We’re back with Caturday felids again, but I ask readers to help me out by sending me good cat-related news items when you see them. I may not use some, but I will look at all of them. Thanks.
Today we have three short items. The first, from History.com, describes a 1960 attempt by the CIA to turn cats into spies. In principle it was a good idea, but not so much in practice. Click the screenshot to read:
Here’s a description of “Operation Acoustic Kitty”:
The Acoustic Kitty was a sort of feline-android hybrid—a cyborg cat. A surgeon implanted a microphone in its ear and a radio transmitter at the base of its skull. The surgeon also wove an antenna into the cat’s fur, writes science journalist Emily Anthes in Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts.
CIA operatives hoped they could train the cat to sit near foreign officials. That way, the cat could secretly transmit their private conversations to CIA operatives.
“For its first official test, CIA staffers drove Acoustic Kitty to the park and tasked it with capturing the conversation of two men sitting on a bench,” Anthes writes. “Instead, the cat wandered into the street, where it was promptly squashed by a taxi”—not the outcome they were expecting.
Oy! I bet the microphone contributed to its death.
“The problem was that cats are not especially trainable,” she writes. In a heavily redacted memo, the CIA concluded: “Our final examination of trained cats…convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.”
Here’s the conclusion, with credit given to the CIA:
There’s more: they tried to create spy insects:
With DARPA’s support, researchers at the University of California Berkeley successfully created a cyborg beetle whose movements they could remotely control. They reported their results in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience in October 2009.
“Berkeley scientists appear to have demonstrated an impressive degree of control over their insect’s flight; they report being able to use an implant for neural stimulation of the beetle’s brain to start, stop, and control the insect in flight,” reported Wired the month these findings came out. “They could even command turns by stimulating the basalar muscles.”
Well, to use the radio-controlled bugs as spies, they’d also have to equip them with microphones, which they didn’t, but they could be used for another purpose. The Wired article quotes the Berkeley researchers:
Eventually, the mind-controlled insects could be used to “serve as couriers to locations not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots,”
********************
Here’s a post from Facebook (see also here) that I tried to check. It seems accurate in that it’s replicated elsewhere, including a newspaper (below), but information is scant. In this case, however, the cats detected spying, probably because cats have a broader hearing range than humans, especially at high frequencies, and their hearing is more sensitive than ours.
From Google News (I don’t know the newspaper). The incident is said to have taken place in 1964, but I lost the link to the article, which gave the quote below:
The article, titled “Cats Finger ‘Bugs'”, reports on the discovery of 30 hidden microphones in the Dutch Embassy in Moscow. The listening devices were reportedly found after two Siamese cats reacted to the imperceptible sound of a microphone being switched on.
- Discovery: Two Siamese cats alerted the ambassador to the hidden microphones by scratching a wall.
- Technology: The microphones were wireless, activated by electronic beams, and produced a sound inaudible to humans.
- Diplomatic Response: Instead of protesting, embassy staff used the bugs to their advantage, staging dialogues that resulted in the Soviet authorities unknowingly fixing an embassy sewer issue.
- Current Status: The newspaper reported that the microphones remained in place, and the diplomats had grown accustomed to their presence.
********************
Finally, in a 5-minute video, actor Jeremy Irons describes artistic depiction of lions, from ancient Egypt through ancient China, Greece, and Rome up to Rembrandt and beyond. Six drawings of lions by Rembrandt survive, and below you can see that one of them is up for auction.
On February 4, one of the most significant drawings by Rembrandt ever to reach auction will be sold at Sotheby’s, with 100% of proceeds protecting wild cats worldwide — art giving back to the animals that inspired it. While lions dominate culture, their real-world populations have declined by nearly 90%, and this historic auction directly supports Panthera’s work to reverse that trend.
Here’s Rembrandt’s drawing, of “Young Lion Resting” created between 1638 and 1642, and I hope it brings a lot of money for Panthera:
*********************
Lagniappe: A short video of three bobcats having fun in someone’s swimming pool:
And riceball cats from Facebook: cats made out of rice:
h/t: Debra
Hooray for the very smart Siamese cats in Moscow–and also the inventiveness of the Dutch for “snookering” the Russian authorities.
The Rembrandt drawing of the lion is beautiful. May it raise lots of money for Panthera!
I make a rice from a bag I buy called Sushi Rice. It’s very sticky so I think it may not be too hard to make a cat shape. The defining lines and eyes look like they use seaweed. Or it might look easier said than done. Those are pretty good cat shapes.
I hope lots bid on the Rembrandt Lion Art. Panthera has saved lots of big cats.
Great video of swimming bobcats taking a dip.
Very nice. The “riceball” cats are amazing! Just imagine them surrounded by a crown of roasted Brussels Sprouts. Yum!
And, with miniaturization being so advanced, it’s time to rebuild our insect spy program. Just imagine. Bedbugs spying on the Russians. I wonder what insect the Russians would use against us?
Repeated touting of Brussels sprouts may turn out to be a banning offense. . .
Rhubarb?
The US government has an insect spy program. They are tiny drones made to look like an insect. The only one I have ever seen was called by its inventor “the bumble bee.” This was in the 1990s before he was paid a lot of money to work with a certain aviation company to develop it further, and it then became classified Top Secret. I wonder how advanced it has become since then.
Forget stinkin’ bugs! Birds Aren’t Real! And I know that’s true, because I’ve got the T-shirt and the hat!
Here’s an article on Fly Spies on HowStuffWorks: https://science.howstuffworks.com/spy-fly.htm.
Interesting web site BTW.
Great website! Thanks for the link.
I call BS. Cats are trainable. CIA WANTS everyone to believe they would not use cats for spying. Search Hili for hidden microphones!
Regarding the “Cats Finger ‘Bugs'” newspaper article, I did a search on newspapers.com for that phrase and I got one hit. It was from The Montreal Gazette, Tuesday, May 26, 1964, page 1. The image in the Google News article (linked-to in the Reddit post) matches the Gazette article exactly.
βPer
The rice cats are pretty cute! 😺
Yay! Caturday Felids are back!
Love the rice ball kittehs! And the Rembrandt!
Thanks for the articles about our feline superiors.
But I hate that I laughed out loud when I got to the part where the kitty spy was squashed. What’s wrong with me?
You clearly have no empathy for cats. If I were you, I would keep those sentiments to yourself. . .
What a wonderful Caturday post! The Rembrandt is beautiful.
I read about the Siamese cats who detected the Soviet bugs years ago, in a book whose title and author I can, alas, no longer recall. The same book quoted the following solid advice from a behavioral scientist: “Don’t use cats, they’ll screw up your data.”
I find it funny that the lion’s paws are somewhat botched.
Rembrandt rather famously couldn’t paint hands worth a darn. Or, to be fair, he couldn’t paint hands quite as well as he could paint everything else. He sometimes composed pictures so that the subject’s hands were just out of sight.
An episode of the landmark TV series Mission: Impossible featured a CIA cat spy. Not only is he a very clever (and obedient!) cat, but there’s other good stuff like a Randi-like stage magician who uses his skills to snooker some rich a-hole guy. Read about it here, especially the “trivia” page — in which we learn that there were actually twelve cats used in the production — each trained for a specific on-screen task. They just don’t make TV like that any more!
The critical two minutes can be viewed here.