I’m writing this from O’Hare airport for posting tomorrow, just to ensure that the Caturday felids don’t skip a week.
The first item comes from the BBC (click on screenshot below), and recounts a short but heartening tail of a rescued stowaway cat. (No photo credits were given.)
So here’s all the news fit to print:
A stowaway cat who was flown ashore from a North Sea platform has been reunited with his owner – five years after going missing.
The one-eyed cat was discovered on Thursday inside a shipping container that had been shipped from Peterhead.
It emerged he had previously been a regular visitor to HMP Grampian, where prison staff fed him and nicknamed him “one-eyed Joe”.
The publicity has now led to the wanderer being identified as Dexter.
The crew of the offshore platform fed their unexpected visitor on chicken from the canteen and called in the Scottish SPCA.
Here’s Dexter/One-Eyed Joe:
On Friday morning he was flown by helicopter into Aberdeen and handed over to the charity.
Animal rescue officer Aimee Findlay, who collected the cat, said: “We’ve no idea how the cat ended up there.
“After checking him for a microchip it turns out his real name is Dexter and he has been missing for five years.”
She added: “We are so glad that he was well looked after for the time he was missing, but were even more delighted to be able to reunite him with his original owner thanks to his microchip being up to date.”
Delighted owner Bridie Dorta told BBC Scotland she was “quite shocked” to have Dexter back.
“He’s always been a wanderer,” she said. “He went away a few years ago and we never heard anything about him since.
“We never expected him to end up back here.”
What I want to know is how a cat can wander into and out of prison at will. And imagine what it could be used to smuggle! How did he lose his eye?
Well, I don’t know, but he’s home and got chicken. Another photo:
Oh, there’s one more line:
[Bridie] hopes to be able to keep Dexter in touch with his fans at the prison.
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I had totally forgotten about the world’s most famous cat—Maru, of course—until I saw this video “suggested” for me on YouTube. Apparently, since I last checked in, after Marus owner adopted another tabby named Hana, she’s gotten yet ANOTHER cat, which is mostly white .
The translation of this video, the “Beer Box Challenge”:
Beer Box Challenge 2. If Maru goes through the beer boxes first, he doesn’t jump over to the end.
Maru can’t even make it over level one He’s a lazy cat, but we also know that he loves going through boxes (in fact, he drags the whole apparatus with him). As I remember him saying a while back, “When I see a box, I cannot help but enter.” And so he does, and that’s why we love him.
h/t: Jez, Malcolm
I love the Saturday post! So glad to see the stories turned out okay for the first two cats.
Maru is always hilarious. Especially his expression at the end. Always deadpan.
Thank you for thinking of us cat lovers who love these posts.
Good to see Maru is still with us and somewhat active. Betting he doesn’t do those high jumps into tall boxes that started his career.
A good trifecta, as usual. I’m glad you had a chance to set it up before your trip—it’s a nice part of my Saturday routine. Safe travels.
That poor undernourished cat – and what an unbelievable transformation! Wow!
Given that Dexter/One-Eyed Joe appears to be a left-eyed cat, wouldn’t ‘Sinister’ be a more appropriate name?
bPer
Latin – to any level – isn’t normally a requirement of HR departments recruiting for offshore.
There’s a fairly steady stream of land life getting out to rigs either by sneaking into containers during packing, or being in open-ended tubulars when they get bundled for the lorry and onto the quayside. I’ve never had to deal with an example, but I’d expect that baited traps would be the way to go, because trying to catch the beast would probably lead to “cat overboard”, and an awful lot more paperwork. And worse PR.
They didn’t say which rig this was. Service boats from Peterhead cover installations from 57°N to beyond 62°N, and even without the boat doing a “milk run” (visiting multiple locations) would have had between 150 and 500km (10-36hrs steaming time) run.
Agreed, it’s hard to believe it is the same cat, what a wonderful rescue!