I don’t know what they put in the cat food in Russia, but many of the most awesome cat videos are coming out of that country. Today we have two.
This dude is watching t.v., apparently in Russia since the headline is:
And, a Russian kot goes for a swim in the sea (thanks to P.Z. for putting this up, even though he called the cat “squid food”):
h/t: Michael
As Red 9, that cat is just standing by as ordered by Red Leader. Just after the video ended, he locked his S-foils in attack position.
I see that YouTube moderators have put this note against the swimming cat video:
YouTube doesn’t moderate the visual content of videos as a matter of course ~ they only only review videos which have been flagged as inappropriate by viewers. One can watch any amount of horrifying unrestricted material from war zones, because no one flagged it. I have this image in my mind of a cat-loving granny recoiling in horror at the sight of a bikini-clad woman & clicking her mouse in protest.
I like how the woman kisses and comforts the cat after the swim. That looks like a warm and trusting relationship between pet and feline.
That trust reminds me of a cat we had who would go for walks across the fields with us. It was a long way for her little legs and the cows hated her and would try to trample her* but she just put her head down and charged ahead. Once to the creek we sat and waited until she was rested and ready to lead the charge home. I always thought she seemed a little puzzled by the apparent pointless of the walk (no hunting) but we were her people and if that’s what we wanted she would go along with it. When my dad and I went for walks along the country roads we had to sneak off to keep her from following us.
If there is a deep enough trust and affection between a cat and her apes she will do things a lot of people consider un-cat like.
*We got between them and shooed the cows off.
It is always incredibly humbling to experience just how much cats & dogs, two spp we’ve co-evolved with, appear to value our inter-order relationship as much as we do.
PZ is worng. Cephalopods, meet your new masters.
I can picture Merlyn being fascinated with the lightsabre sequences.
Damn! Cat had better attention span than I did watching that movie…
There was a cat in that video!
Star Wars watching cat is:
a) fairly creepy, and
b) the shmoo.
I’m curious as to whether there was a specific part or parts of Star Wars the cat found particularly riveting. You’d see it seem to lose focus a bit and then –hey — perk up and lean in. Did they go into hyperdrive at that point, or turn on light sabers?
Or perhaps it got romantic.
Just from looking at the cat, my guess is that it wanted to know the secret of the Wookie: how to get so big?
In case you forgot…here’s the Star Wars story line
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2008/02/24/star-wars-according-to-a-3-year-old/
There does seem to be something in the cat food in Russia. My fiancee’s friends-across-the-square had a black-and-white cat called Тища who was decidedly weird and would use the toilet just like the humans. Couldn’t reach the handle, so he’d have to go and get a human to do that for him.
Then again, when it’s -40degC outside, the prospect of walking down 5 flights of stairs to freeze one’s ass off may encourage behavioural modification.
What, no kitty litter in Russia?
We can’t afford kitty litter.
The cat is clearly a transitional form, halfway on its way to bipedality.
Take that creationists.
Evolution IS true.
Look at those little kitty ‘feets’ kicking in the water! Cute! [insert Jaws theme here]
It’s customary, at least in older Russian families, to give cats a fair amount of ‘human’ food — pieces of sausage, meat for a treat, cheese (my grandparents’ cat LOVED Finnish Viola cheese, it was like crack to him…). I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of it turns out quite a bit better for the cats than much of the mass-produced questionable-content commercial cat food out there. Mass-produced human food is bad enough, so extrapolate that to creatures for whom we have even lower standards… *shudder*
So maybe it actually is something about the food 😉
Well, that and Americans are generally a dog-loving culture (elevating dogs above humans, sometimes), whereas dogs aren’t as heavily worshiped in Russia — might even be more of a cat culture overall.
The nearby Germans are definitely a feline folk — even their advertisements feature lots of cats, much like American advertisements almost exclusively star dogs for their animal roles.
Thanks for the post! I got a tomcat called Frank. Once the cute little mice of my neighbors children played on their maddow in front of the house. I did not know where Frank was. He had not come back the other night. He suddenly jumped out of the bushes and ate one of the mice. OMG!! What a cruel view for the neighbors kids. They hate him for that, though he looks really harmless and usually is harmless…