Now from Cole and Marmalade we have a very rare “Unicorn Cat”. Click to read (see also Cheezburger.com and reddit)
The latest rare unicorn cat, a cat that almost doesn’t look real, is capturing lots of hearts online. Is this cat for real? Or is it an AI image? Who can tell anymore? It’s rapidly getting harder to say what’s artificial intelligence versus authentic these days. We see people believing in fakes so much, so it’s (unfortunately) a legitimate question in 2024.
However, this unicorn’s human promises he’s very much real, supplying more images.
Meet Bruce, a kitty so unusual that his mama has had to tell folks on Reddit, “He is real.”
According to the post, Bruce is a Minuet, a cross between a Persian and a Munchkin with shorter legs. But if so, he’s unlike any cat we’ve seen.
As you can see, Bruce appears to be Tuxie on his face but with the palest silvery blue eyes. That alone is unusual as most tuxedo adults will have a pale greenish or yellow eye color. Unfortunately, it suggests Bruce might be the result of the breeder’s efforts to produce cats with the “Dominant Blue Eye” trait.
. . . . Considering that it looks like Bruce is a combination of two cats, this unicorn kitty may be a genetic chimera. These cats, like the famous Venus, the two-faced cat, may have different eye colors and appear as two felines split right down the middle to make one animal!
Put very simply, a chimera has at least two different sets of DNA after the fusion of fertilized eggs or zygotes. They can sometimes be both male and female at once, leading people to speculate about Bruce’s gender, which could factually be ambiguous and nonbinary. Since the kitty seems to show the tortie or calico color (almost always female), it’s an added level of oddity that the name suggests he’s fully male too. It’s even rarer!
Whatever the case, Bruce is adorable and lovable and behaves like any cat being handled at the vet. Thus, we must acknowledge that the colors, however pretty or rare, don’t really matter at all.
But they do matter because these colors get the cat a lot of attention! Still, why don’t they say something about the secondary sexual characteristic of the cat? Does it have male or female genitals, for one thing?
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From Meowingtons.com we hear about cats that once delivered mail in Belgium. Bad idea! Click to read:
An excerpt:
Once upon a time in the Belgian town of Liège, the postal system was taken over, briefly, by cats.
, , , But as intelligent and skilled as cats are, we know that even our feline friends have their limitations. Which is why when a city in 1870s Belgium decided to use cats to deliver mail, a system that relies on a timeline that doesn’t exactly suit the ideal 17-hour sleep schedule of a cay … well, it should come as no surprise that it was relatively short-lived.
Nevertheless, in the 1870s, the city of Liège, Belgium hired a grand 37 cats to deliver mail. Messages were to be tied around the cats’ necks in waterproof bags to prevent any damage to the letters. The idea was to allow the citizens of Liège and surrounding villages to easily communicate with each other.
“Unless the criminal class of dogs undertakes to waylay and rob the mail-cats, the messages will be delivered with rapidity and safety,” The New York Times reported. One particularly dedicated feline delivered his letter safe and sound in less than five hours! However, the other felines took up to a day to deliver mail to their own homes, preferring a leisurely stroll and maybe a saucer of milk along the way.
Sadly, there are no photos of this horrible idea, but the BBC does have a section on Post Office Cats in its “working cats” post (more later). Excerpts:
In 1868 three cats were formally employed as mousers at the Money Order Office in London. They were “paid” a wage of one shilling a week – which went towards their upkeep – and were given a six-month probationary period.
They obviously did their job efficiently as in 1873 they were awarded an increase of 6d a week. The official use of cats soon spread to other post offices.
According to the Postal Museum, the most popular cat of all was Tibs. Born in November 1950, at his biggest he weighed 23lbs (10.4kg) and lived in the Post Office headquarters’ refreshment club in the basement of the building in central London. During his 14 years’ service he kept the building rodent-free.
Wikipedia has an article on “Tibs the Great” with a photo and more information:
Tibs worked at Post Office Headquarters in London for 14 years, and was officially employed and paid 2s 6d per week. He worked in the basement. He was cared for by Alf Talbut, cleaner at the church of St. Martin’s Le Grand, who had also owned his mother, Minnie.[4] During his 14 years, Tibs kept the Post Office headquarters completely free of mice.[1]
In 1952, there was “public outrage” that the cats had not had a pay rise since 1873, and the next year there was a question in the House of Commons, asking the Assistant Postmaster-General, David Gammans, “when the allowance payable for the maintenance of cats in his department was last raised?”[1]
Tibs died in December 1964; he had been suffering from oral cancer. He received obituaries in several newspapers. By the time of his death he had grown to 23 lb (10 kg) in weight, probably due to living in one of the staff dining rooms, rather than from eating rats.
. . . The last cat employed at Post Office headquarters was Blackie, who died in 1984, which coincided with cloth sacks being replaced with rodent-resistant plastic sacks.[2]
Here’s Tibs’s obituary printed in the Post Office Magazine:
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Also from Cole and Marmalade: Karma for an animal abuser (click to read):
Being cruel to animals or other people always comes back to bite the person doing the abuse. But so often, it seems Karma has extreme patience, and justice is not swift enough for our liking.
Well, for a couple of people who were abusive to animals, the trouble that came for them is all they may ever be remembered for. Over 75 years later, their stories are remembered as anecdotes shared all over the world.
It’s amazing to think that this story from 1949 in France is still circulating around the world today. It’s all about the swift justice that came after a man named Henri Villette tried to drown a kitten. Who could have sympathy for what became of him?
Here are some news stories, with one in French:
Today, people remember Villette only as a sort of fable that tells a moral. Most versions are attributed to the Associated Press and appeared in newspapers in the United States, like the Gettysburg Times and the Ironwood Daily Globe from Michigan and the Des Moines Tribune from Iowa in 1949. The Daily Mirror in Sydney, Australia also shared the story as well as the Singapore Free Press.
More:
The story also appeared in TIME magazine, dating to October 3, 1949, with more interesting details.
“Cool and confident in his superior strength and wisdom one day last week, Henri Villette, a 67-year-old barrelmaker of Alencon, clapped an unwanted kitten into a musette bag and set out for the Sarthe River to drown it. On the river’s bank he slipped and fell. The kitten crawled to safety. Henri’s drowned body was found later by local firemen,” the story states.
There’s also a story of an abused d*g who was thrown into a well by an odious man, but the d*g lived seven months in the well, eating corpses thrown down by other people, before it was rescued. Here it is, but brush up on your French!
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Lagnaiappe: a physics cat (see here):
Here’s the story from Atlas Obscura, complete with a reprint of the paper, signed by both human and cat authors:
Jack H. Hetherington was a professor of physics at Michigan State University in 1975, when he finished what would become an influential and often-cited physics paper. The academic writing, entitled Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He, was an in-depth exploration of atomic behavior at different temperatures. It would have flown over the heads of most lay people, not to mention cats.
He was all set to send it to Physical Review Letters, which today describes itself as “the world’s premier physics letter journal.” However, before he dispatched it, Hetherington gave the paper to a colleague to get one last set of eyes on the piece. This is when he ran into a strange problem. Hetherington had used the royal “we” throughout the paper. As his colleague pointed out, Physical Review Letters generally only published papers using plural pronouns and adjectives like “we” and “our” if the paper had multiple authors.
. . .Hetherington wrote that after giving the issue “an evening’s thought,” he decided the paper was so good that it required rapid publishing. Unwilling to go back and replace the plural voice in the document, he did the next best thing and just added a second author: his Siamese cat, Chester. Of course just listing “Chester” as a co-author probably wouldn’t fly, so he invented the name F.D.C. Willard. The “F.D.C.” stood for “Felix Domesticus, Chester.” Willard had been the name of Chester’s father.
Portraying F.D.C. Willard as one of his colleagues at Michigan State, Hetherington submitted his paper, and it was published in issue 35 of Physical Review Letters.
Voilà!:
That is a physicist after my own heart!
h/t: Debra, Stacy
Bruce looks like a black and white cat that is wearing a racoon coat from the 20s.
Alternatively, Bruce looks like a tuxedo cat that had its head transplanted onto the body of a tabby by a mad scientist. (wasn’t there an item about the doctor who was going to do a head transplant on people on this site recently?)
I was so curious about Bruce that I googled for more info, but all the links go back to the same set of pictures of Bruce taken at the vet’s office. That makes me think that the photographer was someone who worked at the vet and not the owners. If so, I wonder if the owners even know that their kitty is now internet famous.
Hili thus participates in a long tradition, along with F.D.C. Willard, of cats helping their writing/researching staff. One of my cats, Jennifer, “contributed” in the writing of my master’s thesis in musicology by dashing across the room just as I had dozens of 3×5 cards laid out on the floor. She thought they needed rearranging.
Thanks for Caturday on what must be a very busy day for you! I’m interested in what might happen at graduation.
I wouldn’t say that the orange part of the strange cat was calico or tortoiseshell. It’s more orange tabby, certainly seen in male cats.
I was thinking chimera too.
Great selection today. I enjoyed the story of the cat co-authoring the research paper. My cats have been very “helpful” in my studies as well, without recognition.
“Compliments of the author.” How quaint. Do researchers still buy and distribute reprints of articles, or is everything online now? I always found it flattering when someone asked me for a reprint of one of my articles.
The cat has a mix of black, orange and white, which occurs in Calico’s due to X-Inactivation, and a copy of the white spotting gene. Torties don’t have the white spotting gene. These cat’s are almost always females. The few rare males have XXY aneuploidy, and a condition called Klinefelter Syndrome, which only occurs in Primates and Felines. It’s named for the doctor who discovered it in humans. If Bruce has Chimerism, he’d have two sets of sex chromosomes, which could cause the expression of the tabby coat pattern on his body, and the tuxedo coat pattern on the head. He’s quite a rare kitty, and cute too.
Bruce is a beauty! Of all my many cats over the years, only one was a hunter. He brought me birds. The others were more interested in socks, mittens and such.
The story of F.D.C. Willard, feline physicist, was recounted in the book “More Random Walks in Science”, a collection of quirky and amusing science anecdotes, mainly from physics and mathematics. This book was the successor to an earlier collection, “Random Walks in Science”, which included a chapter on the mathematics of big-game hunting, a tongue-in-cheek explanation of how to catch lions using mathematics alone.
I am not surprised that Chester the physicist cat was a Siamese. They are an intelligent breed.
Relevant to “The Kitteh Strikes Back”,
Useless information, brought to you by channel-hopping past the live Tour de France broadcast – a “musette” is, to a (French) cyclist, a small fabric “shoulder bag” grabbed by riders, containing food, a water bottle, whatever, for consumption “on the hoof”. The original use of “musette” was for a horse’s “nosebag” containing it’s mid-day meal.
The last time I brought a new bike, spare brake blocks, pedal straps, and basic tools were supplied in a draw-neck bag, which resembles a “musette”.
“Getting some nosebag” remains slang in some parts of (northern) England for a lunch-break or brew-up at work.
Amazing the useless things you pick up with the channel-change button.