A 12-pound cat nicknamed Big Sexy disappeared from the set of a photo shoot for FDNY EMT’s 2020 Calendar of Heroes after getting a little scared and running away from set last week. Very appropriately, Big Sexy (real name Buddy) was there to model; the concept of the shoot involved each sexy first-responder posing with a rescue animal.
Other than Big Sexy, there were seven dogs and four cats on set, according to the New York Daily News — but all the other animals are accounted for. The last time Big Sexy was seen, he was darting underneath a fire truck at Engine 4/ Ladder 15, in Lower Manhattan on January 22.
“I’m desperate,” Big Sexy’s owner, Leslie Silbert, told the Daily News. She said she holds no grudges against the FDNY, and that they actually went to great lengths to help look for the missing feline. “Super-nice firefighters searched with thermal imagers under the truck he ran beneath and along the massive storage areas. I’ve set cat traps in the firehouse (and) they kindly let me in to call for him and freshen the food in the traps.”
Silbert — who is a private investigator, author, and daughter of the first prosecutor in the Watergate case — is worried about her cat in the dropping temperatures of the polar vortex. She adopted him nearly two years ago on Valentine’s Day, in 2017; he’d been found wandering a hospital ward in Harlem when he was just four months old.
“It’s like his story has gone full circle,” said Silbert. “He was found at a hospital — a lifesaving enterprise — and he disappeared at another lifesaving enterprise.”
If you’ve seen Big Sexy, you can reach out to Silbert, who has posted about her cat online in hopes of his safe return home.