tikTok – Pain In The Bud

Gen Z Kids Think The Cat In The Hat Is Stalking Them In Real Life

Viral videos show figures dressed as the Dr. Seuss character terrorizing unsuspecting people in mostly quiet suburban settings.

There’s a new freak-out among the terminally online, mostly relegated to Gen Z and people who spend significant amounts of time on TikTok – they think a Dr. Seuss character made flesh is popping up in the suburbs of the UK and Ireland to stalk and scare the pants off people.

Videos featuring the iconic children’s story character have gone viral on the platform in the last week or two, each of them showing similar scenes: it’s night, usually in some safe-looking suburb, and a person wearing a full size Cat In The Hat costume pops out of the bushes or from behind a car to terrify unsuspecting passersby.

Others show the costumed creeps simply standing in driveways or in the middle of the street and silently observing people in their homes.

The alleged perps favor a more sinister look than the traditionally friendly-looking creation of Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel in 1957. These cats in hats wear a disturbing grin or a sneer, and some videos depict the costumed weirdos leaping onto cars with feline athleticism or stalking the people they encounter.

While the footage looks real enough that it initially fooled UK media as well as kids, police in several jurisdictions have looked into the reports and concluded the videos are AI generated, likely with Chinese-made tools like Wan and Skywork.

OpenAI, one of the leading AI companies in the US, shut down its Sora AI video generator earlier this year amid widespread criticism and abuse of the tool.

While Sora had guardrails preventing users from generating certain kinds of content or violating intellectual property (you could not, for example, generate a video of a laughing Mickey Mouse gunning down a crowd of people with an Uzi), many of the Chinese-made video generation tools do not place restrictions on videos.

Some western companies have tried to compete in that space, including TripleTaco, which runs quite possibly the creepiest ads touting “AI that never says ‘no.'”

In any case, the panic over the Cat In The Hat mirrors a similar freak-out in India earlier this year when social media was flooded with realistic videos showing tigers and leopards mauling people having their morning tea outdoors or snatching them from moving trains.

The Cat In The Hat videos haven’t really caught on in the US, possibly because it stretches credulity to believe trigger-happy ‘Mericans wouldn’t just shoot weirdos stalking through our neighborhoods.

Regardless, it’s a good reminder to take everything with a grain of salt, especially anything you see on social media.

Newest Online Trend Has People Rage-Baiting Their Cats For Laughs

People are intentionally annoying/frustrating their cats and sharing the footage online.

It pays to make people angry.

Rage-baiting has existed as long as the internet has been a thing, but thanks to algorithmically-ruled social media, eliciting clicks through anger has become incentivized and normalized.

Monetized Facebook groups use rage-bait to drive engagement. Advertisers use it to break through the noise with carefully calibrated taunts: “Taylor Swift has an IQ of 165. Think you can beat her in this online test?” Unscrupulous online “news” platforms use it to keep readers in perpetual doomscrolling loops, which is easy to do in a politically charged environment.

But rage-baiting cats? Why would anyone do that?

Apparently some people think it’s funny, and the practice seems to have originated where all of our society’s most brilliant ideas are spawned: on TikTok, that virtual salon where towering intellects advance the causes of humanity.

Of course you can’t bait a cat with politics or culture wars, so the videos of feline rage-baiting compilations demonstrate trolling of a more physical nature: pulling tails, aggressively petting when it’s not wanted, poking cats in their tummies, picking them up and taking an agonizingly long time to place them back on the ground.

If it annoys a feline and provokes a reaction, it’s on the table.

We won’t link to cat rage-baiting videos, but suffice to say stuff like this does not benefit your relationship with your feline bud.

Rage-baiting is just another way to say they’re making their cats extremely frustrated to get a rise out of them.

When the cat reacts, that’s supposed to be the funny bit.

It’s not funny. Rage-baiting your cats, in honest terms, means doing things that make them deeply uncomfortable in their own homes where they’re supposed to feel safe. Arguably worse, the perpetrators are their humans, with whom they’re supposed to feel protected and loved.

As feline behavior consultant Julia Specht of Park Slope Paws told Upworthy, our furry friends are not in on the joke, they’re the butt of it.

“Cats can’t know what your intention is; they’re not capable of that tertiary-level thought,” Specht said. “All they know is that you’re doing something unpleasant that they don’t like.”

I’m not going for virtue signaling points when I say it’s a profound betrayal. I cannot fathom intentionally making my cat feel uncomfortable or frustrating him, let alone to do so motivated by potential attention from online strangers.

Your cat is supposed to be your pal. Your cat lives with you and loves you. Your cat is innocent. Why would anyone damage that relationship to bring a few seconds of misguided amusement to phone-addicted automatons who think messing with animals is funny?

Home Inspector Freaked Out By Large Maine Coon [VIDEO]

The surprised home inspector made a phone call from inside the owner’s living room, reporting “an intimidatingly large cat.”

Home camera footage shows a housing inspector who enters a family’s living room and stops dead in his tracks because he sees…a Maine Coon?!

The inspector was concerned enough that he phoned back to the office to report an “intimidatingly large cat.”

“I’m doing a home inspection now and, like, there’s this cat here, and it’s a very large size cat,” he tells the person on the other end of the line. “You know how you see a cat and they have a cute face? This cat is like… I might eat you later.”

What’d he think it was, a lynx?

@rachbiscuit22
pippy girl #fyp #explore #catsoftiktok #mainecoon #viral
♬ original sound – biscuit22

Of course we get this sort of thing all the time here at Casa de Buddy. Oftentimes people will hear Little Buddy’s terrifying roar and cast an uncertain glance my way.

“Dude, you got Elmo locked in a room or something?”

Followed inevitably by Bud’s indignant reply.

“I do NOT sound like Elmo! I’m a tiger, I just haven’t hit my growth spurt yet.”

So there you have it. Weird things can happen when you have a huge cat in your home…or one who sounds like Elmo.

Look At Him Go! Cat Enthusiastically Takes To Treadmill

Archie the cat, with his love of exercise, is the anti-Buddy.

This is unbelievable.

A three-year-old cat named Archie, who also hails from New York, loves running on his human’s treadmill. Mariah, his 27-year-old servant, keeps a close eye on the little guy while he gets his run in to make sure he doesn’t get hurt, but he seems entirely unperturbed and pumps his little legs, keeping a steady pace:

@mariah.sola
Archie is maintaining 3.0-3.2 our ultimate goal is 4.5MPH
♬ Young Black & Rich (Instrumental) – Melly Mike

Honestly, I can barely comprehend this. Bud would be more likely to engineer a treadmill into an automated system to deliver snacks to him so he doesn’t have to lift a paw. He is, after all, remarkably dedicated to the craft of being as lazy as possible.

Cheers to Archie for showing not all cats are loafing blobs!

‘White Ghost’: Amateur Photog Gets First-Ever Shots Of White Iberian Lynx

Photographer Angel Hidalgo thought the color was a trail camera malfunction until he saw the incredible feline for himself.

For the first time in history, a white Iberian lynx has been photographed.

A Spanish man who works in a factory by day and photographs wildlife as a hobby was behind the camera for the unprecedented shots.

It wasn’t easy.

Angel Hidalgo told National Geographic that first spotted fleeting images of the extraordinarily rare feline on one of his camera traps, but he was skeptical.

“I couldn’t believe it,” the 29-year-old said. “I thought it was a camera effect, and from then on, I dedicated myself to the search for the lynx. I’m still in shock.”

While hiking in late October, Hidalgo saw the “ghost cat” with his own eyes and quickly took a handful of shots and a short video before the cat vanished.

The Iberian lynx, as its name indicates, is native to Spain and a small range in Portugal. The cats call mountain ranges like Sierra Morena and Montes de Toledo home.

The white color morph is due to leucism, not albinism: the difference is the former causes only partial loss of pigmentation, and the eyes are unaffected.

In the video footage, the cat sits calmly and regards Hidalgo for about 15 seconds before blinking and turning its head. It’s a fleeting but fascinating look at an animal that most of us will never have the opportunity to see in the flesh.

Hidalgo won’t say where he encountered the white lynx, which is a smart move in an age when bored rich kids in places like Dubai can throw money at wildlife poachers and help themselves to the rarest and most vulnerable wildlife.

Because they know the authorities in their countries won’t bother them, the sons of oil oligarchs and emirs openly flaunt their wild “pet” collections: Instagram and TikTok host thousands of photos and videos of young men and women posing with cheetahs, lions and tigers, with the cats often riding shotgun in hypercars from Lamborghini, Ferrari and McLaren.

We hope the location remains a secret for the sake of the wild cat and because the Iberian lynx is a conservation success story. The species was on the brink of extinction in the 1990s and now has a healthy breeding population that numbers in the thousands.