshepsut, Buddy’s royal Egyptian ancestor. Credit: The Grand Museum of Magnificent Feline Stuff

Lyons was part of a research team that extracted DNA from mummified cats buried in ancient Egyptian tombs and sequenced their genetic code.

While the project verified that the Egyptians domesticated cats long before they began mummifying them and affording them revered status, Lyons says a DNA sequence from the ancient felines “has only been found in cats in Egypt and the U.S., unlocking even more questions to be explored.”

“We are looking at mitochondrial DNA only found in these pharaoh cats and a few cats in the U.S. So it’s really hard to find these cats, hence this hunt with Sheba pet food,” she said. “We’re on that quest to find the cats that went from Egypt into the U.S. and are the divine cats of the pharaohs. They should be worshiped like they were.”

The Temple of Amun Bud is guarded by gold statues of domestic cats instead of sphynxes. Credit: National Gallery of Buddesian Artifacts

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the aptly named Dr. Lyons is on team cat.

So here’s to hoping Bud gets a lifetime supply of Sheba, and Dr. Lyons is successful in her quest to find the elusive pharaoh cat lineage. In the meantime, we should probably start work on an impressive new pyramid here in the US, lest we disappoint our new feline pharaoh.

Cat On The Street: Should Humans Worship Felines As They Did In Ancient Egypt?

We asked six cats what they think about the possibility of humanity worshiping their species again.

It’s said that the people of ancient Egypt venerated cats as deities and treated them with the utmost respect in addition to pampering them, granting them access to pharaonic palaces and feeding them from the pharaoh’s own kitchens.

Cats have not forgotten their elevated status in ancient Egypt, even thousands of years later, and they yearn for a return to the days when they were served with veneration rather than simply being served.

Should humans worship cats as they did in ancient Egypt?

“I don’t see how that would be any different than the arrangement we have now.”

Sofi Sen Hotep Re, 5

“If it means I get a golden litter box, several cat-size palaces, a summer residence on the Nile and more servants, then naturally, yes.”

Catshepsut, 7

“Of course they should worship us! Who else are they going to worship, dogs? LOL!”

Catthor, 2

“I shall have my human servants wear loinclothes and brand them with my name, just to remind them who’s boss.”

Ca’at, 8

“What do Egyptian gods eat? Was Osiris into turkey? Because I like turkey.”

Buddeses I, 9

“I’m willing to model for a new Great Sphinx of Giza since the old one was defaced by some ridiculous human replacing a cat’s face with his own.”

Atum Raymond, 12

FurryGate: Rogan, Boebert, Greene Drag Cats Into Politics With Claims Of Litter Boxes In Schools

The “kids identifying as cats” claims are popping up everywhere ahead of midterm elections. Why are we dragging cats into our culture wars?

The physicist Michio Kaku was a guest on a radio show and was answering a question about possible intelligent life visiting Earth when Joe Rogan interrupted him.

“The three pyramids are aligned with Orion’s belt,” Rogan said. “Do your research, man. Look it up.”

Rogan, who was into 9/11 truther conspiracies at the time, went on to explain how the Egyptians couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids on their own, and that aliens helped them align the positions of the giant structures to correspond to important celestial features.

Here was Kaku, one of the brightest minds in human history, co-founder of string field theory, a man whose textbooks are required reading for PhD-level physics students, getting talked over and “educated” by a pothead who rose to fame hosting a game show in which he forced contestants to eat cockroaches.

I thought of that cringey interaction this week after reading about Rogan insisting school districts are accommodating kids who identify as cats by replacing toilets with litter boxes in school bathrooms.

Rogan’s source was rock solid if you’re the type of person who thinks ancient aliens traveled thousands of lights to the Earth of deep antiquity to teach human beings how to stack stones on top of each other: Rogan’s friend’s wife, who works at the school district, insisted the litter box story is true.

Like previous claims of school administrators gone mad in service to alleged furries, Rogan’s claim was intentionally nebulous and unverifiable. He didn’t name the school, the district or the teacher. We have to take his word for it.

If you like that sort of thing, I have good news for you! Rogan’s in great company.

Marjorie Taylor Greene — the congresswoman who once claimed “Jewish space lasers” were responsible for California wildfires, the shining testament to US education standards who warned “the Gazpacho police” will imprison patriotic Americans, the genteel stateswoman who said scientists are creating fake meat in “Peach tree dishes” to “zap” Americans — has also warned of the apparently widespread practice of furry school children shitting in litter boxes.

Not to be outdone, Rep. Lauren Boebert has co-signed the cat conspiracy, telling donors that evil cat-loving people are hell bent on destroying wholesome American values by unleashing cat-identified children on an innocent and unsuspecting public.

Say it enough and it becomes true

The claims have been repeated so many times that they’ve spread to school board meetings and state legislatures across the country, perpetuated by gerontocratic leaders who think The Onion is a real news source. Two current gubernatorial candidates, in Colorado and Minnesota, have also repeated the claim.

“Schools are not disclosing that they are allowing children who identify as snakes, cats, whatever, they’re providing litter boxes for the [student] cats,” a Tennessee state representative said during a hearing in September. “And obviously it’s very disruptive to the learning process. If a child has that much of a self-identity issue they probably need a different environment, and it’s creating a lot of anxiety, a lot of confusion with the children who are boys and girls.”

“But Big Buddy,” you might be thinking, “I thought you said PITB was apolitical and you’re a moderate?”

It is, and I am.

I dislike all ideology equally because it invites people to abdicate their responsibility to think for themselves. I believe our two-party system and the divisiveness it fuels could be the ruin of our great nation, particularly at a time when polls show up to half the US population expects to fight in an ideologically-driven civil war. I worry that we are doing precisely what our enemies want by feuding amongst ourselves. Indeed, we know for a fact that “troll farms” in countries like Russia and China exist to sow the seeds of division and crank up poisonous political rhetoric online.

But I’m also against pure, abject, mind-boggling, depressing, Idiocracy-style stupidity and the idea that anything is true if someone says it is. Neither party has a monopoly on this kind of thing.

In particular, I’m not a fan of injecting cats into the American culture wars. (Although it’s not just cats at this point. A Texas school district was forced to deny rumors that administrators were allowing “furries” to eat out of dog bowls in school cafeterias.)

We already fail these innocent creatures in myriad ways, from allowing declawing and doing little to improve weak animal welfare laws, to tolerating the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable for people to shoot cats with arrows, BBs and real firearms as some grotesque form of entertainment.

Now people want to use cats as the rope in a perverse game of cultural tug-of-war, which could further degrade their status and lead to more proxy violence against them.

Cats are vulnerable, and are already targets of hate

Violent criminals, including the perpetrators of the recent mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, often get their start by killing cats before “graduating” to humans.

Cats are also frequent victims of redirected anger, with studies showing they’re abused and killed in domestic violence situations because they’re viewed as extensions of the feminine, or simply because killing them causes emotional distress to the people who care for them.

Of domestic violence victims who have pets, more than 70 percent of their abusers also took their rage out on the victims’ pets.

Politics have pervaded and infected so many things, cats and dogs are now staked to territory on either side of the political fault lines.

So how long will it be before an Alex Jones type claims the government is using cats to spy on Americans? The best conspiracy theories always have a nugget of truth to them, after all, and in the 1960s the CIA tried — and failed, spectacularly — to use cats implanted with transmitters to spy on Soviet officials.

How long before a Boebert or a Greene tells a crowd that it’s their patriotic duty to shoot “liberal cats” on sight? How long before Tucker Carlson follows up one of his thrilling UFO/crop circle/cow mutilation investigative specials with a breathless exclusive about America-hating cats?

“Why do so many cats want to see America burn? Why do cats like to line their litter boxes with the American flag? Does the government allow cats to vote? Hey, I’m just asking questions!”

If you think that’s outlandish, I’d point out that we’ve been there, done that.

Tucker Swanson Carlson has already claimed that “decadent rich people” who “detest the country” like to plot America’s downfall from cat cafes. Those evil America-haters stroke cats and sip lattes while “working through the night to destroy” our great nation, Carlson told his viewers. I’m not making this up.

Europeans almost extirpated domestic cats in the middle ages when people were convinced they carried the Black Plague, and cats had even bigger targets on their backs after the Inquisition’s most overzealous prosecutors insisted felines were used in Satanic rituals.

Likewise, my Google News alert for cat-related articles shows a depressing, never-ending feed of stories about people chugging beer and shooting cats with BB guns, mystery killers strangling neighborhood kitties and “hunters” who put arrows through these sentient, innocent animals who have the mental and emotional capacity of three-year-old human children.

And there’s already plenty of nonsense online about how our choice of pet reflects our political beliefs, as well as unhinged rants about the kind of people who prefer cats. There are even research studies about the intersection of politics and attitudes toward companion animals, and research shows certain people consider cats “liberal” because they don’t adhere to social hierarchies and don’t recognize authority.

Is it really a stretch to imagine some 85, deep into a case of Miller High Life, taking target practice at neighborhood cats because he sees them as evil, feminine, America-hating animals? Are we sure it doesn’t happen already?

Politics really does ruin everything.

The New York Times Is Back To Spread Misinformation About Cats

Protecting birds from extinction will take a lot more than passing laws requiring people to keep their cats indoors.

Prompted by the recent news that Polish scientists have added cats to a list of invasive alien species, the New York Times ran an enterprise story on Tuesday titled “The Outdoor Cat: Neighborhood Mascot Or Menace?”

I’m highly critical of print media stories on animals because I’ve been a journalist for almost my entire career, and I know when a reporter has done her homework and when she hasn’t. Unfortunately it looks like Maria Cramer, author of the Times story, hasn’t.

Her story identifies the stray cats of Istanbul as “ferals,” cites bunk studies — including meta-analyses based on suspect data — and misrepresents a biologist’s solutions “to adopt feral cats, have them spayed or neutered and domesticate them.”

Doubtless the biologist understands cats are domesticated, but Cramer apparently does not, and her story misrepresents the domestication process.

Individual animals can’t be domesticated. Only species can. It’s a long, agonizingly slow process that involves changes at the genetic level that occur over many generations. Domestication accounts for physical changes (dogs developing floppy ears while their wolf ancestors have rigid ears, for example) and temperamental ones. A hallmark of domestication is the adjustment to coexisting with humans.

agriculture animal beautiful cat
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

In other words, if cats were wild animals it would take hundreds of years to fully domesticate them, and I’m sure no one’s suggesting we wait hundreds of years to solve the free-ranging cat problem.

Ferals can be “tamed,” but the majority of cats living in proximity to humans are strays, not ferals. The difference? Strays are socialized to humans and will live among us, while ferals are not and will not. Strays can be captured and adopted. In most cases ferals can’t, and the best we can hope for is that they become barn cats.

To her credit, Cramer does make efforts to balance the story and quotes the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the U.K., which places the majority of the blame squarely at the feet of humans, noting “the decline in bird populations has been caused primarily by man-made problems such as climate change, pollution and agricultural management.”

Even our structures kill billions of birds a year. That’s the estimated toll just from the mirrored surfaces of skyscrapers, and no one’s suggesting we stop building skyscrapers.

Indeed, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al Saud (MBS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Araba, has been busy commissioning science fiction city designs when he’s not murdering journalists critical of his policies. The design he’s chosen for his ultra-ambitious future city, which he hopes will rival the pyramids in terms of lasting monuments to humanity’s greatness, is a 100-mile-long mirrored megacity called Neom, which is Arabic for “Dystopian Bird Hell.” (Okay, we made that up. Couldn’t resist.)

Take a look:

INTRODUCTION Depictions in a planning document show The Line as a massive micro that would be located at the Gulf of Aqaba and part of it extends into the sea

The point is, of the many factors driving bird extinction, humans are responsible for the majority of them, and if we want to save birds we have to do more than bring cats inside. Additionally, sloppy research portraying cats as the primary reason for bird extinction has resulted in cruel policies, like Australia’s effort to kill two million cats by air-dropping poisoned sausages across the country.

This blog has always taken the position that keeping cats indoors is the smart play, and it’s win-win: It protects cats from the many dangers of the outdoors (predators like coyotes and mountain lions, fights with other neighborhood cats, diseases, intentional harm at the hands of disturbed humans, getting run over by vehicles), ensures they’re not killing small animals, and placates conservationists.

At the same time, we don’t demonize people who allow their cats to roam free, and we recognize attitudes vary widely in different countries. Indeed, as the Times notes, 81 percent of pet cats are kept indoors in the US, while 74 percent of cat caretakers allow their pets to roam in the U.K.

We have readers and friends in the U.K., and we wouldn’t dream of telling them what to do, or suggest they’re bad people for letting their cats out.

Ultimately, tackling the problem depends on getting a real baseline, which Washington, D.C. did with its Cat Count. The organizers of that multi-year effort brought together cat lovers, bird lovers, conservationists and scientists to get the job done, and it’s already paying off with new insights that will help shape effective policies. To help others, they’ve created a toolkit explaining in detail how they conducted their feline census and how to implement it elsewhere.

Every community would do well — and do right by cats and birds — by following D.C.’s lead.

Archaeologists Find New Pyramid In Buddy’s Litter Box

Of particular interest to archaeologists was an internal chamber of the Temple of Deuceamemnon featuring a cartouche extolling the excretory potency of Buddy.

CAIRO, East Litter Box — A new pyramid dating to the 3rd dynasty has been found buried beneath the sand in Buddy’s litter box, a university dig team announced in the scholarly journal Fecal Archaeology.

The find is significant not only because it reveals one of the few surviving artifacts of the Old Kingdom, but because it lies outside the so-called Valley of the Kings, an area rich with deuce deposits and hidden burial chambers, Egyptologists said Thursday.

“Previously King Poopankhamen, a 3rd dynasty pharaoh, was considered apocryphal,” said Ferdinand Lyle, an Egyptologist with the British Museum. “Now, thanks to the inscriptions found in the newly-discovered pyramid, we know King Poopankhamen did indeed exist, and is responsible for many of the most fabulous monuments in the eastern litter box region.”

catsegypt
Priceless statues of felines recovered from the newly-discovered pyramid in Buddy’s litter box. (Credit)

Of particular interest to archaeologists was an internal chamber of the Temple of Deuceamemnon featuring a cartouche extolling the excretory potency of Buddy.

The cartouche, Lyle said, proved Buddy was worshiped before the 4th dynasty pharaoh, Pooptolemy, founded the Cult of Budster.

“The inscriptions in the poop burial chamber speak of mighty nuggets of feces raining down from the sky,” Lyle said, “which was seen as a sign that Buddy was angry and signaled an impending yellow flood.”

heiroglyph
A hieroglyphic inscription reads: “And so as man angered the Buddy, the sky opened up and a yellow rain came pouring down.”

Still, not all were convinced to change their views in light of the newly discovered pyramid.

“It’s obvious we couldn’t have built those pyramids without the help of aliens, bro,” said Joe Rogan, who is best known for making contestants eat roaches on the short-lived show Fear Factor. “Like, when you get stoned and really think about it, it’s clear that aliens were here millennia ago and were worshiped as gods, like in the movie Stargate.”