Caturday felids: Report on Jerry Coyne the ginger cat, and a rare appearance of Basement Cat

February 8, 2014 • 7:39 am

You might remember that reader Gayle Ferguson is fostering five tiny kittens abandoned at a gas station at the age of only three weeks. Reports are that they are all doing well. There are four females and a male, and the male is named Jerry Coyne. So of course I take a special interest in my namesake, and, like any proud parent, will bore you with his baby pictures:

Here he is with his littermates; Jerry is the ginger cat asleep in the rear:

Jerry asleep in middle

According to Gayle, Jerry Coyne is not a fastidious eater, and pretty much besmirches his entire cranium with milk when he drinks from his dropper. As Gayle noted on her Facebook page:

“Little Jerry Coyne is hilarious. He has such a big fat round tummy and such fluffy fur. When he walks around he looks like a little orange, fluffy sausage dog.”

That’s cute, except for the d*g part!

Jerry after feeding

Got milk? All Jerry Coyne needs here is an Oreo:

Milk beard

A postprandial yawn:

Jerry Yawns

Time for a postprandial nap:

Jerry post feeding

Jerry is, again, the one who’s sleeping here:

Jerry on left
Since I have no human issue of my own, I hope that whoever adopts Jerry Coyne will keep his name. That will be my legacy!

***

Reader Joe from Williamsburg, Virginia (home of my alma mater) sent this horrifying photo of Basement Cat. He has come to extract vengeance from Ken Ham:

I saw this photo this morning on my cousin’s Facebook page. I didn’t even wait to read the details of how the moggie came to be peering through the floor. I figure Professor Ceiling Cat needs a cosmic antagonist, but not one with the same rank. Or tenure. Hope you get a kick out of this. I did.

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30 thoughts on “Caturday felids: Report on Jerry Coyne the ginger cat, and a rare appearance of Basement Cat

  1. Hey, Gayle, why are you feeding those kittens with an eye dropper?

    Any pet store will have a kitten-sized bottle and nipple, which is a whole lot neater, plus it gives the kittens a chance to suck, which, IMO, is necessary. L

    1. They are not feeding from an eyedropper. They are feeding from a syringe with a teat on the end. This is how the vet told me to feed. The strength of the kittens’ suck pulls down the syringe plunger without any need for me to depress it (most of the time anyway). They are now extremely aggressive at feeding time and it can get quite violent! They are learning to eat kibble and lap up milk from a bowl.

      1. I was going to post something similar. I always used kitten bottles and they never got milk all over their face like that…

        I also would wipe their anus with cotton wool dipped in warm water and then squeezed, so as to stimulate their defecation (mother cats lick them there after they have fed, for that very reason) – without this, their tummies can get huge and congested, and they can even die from intestinal obstruction.

        1. Yes, yes. I’ve done all of that toileting business – now they do it by themselves in the litter tray. Milk on their faces was ‘day 1’ – their first day of syringe feeding after being taken from their mother and spending perhaps as long as 12 hours alone in a box at a petrol station. It took them a while to learn to suck. Photos are old. Kittens are now almost 5 weeks old.

    1. I don’t know about you, but when I was getting flooring (for the loft, admittedly) last summer, the choice was between different sizes of chipboard for the flooring, then an extensive range of laminate boards to go over the top of it. Real wood for flooring? Not on my budget. Not even on the biggest hardware store in town’s aspirational end of their stock range.

      1. Geometry is different for cats. “Higher” and “lower” don’t have the same meaning to them as to us mere mortals. Especially since they’re all beyond our comprehension in the first place.

        b&

        1. So … cats would be discomforted by the geometrical correctness of the “Crooked House” I mentioned a couple of messages ago?

          1. Discomfited? No. Bored, maybe, but not discomfited…though they’d probably feign interest just to avoid hurting the feelings of the slave who built it.

            b&

    1. Now I get the amusing image of a Jerry asleep in the rear as well as in the front after reading theology for too long.

      And the middle part is awake asking for moar noms: “growrr”.

  2. I wonder if kitten photos and powdered sugar covered fried dough were passed around before every UN session, might we see immediate progress toward world peace 😉

  3. Basement Cat looks more laid back than Ceiling Cat, whose expression seem to be one of shock and alarm.

    Of course, Basement Cat has probably seen it all. Chill, Dude — it’s cool. Get down.

    1. Those are amazing!

      What completely baffles me about e.g. the third one (with the cat draped over a row of steel bars) is how can they possibly sleep like that. To a human, it would become excruciatingly painful and probably life-threatening after about three minutes.

      Anyway, those are classic photos. (CeilingCat if you see this I commend them to you as a post)

  4. I will keep the name Jerry’ or perhaps ‘JC’ in mind when I get my next cat.
    I had planned to call it Hodge because even though Samuel Johnson was an utter bastard, he did like cats and this is my favourite line from Boswells life of Johnson –
    ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;’ and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’

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