Backpacker.com reports an Air BnB’s orange cat guiding hikers along the Appalachian Trail. Well, it doesn’t really go with them on long hikes, as the trail is well marked, but the cat does accompany them—and groused if they get off the trail. The cat also guides them home again. Click to read:
Foxglove Farm boasts a newly renovated bathroom and kitchen, easy access to the Appalachian Trail, and a private patio that looks out onto the forests of Garrison, just an hour and change north of New York City. But the Airbnb’s most popular amenity may just be an orange cat named Cinamen who loves to hike with guests.
Cinamen went viral earlier this month after X user Sebastian S. Cocioba posted about his stay with the cat. “Went with my partner upstate and the AirbnB host’s cat took us for a guided hike along the Appalachian Trail,” wrote Cocioba alongside photos of Cinamen stalking through the moss, sitting on Cocioba’s chest during a break, and perching on the edge of a puddle. “Apparently this is what she does with every guest. She would complain when we took a wrong turn off the trail and knew the way back. Amazing cat. Would apocalypse with.” The post went viral; as of the time of writing, it has been viewed more than 1.6 million times.
While Cinamen—actually male, owner Trisha Mulligan says—may be new to the internet, he’s not new to the trail by any means. A quick scan of Foxglove Farm’s reviews turns up more than a dozen mentions of the cat: “We were thrilled to have her sweet kitty [Cinamen] walk with us on the trail for a bit so we got to check off hiking with a cat from our bucket list,” one guest wrote. “We had an amazing time with [Cinamen] who went on a hike with us, coolest cat on earth,” wrote another. “[Cinamen], the cat, accompanied us on the hike and was a reliable tour guide,” a third noted.
. . .Most of Mulligan’s guests seem to agree; some, she says, come back repeatedly just to visit the cat.
“There’s this one guy, this Russian guy who comes back regularly. He never leaves reviews, but he always sends me pictures—he’s a photographer—and he books because he wants to be with Cinamen and he wants to do the trail with Cinamen,” she says. “I’ve had other people say, ‘Oh my God, we were hiking and lost, but Cinamen wouldn’t let us get lost.’” (Downside: If you’re hoping for Cinamen to join your tramily, you may be out of luck. While Mulligan says that Cinamen sometimes stays out long enough with hiking guests to worry her, he rarely spends the night outside.)
Here are two tweets (second screenshotted) of one guy’s experience with Cinamen:
Went with my partner upstate and the AirBnB host’s cat took us for a guided hike along the Appalachian trail. Apparently this is what she does with every guest. She would complain when we took a wrong turn off the trail and knew the way back. Amazing cat. Would apocalypse with. pic.twitter.com/Ubomeix285
— Sebastian S. Cocioba🪄🌷 (@ATinyGreenCell) March 11, 2024
Here’s Jen, the Good News Girl, presenting Cinamen on Tik Tok:
@thatgoodnewsgirl This AirBnB host is causing a lot of commotion online because he keeps following guests around for their entire stay. And the AirBnB has nearly a perfect rating, because it turns out that Cinnamon the cat is actually an amazing tour guide. Guests have even been coming back specifically to see him! 🐈 📸 Sebastian S. Cocioba (atinygreencell / X) #cat #catsoftiktok #newyork #appalachiantrail #hiking #hikingwithcats
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From Catster, “wholesome” cat memes. Click headline to see a bunch, and I’ll post a few:
These are, I believe, real moggies, not Photoshopped ones:
And there are many more at the site.
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From Science, a prècis of a published paper on why cats eat plants and then vomit (click to read). The authors hypothesize (and show supporting evidence) that cats eat plants because the serrated parts of the plants catch onto swallowed hair, and, when the cats vomit up a hairball, it contains plant matter with the attached hair. In other words, the plants induce vomiting, and by being attached to hairballs that might otherwise clog the gut and cause big problems, plant-eating helps preserve health by helping expel hair clogs. Click to read, and I’ll give an (indented) excerpt below:
An except:
Of the many mysterious behaviors cats exhibit, one of the biggest is also one of the most disgusting: Why do they insist on eating grass, when it only seems to make them throw up? Scientists have proposed many theories over the years, but the latest may be the one that sticks—literally. In a study published last month in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior, researchers show the grass species felines eat tend to be jagged and covered in spikelike projections. That allows them to latch onto intestinal hairballs, the team proposes, potentially helping cats dislodge them.
The study suggests cats may have figured out how to take advantage of features that plants originally evolved for self-defense, says T. Michael Anderson, an ecologist at Wake Forest University. “This could be another fascinating example of how animals use plants in ways that don’t involve getting calories and nutrients by eating them.”
Hairballs come with the territory of being a cat. Our feline friends swallow lots of fur during grooming, even more if they eat furry prey. The thick bulk can block their digestive systems—until it’s thrown up. Although scientists generally claim that cats eat grass to get rid of intestinal worms, some people suspect they do it to help expel hairballs. So far, there’s been no evidence to support this, however.
So in the new study, Nicole Hughes, a plant biologist at High Point University, focused not on cats, but on the greens they eat. “I know what grass looks like—it’s spiky and likely to snag,” she says. A mom to two tuxedo cats—Mildred and Merle—Hughes has been saving their hairballs for years, waiting for the right research project to come along. That’s just what happened when undergraduate student Kara Bensel, now an animal behaviorist at Appalachian State University, joined the lab.
Together, Bensel and Hughes clipped off bits of six homegrown hairballs and coated them in gold—a necessary step for scanning them with an electron microscope. Detailed images of the plant matter embedded in the hair wads revealed both jagged edges and trichomes, spikelike projections that stick out like prongs. Depending on the plant, those microstructures were two to 20 times longer than cat hairs were wide—meaning they were just the right size to snare fur.
Hughes says it was like looking at “drain snakes,” jagged coils of plastic designed to yank human hair out of bathroom sinks. Cat parasites like roundworms and tapeworms are up to 60 times larger than these plant microstructures—too large to be snared. That makes parasite removal a less likely reason cats eat grass, Hughes says.
Most of the plants found in the hairballs were common backyard grasses and indoor house plants such as spiderwort, according to a genetic analysis by Megan Rudock Bowman, a geneticist also at High Point. All are fairly rough surfaced, at least at the nanometer level. It’s as if the cats were specifically choosing microscopically scratchy plants, Hughes says.
The one problem with this, which author Lasserre cites, is this, quoting Benjamin Hart, a veterinary prof at UC Davis, “dogs and other animals that don’t suffer from hairballs eat grass, too. Instead, he believes the behavior is an evolutionary holdover from an ancient ancestor that may have munched grass to expel parasites. ‘Now they’re just hard-wired to do it.’”
Here’s the paper, which you might be able to download if you click below (I had trouble). But if you want it, just ask me. I’ll put in the abstract and one SEM photo:
The abstract from the preprint:
Domestic cats and dogs have long been observed consuming fibrous plant material such as leaves and stems, and then regurgitating this matter, undigested, shortly thereafter. Previous researchers have hypothesized that consumption of plant matter by carnivores aids in the expulsion of parasites and/or hair trapped in their digestive tracts from feeding and grooming. Although direct interactions between ingested leaves and parasites have been reported in stools of many mammalian species, no such interactions have been reported for hairs expelled orally or in stools. In this study, we used scanning electron microscopy to examine six regurgitated plant masses naturally produced by two indoor/outdoor domestic cats belonging to one of the authors. DNA barcoding was additionally used to identify plants in all samples. Scanning electron microscopy revealed that all consumed/regurgitated plant matter exhibited microscopic serrations and/or epidermal hairs (trichomes), and that direct interactions between these structures and animal hairs were clearly visible in all samples examined. Ingested plant material included grasses as well as several other indoor and outdoor plant species, representing a variety of taxonomic groups. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that consuming textured leaves is a healthy behavior that could help cats and other carnivores avoid intestinal blockages by hairs ingested during feeding or grooming.
And a photo, captioned in the paper, showing cat hairs entangled with plant material. (Fve cats were examined and their vomit inspected under a scanning electron microscope, which requires that the dried mess of hair and plants be coated with gold dust!)
Figure 1. SEM micrographs of plant microstructures observed ensnaring hairs. Images include leaves of Araceae featuring trichomes (A and B), Poaceae featuring serrations only (C), Poaceae with serrations and trichomes (D), and Commelinaceae (Tradescantia sp.) with trichomes only (E).
Now if only they’d figure out how to ensure that cats stay off the rugs when they vomit up hairballs. (As every ailurophile knows, cats seem to prefer barfing on rugs rather than on bar floors.)
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Lagniappe: A mountain lion gets stoned on catnip in a pet store! From StoryTime on Facebook:
The caption ends this way:
After sniffing around, the big cat stopped at the catnip shelf, pawed a bag down, ripped it open, and immediately flopped onto the floor. Rolling back and forth, it rubbed its face and paws in the catnip, completely intoxicated by its new discovery.
When employees unlocked the doors, they were stunned to find the “customer” sprawled out in the toy aisle, surrounded by shredded bags of catnip. Wildlife officers carefully coaxed the lion outside before relocating it back into the nearby hills.
Experts explained that while mountain lions aren’t known for reacting to catnip like housecats, curiosity and the strong scent could have triggered its playful behavior. When asked about the situation, the store owner just smirked: “Colorado’s known for its plants making folks feel good, guess now we know the animals are into it too.” #cat #animals
h/t: Merilee, Stephen, Michael, Ginger K.
I can believe that eating grass and vomiting has the effect of helping to remove hairballs, but I would like to see more evidence that doing so is really an adaptation built via natural selection—which seems to be the implication. Another possibility is that they like the taste of grass, but they don’t associate eating grass with vomiting, so they don’t stop doing it. Yet another is that they like the taste of grass and they like vomiting, so they eat grass in order to experience the fantastic sensation of vomiting. Cats. So familiar, yet so mysterious.
Love the cat memes!
The lead author on the cat and grass paper, Dr. Nicole Hughes, was my MS student 20 years ago. One of the brightest and most talented researchers I have ever had. After her Masters she obtained her Ph.D. at Wake, came in 2nd in the international Tansley Competition for best review paper by a newly minted PhD, and was named Most Outstanding Teacher at High Point University. She is a truly talented researcher who continues to publish with undergrads, as they don’t have a grad program at High Point.
The mountain lion passed out on catnip! Love it. 🐈🐈🐈
I think the mountain cat picture is AI. Look at the facebook page. There is another one going around of a polar bear attack from another AI page (Lifeline Tails).
Gold-covered hairballs!? If only.
Cinamen is a darling.
I always assumed that when dogs and cats eat grass, they are doing that in response to gastrointestinal upset. Maybe they are getting some roughage to help push things through, or perhaps to elicit vomiting, or both?
My cats definitely made their way from a hard surface floor to the rug to barf whenever possible! Haven’t seen a study on that.
Enjoyed the memes. The cat on the couch does look a bit arrogant. Terrific story about the cat who walks with visitors along the Applacian Trail.
The kitteh on his sofa pwns it and he knows it. The kitteh on the toilet reminds me of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” when the troll/gnome asked the Pythons “questions 3” to let them pass. I think this black kitteh would do the same if she could.
What a lovely Cinamen leading hoomins on the Appalachian Trail. I see memes and reports of orange kittehs having “1 brain cell,” but Cinamen and my two late beloved oranges are/were very smart. My two knew how to open doors, drawers, refrigerators, and were Alpha Kittehs who looked out for my other cats.
I “would apocalypse with” any kitteh!