A lot is going on in the world of cats and their staff.
Although Stephen Barnard already premiered this with his companion hound Deets, the trend has taken off and we now have Trump your cat
Why yes, yes, @maddow, #trumpyourcat is the funniest thing on the internets today! pic.twitter.com/p103udmufn
— scott olson (@scott_olson) July 11, 2015
My own personal theory which is mine, is that The Donald is secretly running interference for Hillary. With everyone’s attention focused firmly on his antics, she slips under the radar and on with her mission.
Lion cubs at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo! Babies are definitely cuter when they come covered in fur. Humanity really slipped up there.
Roaaaaawrrrr!
Slate had an interesting article on the domestication of cats asking Are they really still wild? Of course they have it all backwards: cats have bent humans to their will. Anyhoo, long story short, the verdict is: the experts can’t agree.
Click through on the image to watch the video on Slate.
Then we get the Six-Legged Cat of Edmonton and no, this isn’t a glitch on Google Earth or Panoramic iPhone settings.
And he’s a really sweet tuxedo cat named Pauly.
The vet says he thinks the extra legs are the result of a partially absorbed inter-uterine twin. He is currently being treated by a kind-hearted vet Dr. Tamer Mahmoud, at Edmonton’s Oxford Animal Hospital who hopes that corrective surgery will enable him to live a normal life and find a loving forever-home.
Jerry’s posted photos of Cat Man from Tokyo before, but now we have a video.
A bit of history with your Caturday? Of course. We have an ancient bobcat buried like a human found in a 2000 year old Native American burial ground in western Illinois. These pendants were buried with the beloved moggie.
One of the archeologists on the dig said this:
“It shocked me to my toes, I’ve never seen anything like it in almost 70 excavated mounds. Because the mounds were intended for humans, somebody bent the rules to get the cat buried there. Somebody important must have convinced other members of the society that it must be done. I’d give anything to know why.”
And then we have a little bit of nature imitating art. The owl and the pussycat in this case do not go to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. But they live at Hukulou Coffee in Osaka, Japan, so there may well be honey and plenty of money.
And after that cavity-inducing, internet-breaking bowl of sweetness; that’s a wrap for another week.
Hat-tip and many thanks to: @OrAroundTen, @TychaBrahe, @Aneris23, John W., Taskin, Merilee, Catherine P, Randy.
Sure, it’s funny until you find out that he has used Gorilla Glue on their butts to keep them in the baby carriage.
Someone will probably correct me, but I think the “hukulou” in Hukulou Coffee means owl.
Google translates tells me some squiggles and ” フクロウ Fukurō” for “Owl”. But since my stock of Japanese comes solely from the Go board, I can’t contribute further.
More like a “Sqweeeek!” from what I remember of lion kitten vocalisations.
First thing I thought when I saw 6-legged cat was “partial twin”, but isn’t there also a developmental anomaly which results in (partial) duplication of limbs distal to a fracture and rotation of the limb bud. Not at all sure how that would happen intra-uterine ; once let alone twice. So partial twin sounds the more likely circumstance.
The surplus limbs are rotated 180 degrees to the normal (well, larger) limbs. That’s a characteristic of the developmental weirdness I’m thinking of. Something similar happens with amphibians in response to some fungal infections. Hmmm. From the partial twin POV, that would require the … well, quite a specific orientation of the two embryos.
A hip dysplasia and an ascended bollock. Not a happy catty. But seems likely to be in as good hands as he’s going to get.
I speculate that the extra legs are not from an absorbed twin, but are rather parts of a conjoined twin that developed that way from the very beginning. The sign is that the supernumerary legs (and I see what look like ribs as well) are in mirror symmetry to the adjacent normal legs and ribs.
Early stage vertebrate embryos have powerful abilities to regulate their developing anatomy so that it comes out with a continuous pattern of structures. If a perturbation in scaling or cell-cell communication occurs that disrupts the continuity of pattern then the embryo regulates it to smooth things out and restore continuity. At the extreme we see as a result conjoined, mirror image twins. On a lesser scale we see a single individual with some mirror image duplications like mirror imaged limbs or other structures. The literature on embryonic development is full of experimental demonstrations of this important principle, where normal embryos are surgically altered a little, and the result is conjoined twins and so on.
Fascinating!
(Looks like there’s a bit of extra spine there as well.)