Caturday felid trifecta: Quarantine tips from cats; analysis of an ancient cat sculpture; and life with a lion pride (and lagniappe)

The New Yorker has a short piece about how to quarantine safely and effectively—supposedly written by the author’s cat. Click on the screenshot to see them.

Of course, the “tips” are all things that cats normally do, like these:

Communicate with friends and family.

Start screaming at 6 a.m., for no reason, at anyone within hearing distance. Yowl at the birds. Walk across (or lie down on) a computer keyboard. Cry in front of the closed door to a room you’re not supposed to be in anyway. Bite a phone. Yell into your full bowl of food.

Maintain a balanced diet.

Eat small meals, three to fourteen times a day. Dump food onto the floor for variety. Put your entire hand in a bowl of popcorn but then decide it’s not what you want. Steal a piece of turkey from an unattended sandwich.

Stay hydrated.

Drink plenty of water, ideally directly from a running faucet.

At least the cat didn’t recommend drinking from the toilet. . . .

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From the iris, the site of the Getty Museum, we get an intriguing investigation of a bronze cat statue found in the Getty villa. What was it? Was it from ancient Egypt?

Here’s the statue and what was written on its base:

“Mounted By W.T. Ready, Nov 1892, 55 Rathbone Pl(ace), London W.” A 19^th century business directory listed Ready as “a dealer in antiquities, coins, metals and gems.”

J. Paul Getty bought the statue for £600 pounds in 1955, acquiring it for his envisioned museum. At that price, it better have been genuine! But curators decided initially it was a modern imitation. Then SCIENCE stepped in: X-rays,

Read the article to see the scientific methods used to date it, including X-rays, fluorescence spectroscopy (pXRF), and thermoluminescence. The final result was dispositive:

One of the most advanced technical processes from antiquity, lost wax casting, used a clay core over which the wax model was built up and modeled. The thin layer of wax was then reproduced by the bronze cast. We suspected that this dark material might be a clay containing core material.  If so, could it be dated by a process called thermoluminescence?  To find out, we sent a sample to a dating laboratory in Oxford England. The material indeed contained clay and could be dated to between 1700 and 2700 years ago. Taken together, the alloy and clay core date point to the cat being an ancient Egyptian work after all.

It’s a beautiful work, and must now be worth considerably more than the 600 pounds Getty paid for it

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Finally, we have a 10-minute video of one Dean Schneider interacting with a lion pride at Kruger National Park. It’s an amazing disquisition about how one has to interact with lions to gain their respect and their acceptance. Now clearly many if not all of these cats were raised by humans, but that doesn’t mean they can’t turn on Schneider and dispatch him in a few seconds. He has his own ways of disciplining the lions as well, including rapping them hard on the nose and paws.

It’s fascinating, and I would love to sleep and play with the lions like he does, but I’m under no illusion that I could do these things.

But baby lions, on the other hand. . . .

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For lagniappe, we have a photo from reader Divy Figueroa, who was featured previously with a Galápagos tortoise she was treating (she does veterinary work). This time it’s a different tortoise, but also a d*g and her cat Jango. Divy’s caption:

This tortoise is an African Spur-Thigh tortoise (Centrochelys sulcata), known commonly as a Sulcata. It was a rescue who came home with us overnight. Jango and Rigby were glad to welcome him home.

h/t: Merilee, Ken