The video is thoroughly amusing, but it also illustrates profound truths about feline intelligence, showing cats understand a lot more than people often give them credit for.
I’m loving this video of a sneaky orange tabby pretending to snooze while helping himself to his human’s food.
Little dude lays down and closes his eyes, then slowly reaches a paw out to the cap of an ice cream container, which has a glob of the good stuff on it. He checks to make sure the coast is clear by opening his eyes just a tiny bit, then slowly moves the cap over incrementally, pausing at intervals to make sure he’s still unobserved. (It looks like his human set her phone to record, then left the room so her little buddy thought no eyes were on him).
Aside from being hilarious and cute, this short clip actually illustrates something profound: Cats are much more intelligent than people usually give them credit for.
Consider the fact that to pull this off, the cat needs to be self-aware, and he needs to possess theory of mind. In other words, this cat understands he and his human have different perspectives, know different things, and that if he can move stealthily and appear to innocently nap, he can get away with eating some ice cream.
That may not seem like a big deal at first, but it means the cat understands humans can be deceived, and he understands how to do it. He cannot possibly know we have technology that can record him while we’re not looking, so that’s not a strike against him. There are plenty of things we don’t understand about animals, and we’re supposed to be the more intelligent species.
To truly appreciate how profound this is, consider that human children do not fully possess theory of mind until they’re four or five years old! That’s when they begin to appreciate the fact that other people have internal thought processes and emotions — even if they can’t articulate that — and, crucially, that what a person thinks she knows may not align with reality.
Footage like this goes well beyond refuting the old, debunked claim that animals like cats are biological automatons without thoughts or feelings. It shows they are in full possession of the cognitive tools that form the basis for higher modes of thinking. Again, while some people might hear that and say “What’s the big deal?”, it destroys all arguments that animals don’t have emotions or don’t understand what’s happening to them when humans mistreat them.
It also shows that cats are at least as intelligent as young children in all the ways that matter. They cannot verbalize their thoughts and feelings, but that has no bearing on their existence. After all, no one would argue that a child doesn’t have feelings simply because he’s unable to speak.
Lastly, there’s one more important lesson here: hide your ice cream from your fluffy pals!
A man and woman on TikTok claim they took in a stray, believing it was their own identical-looking cat.
Back in 2021 we were fascinated by the story of a Redditor who thought he found his missing cat after three weeks, only for his actual cat to come walking through the door a week later.
The cats did look remarkably similar, and it’s conceivable that the Redditor was so happy to have his cat back that he didn’t realize there were very small differences.
Now a couple on TikTok claims something similar has happened to them, although it should be taken with a grain of salt. They claim they brought a cat inside, believing it was their feline overlord, only to begin cuddling him the exact moment they realized their actual cat was outside looking in, appearing none too happy about the situation.
Of course to take the story at face value you’d also have to believe that the entire incident happened to be captured on video by an unnamed third person who happened to be filming them at that moment, and happened to have their camera in portrait mode for maximum TikTok compatibility.
The TikTokers
I’m not linking to the account or the Upworthy story that takes it at face value because I’m not a fan of clickbait or content scrapers, but it did remind me of the interesting 2021 story and my reaction to it.
At the time I noted three of Bud’s unique physical characteristics: his bright green eyes framed by dark “guyliner,” the unique tuft of white fur on his chest and perhaps his most obvious distinguishing feature, his pronounced muzzle. You can see it in this photo thanks to the angle:
A Buddy like no other.
But most of all, Buddy’s personality is utterly unique. I could probably search to the ends of the Earth and hell would freeze over before finding a gray tabby cat with the same physical features, the same tyrannical Elmo voice and the same imperious personality.
I cannot fathom mistaking another cat for Bud because I can’t imagine another cat with all of the above qualities who also narrates his own activities in real time like a play-by-play announcer who sounds like a disco-funk vocalist singing in falsetto.
“Jumping off the couch now…funky! I can see the bottom of my bowl, dude, and that is decidedly un-funktacular! I’m gonna do a few laps around the living room at 27mph while filling you in on my latest theories about the multiverse, okay? Prepare to get funky! So I think there are — ooh, I found a crunchy treat I must have missed earlier! Nomnomnom! — anyway, I was doing some calculations and I believe if we extend out to 11 dimensions, we solve some of the incompatibilities I was telling you about earlier. In simple terms, all particles in our universe are like vibrations on a tiny rubber band, physics is the harmonies on the string, chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings, the universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace! Bring me catnip! I need catnip! Can’t you see I’m on the verge of another breakthrough here?”
Buddy: Catnip aficionado, play-by-play announcer and theoretical physicist. Also, beefcake.
I’ve described Bud as a lunatic, and that’s one reason I love him. He’s crazy in the best way, unpredictable, amusing and never boring.
Could you ever mistake another cat for your own? What makes YOUR cat unique?
When cats demand attention they can be relentless!
I’m sure the behavior in this video, of a cat absolutely determined not to let her human get a second of studying in, is familiar to everyone who has the privilege of serving a feline:
The cat grabs at the pen, tries to chew on it, covers the book with her body, nibbles on the pages and plays pretty much every trick in the feline book to get her human to stop what she’s doing and engage in some good old Cat Time.
Or more bluntly, she’s saying: “NO STUDY, HUMAN! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!”
I never gave much thought to how students fare with cats but I know writing by hand is pretty much out of the question for me. Bud just won’t let me do it. Either he’s trying to bite the pen or he’s swatting at it with his paws, making my normally neat handwriting look like that of a deranged person demanding ransom or the work of someone stupidly drunk.
I’ve got a tradition of sketching scenes on birthday cards and other things I send to my nieces by snail mail, and Bud must be secured in another room before I can even attempt it.
Same deal with music, unfortunately. If I’ve got a guitar in my hands, little dude tries to cut in with a blazing, discordant solo of his own. Cat claws and guitar strings do not mix. If I’m using my synthesizer, Bud decides we’re going to do a duet by walking across the keyboard and yowling.
I’ve actually sat hunched at my computer for hours trying to stitch together guitar solos from several different takes because they were going swimmingly until Mr. Bud cut in with a paw and a claw, and trying to fix rhythm tracks that were perfect until Buddy the Destroyer decided 4/4 should become 5/8 or a particular chord progression should be interrupted with an accidental bit of guitar dubstep. Thank God for non-destructive digital editing in modern music production! Musicians in the days of analog multitracks must have had to put their felines under lock and key before attempting to record anything.
Do your cats stop you from doing stuff? What are their methods?
TikTok is a major security risk to the country, a danger to the people using it, and a platform that encourages animal abuse. It’s time for the US government to take action.
The cat is wide-eyed with terror, his mouth moving in protest as his human picks him up.
“Spock already hates me so why not torture him more?” reads the caption on the TikTok video as the woman spins him around to Taylor Swift’s saccharine ballad August.
In another, a man in his 40s stares into the camera, snatches his cat up in one quick motion and then cackles gleefully as he spins his cat, who squirms in his grip and meows plaintively. One woman admitted her cat “hated every second of this” as she twirled her to the Swift track.
Cats subjected to the Taylor Swift “cat spinning” trend on TikTok.
There are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of these videos on TikTok, the Chinese government-controlled social media platform. Inexplicable as the trend is, it’s far from the first time people have abused and terrorized their cats for “lulz” and the approval of strangers on TikTok.
Previous trends had TikTok users picking their cats up upside-down and one-handed, then “answering” them as if they were telephones while reciting a line from the movie The Princess Diaries.
The 2021 holiday season saw the invention and propagation of a “hack” by someone who claimed that if you chase your cat around and brandish your Christmas tree like a weapon so the cat thinks you’re going to hit her with it, “it’ll be too scared to f**k with” the tree. Classy. The video of the woman terrorizing her cat piled up more than 25 million views and spawned innumerable imitators.
Then there was the “influencer” who smacked his cat around and uploaded footage of it, not by accident but because he says that’s how people properly “discipline” their pets. There are one-off abuse videos, and then there are trends that just won’t die, like the “prank” in which people frighten their cats half to death by placing cucumbers behind them while they’re eating.
TikTok is legitimately evil
More than any other platform, aided by an insidious algorithm that expertly keeps its users glued to the screen and scrolling, TikTok is a vehicle for social contagion, elevating the crass, the outrageous and the destructive as it lavishes clicks and revenue on people who behave abominably.
Just look at the case of Chloe Mitchell, the popular TikToker who nearly destroyed a non-profit animal shelter single-handedly when she threw a tantrum earlier this year. Mitchell enjoyed in excess of 50 million views on videos in which she invented wild stories painting the shelter as some sort of criminal operation run by “scammers” who, she claimed, enrich themselves by adopting out animals.
It would almost be funny for its absurdity if not for the fact that the shelter’s operations were crippled for two months as Mitchell’s followers called in death threats, review-bombed the shelter to ruin its reputation online and made its volunteers fear for their safety.
A major security risk
It baffles me why anyone would continue to use TikTok — or sign up to use it in the first place — when its operators admitted under oath that sensitive data belonging to American users is routinely accessed by the company’s headquarters in Beijing, despite many public assurances that the data was compartmentalized and available only to software engineers in TikTok’s US offices.
And if that isn’t reason enough for some people to uninstall the app, consider the fact that TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance, added code that makes the app an extremely malicious piece of spyware software capable of capturing every tap or keystroke by its users.
🔥 New Post: Announcing InAppBrowser – see what JavaScript commands get injected through an in-app browser
For those who aren’t well-versed in technical matters, this means having the app on any of your devices is tantamount to handing China’s government the keys to all of your online accounts, including banking and credit, as well as all your text, email and in-app correspondence. ByteDance can read the private texts you exchange with family members, see precisely what you’re doing on sites like Facebook and Youtube, and help itself to users’ most private information.
Some people might not understand the scope of the security risk because they may not know that every organization in China is subservient and ultimately accountable to the Chinese government and the communist party. The communist government can access data from Chinese companies at any time, force them to hand over their proprietary technology and research, and compel them to cooperate with cyber attacks on US citizens and infrastructure. In fact, it’s written into Chinese law. The government has total control over every Chinese corporation and, under President Xi Jinping, has tightened its grip on every layer of society.
It’s not difficult to imagine the Chinese government using the wealth of data collected by TikTok to compromise the devices of people who work on critical US infrastructure, like the power grid or defense systems, and use that access to retrieve their employee login credentials, providing access to the systems they work on.
Imagine cyberattacks that shut down power plants in Texas and across the southern US during severe weather like the deadly heat dome the country experienced this summer. Or Chinese government-sponsored hackers crippling US banking systems, leaving Americans without access to currency for days or weeks.
Then there are the “smaller” risks that are devastating on an individual level: A hacker compromises your devices and locks photographs of deceased loved ones that are priceless to you, or threatens to blast details about your private life to everyone in your contact list if you don’t pay them $10,000 in cryptocurrency.
All that to use an app that promotes videos of people abusing their pets? No thanks. I hope the US government comes to its senses and bans the app from the US entirely before something catastrophic happens because if they don’t, it’s not a matter of if something disastrous will happen, but when.
Staff are demoralized, volunteers are spooked and the shelter has been buried in negative reviews after a TikToker picked a fight over an adoption fee and her army of followers went vigilante.
The voicemail is chilling not only for the explicit threat the person on the other end makes, but for her chipper tone as she casually threatens the lives of the people working at a west Michigan animal shelter.
“So anyway,” the caller says at the end of the unhinged message, “I’ll blow this number up and I’ll blow your location up as well. Hope you have a wonderful day!”
It’s one of three bomb threats the shelter has received since TikTok influencer Chloe Mitchell began the saga of what she calls “the $900 cat.”
Mitchell adopted a kitten from Michigan’s Noah Project, a small no-kill shelter, in early March. Staff say she didn’t balk at the adoption fee and they thought she was happy with the sweet kitty she took home, but the next day Noah Project’s phones began ringing incessantly with callers heaping abuse on the shelter’s volunteers and staff.
Apparently in the throes of adopter’s remorse, Mitchell uploaded a video to TikTok, the popular Chinese social media app, and raged about the adoption to her three million followers, screaming into the camera as she accused the shelter of identifying her as an easy mark and making a tidy profit off the kitten’s adoption fee.
Sickly kittens and sizable veterinary bills
Mitchell originally came to the shelter, camera in tow, asking specifically for a cat named Heart. The influencer filmed her visit and gushed to her viewers that she’d fallen in love with Heart, a mixed-breed kitten with Savannah heritage.
Heart, or as Mitchell calls her, “the $900 cat.” Credit: Noah Project
Shelter staff explained the kitten was from one of two litters that were brought in with serious ailments after a woman purchased a pair of queens from a breeder.
The former breeder cats went into heat and had babies, predictably, and the situation quickly grew out of control. When the woman realized she couldn’t care for the cats and their many ailing babies, she brought them to the Noah Project, which took on the Herculean task of caring for kittens that had problems ranging from anemia to developmental deformities like swimmer’s leg, also known as deformed leg syndrome.
Noah Project staff had to rush three of the kittens to an emergency veterinary hospital. Another required a leg amputation. Two kittens died, and the remaining babies had to be nursed back to health over three months, with special diets, medication and care on top of the normal costs associated with spaying/neutering, micro-chipping and vaccines.
Taking on that many sick kittens would stretch the resources of any animal shelter, let alone a small rescue, and the Noah Project set the adoption fees at $900 per kitten to help recoup the considerable costs.
Whipping an army of followers into a frenzy
Mitchell wasn’t phased by the fee, shelter staff said, but things quickly turned sour when she went home and posted the dramatic video, sparking the ire of her followers.
After that first video racked up almost six million views and almost 28,000 comments, Mitchell turned the experience into her own miniature “season” of online television, making half a dozen monetized videos in which she accuses the non-profit of lying to her about Heart’s breed and scamming her with the adoption fee.
Collectively, the videos have more than 30 million views, and Mitchell’s increasingly pitched rhetoric has whipped her three million followers into a frenzy.
In the video above, Mitchell acts out an alleged conversation with the shelter and confuses coat pattern for breed, saying “Feline experts have approached me online to say that she is in fact not an African Savannah and is more of a tabby-looking animal.”
“And they’ve stayed that I did get wrongfully charged that $900 in your shelter, which isn’t looking to re-home animals [but] make a profit off of them, and that’s not okay… I was taken advantage of, and that really sucks, I gave you my money for a reason that you were being truthful about her breed.”
Prompted by Mitchell’s insistence that the shelter was “scamming” adopters, her followers turned vigilante, review-bombing the Noah Project on Google and harassing its staff by phone. The shelter, which has been named the best rescue in west Michigan by its local newspaper several years in a row among other plaudits, saw its five-star Google review rating evaporate as negative reviews piled up, and the angry calls keep coming in. (“Unethical scammer! …shady, greedy business!” one of Mitchell’s followers wrote, while others dubbed Noah Project a “retail rescue” that “prioritizes profits over placing animals in a loving home.”)
The experience has been bewildering for shelter volunteers who aren’t accustomed to being the target of international ire.
“One woman [who answers phones at the shelter] doesn’t want to come back this week because it was so bad for her,” said Mashele Garrett-Arndt, Noah Project’s director. “It’s hard to explain to someone in their 60s or 70s. They don’t understand how [followers] can be so loyal to a person in a video. They don’t understand how people can be so cruel.”
Volunteers and staffers have taken the brunt of the abuse from Mitchell’s followers. Several don’t feel comfortable returning to the shelter because of the threats, Garrett-Arndt said.
The callers have said “they hope we die. They hope that we suffer and lose our jobs, they hope our families suffer. Horrible, horrible things,” she said.
As a result of the abuse and the threats, the Noah Project went to the local police, who are now keeping watch over the shelter. They’ve also hired private security, installed cameras covering the property, and have taken to scheduling staff to man the building overnight to watch the premises.
In an effort to end the squabble, Garrett-Arndt reached out and offered to refund Mitchell’s adoption fee, but said the influencer will no longer return the shelter’s calls.
Despite that offer, there’s no end in sight to the drama: Mitchell repeated her accusations that the shelter was trying to “profit” from her in an interview last week with MLive, a website that serves readers of a dozen newspapers across the state, and did an interview with the local Fox affiliate, WXMI, for a news segment that aired Monday.
Mitchell claims the shelter never mentioned the medical issues as the reason why the adoption fee was higher than usual, and says shelter staff told her Heart was “a super rare African Savannah” as rationale for the fee. She suggested she’ll continue her campaign to shame Noah Project until the shelter “proves” Heart is a Savannah, a mix of a wild serval and domestic cat.
“All of this will go away if they send me the certified paperwork ensuring she [is] in fact an African Savannah and I was rightfully charged $900,” the TikToker told WXMI.
But in her initial video Mitchell admitted she didn’t know what a Savannah cat was, and in another video she says she doesn’t care if Heart is a particular breed.
“I trusted you and I gave you my money for a reason, believing that you were being truthful with me about her breed, which didn’t matter to me at all, because I just love this animal,” she says in the video.
The constant stream of new videos about the situation and the behavior of Mitchell’s enraged followers has had a dramatic impact on the rescue.
“It has just been consuming our lives for the past four weeks,” one staffer told WXMI.
No one gets into animal rescue to make money, despite Mitchell’s claims that Project Noah’s staff are using animals in some sort of get rich quick scheme, and Garrett-Arndt told MLive she’d gladly open the shelter’s books to Mitchell or anyone else with concerns to show exactly how much was spent on vet bills and the other expenses involved in saving the sickly kittens and their mothers.
Pleading poverty and punching down
In her first video taking issue with Heart’s adoption fee, Mitchell pleads poverty and suggests the shelter saw her as an easy mark.
“I could just not eat,” she says with a theatrical expression, complaining that the fee is “two thirds of a Yorkie” and a quarter the price of a Louis Vuitton bag.
“I spent $900 on a fuzzy scratch ball that’s going to puke all over my furniture,” she says.
But Mitchell is not the typical college student working a part-time job and eating Ramen noodles to stretch her budget. As a volleyball player at Michigan’s Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, she’s well known as the first collegiate athlete to profit from the NCAA’s new NIL (name and image likeness) deal, which pays college athletes when their names and likenesses are used in broadcasts, promotional materials, video games and other revenue-generating activities tied to their sports.
Mitchell went on to found a company that guides other athletes on NIL deals, and she makes a considerable amount of money on TikTok. Creators on the platform who have three million followers can expect to earn about $15,000 a month from viewership alone, and articles going back to 2021 state Mitchell receives lucrative sponsorships on her videos.
“Five-figure deals are her baseline” for sponsored posts, a story on MLive notes, saying Mitchell was earning up to $20,000 per sponsored post at the time, when she had fewer followers than she does now.
If Mitchell scores a conservative two sponsored posts per month, that could put her earnings at $55,000 a month from TikTok alone, not including money earned from her NIL deal. Very few college students earn that kind of cash, yet Mitchell claimed the $900 adoption fee was “life-changing money.” In addition, she refers to her new pet almost exclusively as “the $900 cat.”
She dismissed the idea that she was creating problems for the Noah Project, telling WXMI that she doesn’t think she’s responsible for what her followers do.
“I never asked for the internet to go call them or to leave Google reviews in my defense whatsoever,” she said. “I’m not asking to be defended, I’m just asking to be heard.”
With 30 million views on her videos about “the $900 cat” saga, she’s been heard. The shelter? Not so much.
“To call people scammers, that’s a huge thing,” Garrett-Arndt told PITB. “You don’t just say someone scammed you. For her to say that about Noah Project, that hit hard for everyone.”
Garrett-Arndt said Noah Project’s social media staffer is hard at work trying to rectify the one-star reviews Mitchell’s followers left on the shelter’s Google listing, and said it’s taken considerable time to combat the damage to the shelter’s reputation.
Time spent dealing with negative reviews, filing police reports and reassuring spooked volunteers means less time dealing with the rescue’s primary mission — saving animals.
Garrett-Arndt said she consulted an attorney about taking to TikTok to tell the shelter’s story, and the attorney warned her that doing so could provoke an even stronger reaction from Mitchell, who has an enormous megaphone.
She said she doesn’t want to anger Mitchell for fear of what the influencer could do in the future, but believes the whole saga was manufactured for the benefit of the influencer’s TikTok account and followers. When the story blew up, she ran with it and wouldn’t return calls from the shelter in an attempt to fix the situation.
“She needed content, so it’s like ‘Let’s go get a cat,’ and then it got out of hand,” Garrett-Arndt said. “She has three million followers, but we have to stand our ground. The truth will come out.”
In the meantime, Mitchell — perhaps with an eye toward creating more viral content — says she’s getting a DNA test for Heart and has threatened to contact the other adopters who took home cats from the same two litters.
“Five other people paid the $900 adoption fee and not one of those people had an issue with it,” Garrett-Arndt said of adopters who took home the other kittens from the sickly litters.
The offer of a refund still stands, and staff at the Noah Project hope there’s an end to the madness.
“Why wouldn’t she come back to us? We’ll refund her,” Garrett-Arndt told PITB. “If you’re that unhappy about the $900, bring the cat back. Adopt another cat so we don’t have to [deal with] this and we don’t get dragged through the mud.”
Pain In The Bud 