rat – Pain In The Bud

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.

If there’s one thing director Michael Sarnoski knows about cat people, it’s that putting a feline in danger is a reliably manipulative way to ratchet up tension.

Frodo the cat, therapy pet to Lupita Nyong’o’s Sam in A Quiet Place: Day One, is every bit the handsome co-star.

In a story about a woman and her cat trying to survive an apocalyptic event in New York City, the cat gets plenty of screen time. There are entire sequences following the little guy as he dashes away from danger (and sometimes toward it) and as he follows his feline instincts, which might not be the right instincts in a world that suddenly has its rules rewritten.

A Quiet Place: Day One is the third installment of the Quiet Place films. The first one thrilled audiences with a tight script, tense acting and a quiet/loud dynamic that made the absence of sound more sinister than sound itself.

A Quiet Place (2018) and its sequel (2020) take place about 16 months after the arrival of monstrous creatures of indeterminate origin. The aliens are blind, but that doesn’t impede their ability to rampage through human cities. They have an unearthly sensitivity to sound and can echolocate. Even a whisper can be enough to draw their attention if they’re in relatively close proximity.

We meet the Abbott family (John Krasinski, Emily Blunt and their children) some 16 months after the initial invasion, when they’re living silently on their isolated farm in upstate New York.

The audience is told nothing about where the creatures came from or what they are, and except for a short sequence in the very beginning of the sequel, we don’t see their arrival. The first two films deal exclusively with the aftermath, with scattered survivors trying to eke out an existence.

Frodo the Cat — A curious Frodo watches Quinn’s character, Eric, emerge gasping from a flooded subway station. Credit: Paramount

Day One is a different beast entirely, both from a plot perspective and through the lens of Sarnoski, who leaves his fingerprints all over the franchise and imbues the prequel with a surprisingly poignant relationship between Nyong’o’s Sam and Joseph Quinn’s Eric, a young British student who moved to New York for law school. (If you’re a fan of Stranger Things, you’ll know Quinn as Eddie Munson, the D&D-playing metalhead and stand-out character from the show’s fourth season. He also had a brief appearance in the seventh season of Game of Thrones, and will appear in the upcoming sequel to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.)

Sam and Eric are strangers thrown together by circumstance and quickly grow close. Eric, overwhelmed by the world being turned upside down in a country he’s not yet accustomed to, needs someone to latch onto. Sam, who has isolated herself as she wastes away from cancer, finds the companionship she didn’t know she needed.

While tens of thousands of New Yorkers heed the US military’s call to head to South Street Seaport for evacuation via boats, as the Death Angels apparently cannot swim, Sam is determined to reach Patsy’s pizzeria in Harlem, where she believes the world’s last slice of their beloved thin-crust pizza awaits. Unlike the other survivors, she doesn’t have the possibility of a future if she makes it to safety.

Walking from Chinatown in lower Manhattan to Patsy’s in Harlem is a hike, about nine miles as the crow flies. It would take most people the better part of three hours to walk under normal circumstances. In an invasion, when the slightest sound can mean death, it’s an extraordinarily dangerous and long journey.

Still, being determined to get the very last slice of pizza in an apocalypse is precisely the sort of ridiculous thing I’d do, so I sympathize with Sam.

Day One — In an amusing scene early in the film, a man in a bodega tells Nyong’o’s Sam she can’t have a cat in the store — while his own shop cat lounges on the counter next to him. Bonus point for the Knicks hat. Credit: Paramount

As for Frodo, he’s one cute little dude! I appreciate the fact that Michael Sarnoski elected to have an adult cat rather than a kitten, not because I have anything against kittens, but because Frodo is a reminder that felines of all ages are beautiful, and there are plenty of Frodos in shelters.

Nico and Schnitzel, the cats who play Frodo, are great animal actors. In one scene Frodo sees Quinn emerge from a flooded subway and stops, curiosity playing across his little face. He looks at the stranger and his mouth opens ever so slightly, as if in shock. How many takes did Sarnoski need to get that?

Frodo is also a survivor. His hunting instincts kick in when he sees a rat, drawing him closer to danger, and at one point curiosity beckons him toward the ruined shell of a building where the Death Angels are apparently nesting.

Incredibly, he never meows. There are times when he freaks out and runs, as cats are known to do, but he reliably finds his way back to Sam, and he has a knack for remaining absolutely still and silent when he needs to be.

There were so many moments when I imagined myself in Sam’s shoes and Buddy in Frodo’s paws, and we’d have been dead in all of them. As I noted in my post about the “Quiet Place Challenge” trend on social media, the Budster and I would have a life expectancy of approximately 60 seconds in the film’s world. Death by Buddy would be my fate, as inescapable as his mealtime screeching.

There is also a visceral 9-11 feel to the opening sequences of the invasion, and any New Yorker old enough to remember that day will be reminded of it. It’s impossible not to with the scenes of ash-covered survivors huddled inside buildings, crowds of dead-eyed people walking away from disaster and the eerie sight of a sooty Manhattan bereft of its usual bustle and life.

There are of course plot holes in Day One, or at least unanswered questions to things that don’t seem to make sense. When the military’s helicopters sweep over Manhattan, announcing via loudspeakers that survivors should head to the ports because “the enemy cannot swim,” I wondered: did these aliens just land in Manhattan? If so, why? Surely they don’t recognize the arbitrary municipal boundaries of humanity, and the whole area is one seemingly endless metropolis.

The Death Angels are obviously sentient, but whether they’re sapient is another matter. They don’t seem to have much in the way of a sense of self-preservation, and there is no method to their madness. During the aforementioned helicopter scene, the characters watch as hundreds of Death Angels race toward lower Manhattan, drawn by the sound of the choppers and the loudspeaker. It’s impossible not to think it would be trivial to draw the lot of them with the loudest possible sound, then drop a few daisy cutters on them and call it a day.

Of course if any of that happened there would be no movie and no drama, so as with most stories like this, it’s best to let the film pull you along without stopping to over-analyze what you’re seeing.

If you’ve watched the first two films, you also know the reasons for the invasion are nebulous. The Death Angels don’t eat their kills, as Krasinski’s Lee Abbott learned, and if they’re the vanguard of a more intelligent species, doing all the dirty work before the masters arrive, well, we’ve yet to see who’s pulling the strings.

Overall, like horror master Mike Flanagan taking on a sequel to the tepid Ouiji earlier in his career, Sarnoski doesn’t view the fact that Day One is a prequel as an excuse to phone in a performance. He approaches the film with enthusiasm and energy as if it’s one of his own creations, and that’s evident in every frame. It’s a Sarnoski movie that happens to be a genre film, not the other way round.

There’s a surprising poignancy to Day One that makes it more than the sum of its parts. We’re not here to spoil anything, but if you’re a cat lover, we will say that Day One doesn’t pull an I Am Legend. You can watch the film with reassurance that Sarnoski has better tricks up his sleeve for stirring your emotions than gratuitous animal-involved violence.

It’s rare when a sequel or a prequel reaches the same heights as the original. How many of us wish franchises like Alien and The Matrix stopped at one film? Thankfully that’s not the case here. There’s life in A Quiet Place yet, and like the best science fiction, it’s a film that uses extraordinary circumstances to tell a very human story.

Perhaps the best part is the experience has made a cat lover of Nyong’o. In a short promo (below), she explains that she’s always been afraid of cats, viewing them as miniature lions.

“Now,” she says with a laugh, “somehow, I love them!”

She’s not just saying that either. After filming Day One, she adopted her own cat, Yoyo, and it takes just a glance at her Instagram page, which is festooned with photos of the orange tabby, to know that she really does love the little guy.