Caturday felids: Cats with specs, kitten imitates mom, lazy cat won’t get up to drink, newborn sand cats

August 22, 2015 • 9:15 am

Thanks largely to readers, Caturday material is coming in at a good clip. Today, then, we have no fewer than four items, all videos.

I suppose someone can find Deep Meaning in this. I can’t, but perhaps readers can suggest something. At any rate, it’s Cats with Spectacles:

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This video is adorable: it’s a tiny kitten imitating its mom washing herself:

The kitten is named “Neo,” and you can see more videos of him here, for his staff is documenting him as he grows up.

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Now here’s a lazy moggie, one that can’t be bothered to stand up to drink water, and so uses its paw as a straw:

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Sand cats (Felis margarita) are one of the smallest wild felids (adults are smaller than house cats), and are quite rare. They’re gorgeous, and, according to The Dodo, a female in an Israeli zoo, Rotem, gave birth to a litter of three kittens. This was a surprise, for a replacement mate imported temporarily from another zoo didn’t appear to hit it off.

When Rotem, a sand cat who lives in captivity at the Ramat Gan Safari Park in Israel, lost her mate Sela last year, she was the only one of her species left at the park.

Sand cats are extremely rare — there are only 116 left on the planet [JAC: how do they know this so precisely?], and many are in captivity. Instead of having new kittens and helping keep her species alive, Rotem was all alone in her enclosure, mourning her lost mate.

In hopes that she would have more litters, the staff brought in a new male sand cat named Kalahari, imported from captivity in Sweden last fall — which is pretty ironic, considering that the sand cat’s natural habitat is in the hot deserts of North Africa and Central Asia.

But Kalahari the Swedish sand cat and Rotem didn’t quite hit it off. In fact, the two pretty much avoided each other, which is why caretakers at the park were so shocked to discover that Rotem had given birth to a surprise litter three weeks ago.

Staff found her curled up with three new kittens — a total shock to the public but probably not a big surprise for Rotem.

Here’s a video of Rotem and her offspring:

Rotem and her brood, and a good photo of an adult:

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And another video giving information about this magnificent species:

h/t: Rick, Gregory, Malgorzata, Robin

13 thoughts on “Caturday felids: Cats with specs, kitten imitates mom, lazy cat won’t get up to drink, newborn sand cats”

  4. The Big Cat Rescue report of 116 sand cats is for captive zoo animals, not wild cats.
    The IUCN list the sand cat as “near threatened”. More info and a more accurate range map here:
    http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=115

    Several wild cats are considered rarer than the sand cat, with the Iberian lynx at the top of the list. Within the sand cat’s range, the Sahara subspecies of the cheetah is the rarest.

  5. My tabby Pearl (may she RIP) was a water dipper. She very seldom would drink from the bowl of water, and dipped instead. More laborious, but what is time to cats? I finally had to resort to a mug with lid for my drinking water as I caught her too many times dipping into my water glass!

      1. One of my previous kitties liked to dip her paw into the milk in our cereal. We had to watch out bowls like hawks!

  6. One of our cats wants to drink while you pour the water into the bowl. I can see why those water fountain dishes would be a big hit.

  7. The lazy water drinking cat cracked me up.
    I can see why the female sand cat did not want to accept the male — she ‘knew’ she was preggers!

  8. The markings of the sand cat are within shouting distance of the archetypal tabby pattern. I’d bet they’re fairly closely related, evolutionarily speaking.

    b&

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