Caturday felid quadrifecta: How to meet street cats; why cats should sleep on their left side ; Cat Video Fest; Matt Damon’s Schwarzenegger cat; and lagniappe

We have four—count them, four—cat items this week as one arrived when I was writing this. Plus there are two items of lagniappe.

If, like me, you’re into meeting street cats as part of a trip (I sometimes carry cat food in my daypack and always try to pet a cat I encounter),  The Washington Post describes a new book that can help you. (click headline to read archived link, or go here if you can access the Post):

An excerpt:

For several years, Bogle has been doggedly searching for street cats around the world: in parks, medinas and open-air markets, on islands and cafe chairs, atop ancient ruins and garbage cans. More than a cat dad who likes to travel, he’s a tabby tourist, a subject he explores in his new book, “Street Cats & Where to Find Them,” available Aug. 19. Over some 200 pages — and in an interview with The Washington Post — he recommends his favorite spots for hanging with community cats on five continents, plus tips on dining, attractions, transportation and helping strays.

More:

Bogle, a father of two daughters and four cats, frequently communed with felines on vacations and work assignments. Then, in 2023, he visited Istanbul, the promised land for cat lovers. He returned home from the “City of Cats” with thousands of cat photos on his phone, a sincere apology to his pets for his infidelity and the idea to write a guidebook about “feline-friendly” destinations.

“The book incorporates my two favorite things: cats, obviously, and traveling with an open heart and an open mind,” Bogle said. “I hope to help people understand what it’s like, not necessarily to be a cat there, but to be a human eating the food, talking to people and having, with any luck, a warm cat on your lap.”

Bogle highlights more than 20 places where visitors can interact with street cats in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, including respectfully observing them in Matera, Italy, and full-on cuddling with them in Lima, Peru. He also includes a sampling of cat cafes and other themed attractions, such as cat museums, a cat festival in Belgium and famous hotel cat ambassadors. Scores of photos illustrate cats being cats in extraordinary settings — not that they care.

. . .His favorite spot is Lima, where he said he would want to live if he were a cat. It’s a great place to be an ailurophile, too. In his “cat cuddle rating,” he awarded the Peruvian city five toe beans. Two other places — Istanbul, also known as Catstanbul, and Old San Juan in Puerto Rico — share this top honor.

“There’s fresh mulch and flowers, and the cats — there’s so many of them. They’re bouncing around, climbing up trees, sitting in trees,” he said of Lima’s Miraflores area. “There are hundreds of people — a great mix of locals and tourists — in this park day and night, and 1 out of every 3 people had a cat on their lap. They’re so loved.”

I don’t remember a lot of cats when I was in Lima, but perhaps it’s changed in the past couple of decades. Bogle also carries treats:

In many of the places he recommends, such as Parque Kennedy in Miraflores, Houtong Cat Village in Taiwan and Old Town in Paphos, Cyprus, volunteers set up feeding stations. Even so, he will still fill his pockets with treats purchased at a corner shop. He prefers dry food because of its portability and longer shelf life, though, on a trip to Lima, he and his wife brought packets of Churu, ambrosia for cats.

I had to look up Churu, but it’s here, and comes in little packets, just right for a cat treat.

Click below to get Bogle’s book on Amazon; it comes out on the 19th of this month:

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There’s now a Cat Video Fest going on around America–and the world. It appears to be a recurring thing, and the AP reports about it:

The best of the internet’s cat videos are coming to the big screen this weekend. Cat Video Fest is a 73-minute, G-rated selection of all things feline —silly, cuddly, sentimental and comedic—that’s playing in more than 500 independent theaters in the U.S. and Canada.

A portion of ticket proceeds benefit cat-focused charities, shelters and animal welfare organization. Since 2019, it’s raised over $1 million.

The videos are curated by Will Braden, the Seattle-based creator of the comedically existential shorts, Henri, le Chat Noir. His business cards read: “I watch cat videos.” And it’s not a joke or an exaggeration. Braden watches thousands of hours of internet videos to make the annual compilation.

“I want to show how broad the idea of a cat video can be so there’s animated things, music videos, little mini documentaries,” Braden said. “It isn’t all just, what I call, ‘America’s Funniest Home Cat Videos.’ It’s not all cats falling into a bathtub. That would get exhausting.”

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Now in its eighth year, Cat Video Fest is bigger than ever, with a global presence that’s already extended to the UK and Denmark, and, for the first time, to France, Spain, Japan and Brazil. Last year, the screenings made over $1 million at the box office.

In the early days, it was a bit of a process trying to convince independent movie theaters to program Cat Video Fest. But Braden, and indie distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories, have found that one year is all it takes to get past that hurdle.

“Everywhere that does it wants to do it again,” Braden said.

Current theatrical partners include Alamo Drafthouse, IFC Center, Nitehawk, Vidiots, Laemmle and Music Box. The screenings attract all variety of audiences, from kids and cat ladies to hipsters and grandparents and everyone in between.

Here’s the official trailer:

You can see where the videos are playing, read more about them, and buy your tickets here.

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An article in Current Biology (click headline below to read, or find the pdf here, Cats, like humans, tend to sleep on one side (I sleep on my right side, always), but the article wonders why there should be this directionality.

Here are the data compiled from YouTube videos of 408 sleeping cats: 65% of the moggies sleep facing leftward, though it looks to me that the directions are reversed in the photos below. Isn’t the “leftward facing cat” actualoly facing towards its right?

The cat on the left is indeed sleeping on its left side, but what does “rightward” mean?

Why should sleeping position be directionally lateralized? According to the authors, sleeping this way, which alerts the right side of the brain (they have the same visual/brain crossover that we do), is better because the right side of the brain is more specialized at detecting predators. (This leaves aside the question of why the brain should have any specialization of its sides, but they also deal with that, too.)  Here is the abstract, which is a bit science-y, but you should see which side your cat sleeps on and report in the comments:

Both vertebrates and invertebrates show a multitude of left–right asymmetries of brains and behaviors¹. For example, cats, dogs, and many other species have a preferred paw when handling food.   But why should humans and other animals have lateralized brains? Based on a large comparative approach¹, it is likely that asymmetries serve several purposes. First, by specializing on one limb or one side of its sensory system, the contralateral hemisphere goes through life-long cycles of motor and perceptual learning, thereby increasing the speed of processing and motor efficacy, decreasing reaction time, and enhancing discrimination ability. Second, by having two complementary, specialized hemispheres, neural processes are computed in parallel, thereby reducing cognitive redundancy¹. For example, the right hemisphere excels in processing threat-related stimuli, providing the left visual field an advantage in reacting to a predator approaching from the left.  Here, we report that two-thirds of cats prefer a leftward sleeping position, giving their left visual field and thus their right brain half a privileged view of approaching animals without being obstructed by their own body.

The conclusion:

. . . . we are inclined to believe that the significant leftward bias in sleeping position in cats may have been evolutionarily driven by hemispheric asymmetries of threat processing, but additional factors cannot be excluded. Although this finding is subject to debate, it could provide an excellent opportunity to study the emergence of asymmetries at the population level, while also helping us to learn more about the nature of one of our favorite pets.

My remaining question is why ANY cats sleep facing the “wrong” way. Is it because domestication has eliminated the threat of predation, so now each cat sleeps the way it finds most comfortable? And what about truly wild cats like lions and cheetahs. Sadly, the authors missed a golden opportunity here: go to zoos and look at truly wild cats only a couple of generations removed from the wild.  If they show the same hemispheric bias—and they should—then the directional bias should be even stronger. (You could even observe sleeping lions in the wild.) Why didn’t they do this?

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Here’s a video in which Matt Damon recounts how he adopted a domestic cat they found in the Costa Rican jungle and went to extreme lengths to save his life when the cat got a brain tumor. It seems to have worked!

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Lagniappe: a cat makes a big jump into its owners arms. Look how it extends its front paws before it lands:

Extra lagniappe showing the sculpture of an ancient Egyptian cat and her kitten. It’s the god Bastet! It’s from Facebook; click on the sculpture to go to the original.

h/t: Nicole, Loretta