Business first: remember that the Cat Confession Contest closes this Sunday (Jan. 26) at 5 p.m. Chicago time. Email your entries to me; and remember—the confession must be honest. We have several dozen entries already, and I have to say that nearly all of them are hilarious.
Now for the pleasure: your end-of-the-week Felid Reward, in this case Didga, the Skateboarding Cat. Didga, an Australian cat (is that feline abuse?) rides around his neck of Australia on a remote-controlled skateboard. As The Laughing Squid notes:
Didga the cat pulls off some sick tricks while riding around the streets Coolangatta, Australia on “Ollie”, a remote-controlled skateboard.
The Action starts when Ollie, a skateboard, takes his friend Didga, a CAT, for a ride around a beautiful beach town. On the way Didga “shows off” by jumping on, off, up and even over obstacles. One of those obstacles happens to be a large Rottweiler dog.
video & photo via CATMANTOO
This really is one of the best cat videos I’ve seen, and Didga rides that board like a champ. (Notice, too, his resemblance to Hili!) It is not a fake video, though clearly many takes were shot.
h/t Lori Anne
That’s some pretty impressive animal training.
My thoughts exactly, especially as cats are reputedly very hard to train. I was really wowed by Didgal.
I believe it was Didga that trained the human, Ollie controller, camera crew, and d*gs… 😉
A board cat.
Indeed — an happy board cat. There’s your real-world contradiction….
b&
I can’t see the batteries on Ollie. Furthermore, to my untrained eye, those look like normal trucks (perhaps someone who has actually ridden a skateboard can clarify). I don’t understand how they have been motoris
ed.
Similar thoughts.
I was wondering the same and if some sort of visual trickery involved, perhaps as simple as a fishing line, or as complicated as a digitally removed rod, for the spinning shots.
Many of the straight runs could just be a skateboard coasting after being pushed.
That’s what I was thinking. At least one trick would have been shot without a fishing line though, the one where Didga scooted under that folding sidewalk board sign. But then the guy could’ve just dropped the line for that shot.
Pretty awesome skillz there anyhow, Didga!
If you zoom in you can see what appears to be fishing line attached to the trucks.
Ah, I guess fishing line does count as “remote control” – I guess we’ve just come to think of it to mean radio controlled.
Notice that the camera is out in front of the board on the close-ups. I’m going to guess that’s where the motor drive and steering and GoPro are located when remote control is being used. Sort of like a tractor-trailer set up.
The rest of the shots that show the whole board must be just coasting or fish line, I suppose.
I’m wondering about the wheelies though. Fishline?
In the comment section CATMANDOO himself says it is not a remote-controlled board, so… we’ll have to take his word for it.
What amazed me beyond the cat’s obvious talent for boarding was it’s comfort in chaotic and strange environments. Most cats I ever had would freak out. Except Watson, who thought he was a dog. Walkies was his favorite thing until he got tired, then he would bite my ankle to let me know it was time to head home.
After reading “A Cat Named Bob”, I’m worried that even cats that are very comfortable in crowds outdoors may still freak out and run if spooked, which happened to Bob a number of times, and was almost lost for good.
I would have a similar concern, most especially with Baihu (which is why he’s never off a leash when out of the house and why we’ve yet to go places with lots of humans). However, cats in such situations are going to be rather predictable and run to the nearest hidey-hole for shelter. A cat as carefully selected and thoroughly trained as Didga clearly is is going to be very unlikely to bolt in the first place, and is going to be easy to follow, find, and coax out of hiding if it happens.
The only real danger would be the cat getting stepped on or run over as it fled in panic, and I don’t think cats like Didga are going to panic-run in those sorts of dangerous directions.
Still…yeah, I’d be nervous.
Cheers,
b&
That’s hilarious, Didga is an amazing cat.
I’m almost 100% sure that that is *not* an RC skateboard. It’s a skateboard on a rig being pulled along by a human (for those shots looking back at the cat via a GoPro camera), or in some cases, a free-wheeling normal skateboard given a shove with Didga aboard so the kitty could leap up onto something and the board could be seen. The wheelies look like they’re done with fishing line. I have a lot of RC experience, and see nothing RC here.
However, it *is* a well-trained and very obliging kitteh, and a well-made video. My own cat would not be happy doing this stuff, at all!
Just to add (are we able to edit posts via iPad? Couldn’t find that option…): one of the giveaways is the sequence where the board coasts along at an exactly even distance from a wall while Didga jumps off and on, with nary a wobble nor wiggle from the board. Clearly that’s a stiff board on a rig, and not a steerable RC vehicle, which would never be so stable as the cat shifts its weight and jumps off and on, and would certainly never maintain it’s perfect distance and attitude from the wall as Didga performs her nevertheless graceful leaps.
And of course we aren’t exposed to the (I’ll bet) countless hours of video where the cat didn’t bother to cooperate.
An excellent piece of editing.
Didga == El Maestro
I live just south of Coolangatta and was up there yesterday but didn’t see any skateboarding cat.
It was raining cats and dogs at the time though.