Caturday felid trifecta: Artistic cat houses; Walter Chandoha’s cats; the history of the world according to cats;

Over at Gizmodo, you can see an article about the 2016 winner of FixNation’s 2016 “Architects for Animals” cat house competition. (FixNation is a charity that sterilizes stray cats under the “trap/neuter/release” program.)  Here’s the contest, according to Gizmodo:

We’re staring at Cat in the Fishbowl, the most popular entry in the auction, designed by Abramson Teiger Architects. We’re also staring at the most incredible thing of all—the fact that a photographer caught the brief moment of time when a cat is interested in the beautiful and specially-designed habitat you’ve just bought for it. (Half a second later, that cat was playing with a piece of tape left over from the box the house was transported in, and we all know it.)

If you go to this site, you’ll see all 12 entries. Here are four. Most don’t seem all that cat-attractive; the designers apparently concentrated on artistic appeal rather than cat-habitability:

I think this is the best one by far, as it has bowls, toys, and a Safe Space:

 

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In February of 2016, Matthew wrote a post that featured Walter Chandoha, America’s most famous cat photographer. He was 94 then, but died in January of this year. His daughter, Paula, was a photographer for the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and I knew her when I was in grad school. But I had no idea that her dad was a premier photographer of cats. He took 90,000 photos of cats in his career, 300 of which graced magazine covers, and wrote 34 books.

At Mental Floss there’s a retrospective of eight of Walter’s cat photos, and I’ve reproduced a few below along with the captions (indented). The first, one of his most famous, in fact features Paula. Had I known that, I would have given her a lot of crap about it!

Paula and Kitten. Long Island, 1955. In this photo, the kitten mirrors the gleeful, toothless mien of Chandoha’s daughter Paula with such precision, it’s no wonder people often say that pets look like their owners. In reality, the kitten was just mid-meow.

Maria and Family Cats, New Jersey, 1962. The Chandoha children were actively involved not only in their father’s photography career, but also in the care and keeping of the many felines the family kept on their 46-acre farm. According to Chandoha, “cats would often become hypnotized when they were with the kids. They had a rapport that was phenomenal. There was no reticence on the part of the cat to get out of the way as they would do with an adult forcing their attention on them.”

The Mob, New Jersey, 1961. Chandoha was presented with the opportunity for one of his most famous photos, The Mob, when a group of cats began tailing him while he was walking down the road. Because he carried his camera almost everywhere, he immediately dropped to his stomach and snapped the close-up shot. The image exemplifies Chandoha’s belief that cats are innately family-oriented, though they’re often considered solitary creatures.

American Shorthair and Beagle, New Jersey, 1966. Though Chandoha worked with plenty of dogs over the duration of his career, he was a cat man, through and through. “The expressions dogs make are pretty limited,” he said. “They don’t get into real exciting postures, as a cat will.”

Indeed. As I always say, cats are living sculptures.

Here’s a picture of Chandoha in his studio in Long Island, 1955.

Here, Chandoha captures the attention of a cat with a good old-fashioned feather. Toys weren’t the extent of his management style—he also made a lot of noise. “Meowing, barking, mooing, bleating,” he said. “Sometimes my studio sounded like a barnyard.”

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Finally, we have a 4½-minute animated video of how cats would view the history of the world. (“Felis” is mispronounced, unforgivable in a TED video.)

 

h/t: Ginger K, Rick