Caturday felid trifecta: Man adopts kitten found at O’Hare airport; a jump-scaring Sphynx cat; a scientific study of cats, toxoplasmosis, and happiness

Caturday felid is moribund, but we continue today with three items and lagniappe.

First, a professor found a kitten at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and I didn’t hear of it until a reader told me. First, the news headlines from NBC 5 (note the “cat distribution system”). Click headline to read:

Here is some text, but the two videos below also tell the same story. And they show the kitten:

A missed connection at O’Hare turned into an airport adoption when the ‘cat distribution system’ struck during a traveler’s smoke break.

Minnesota native Virgil Wiebe was at O’Hare Airport waiting out a long delay when he stepped outside to smoke a cigar, he told NBC Chicago. While at the little park outside Terminal 1, Wiebe said his new little furry orange friend came running up to him.

“He sort of appeared out of nowhere,” Wiebe said. “I already missed one flight, and I figured, well, I might be missing another one.”

Wiebe looked around for a mother, assuming it may have been born in the bushes, but couldn’t find one. So, he took the kitten and went up to ticketing counter.

“The TSA agent had no idea what to do, said they never seen a stray at the airport,” Wiebe said. “They tried to be helpful, said ‘you’re gonna need a kennel.'”

With his flight set to board, Wiebe used DoorDash to deliver a kennel and formula while United Airlines booked one more passenger on the flight home.

Wiebe said he was charged $150 for the cat ticket, “and that was it.”

It’s not clear how the three-week-old kitten — now named Macanudo O’Hare by Wiebe after the cigar he was smoking and the place they united, or Harry, for short — found its way to the middle of the world’s busiest airport. Nonetheless, he had a home with Wiebe from that moment forward.

“He’s just a joyful little thing, and it’s so coincidental how it all happened,” Wiebe said. “Who knows where Harry came from, but now he’s ours.”

Macanudo is a brand of cigar.  And here are two news videos:

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The Sphynx breed of cat, which is nearly completely hairless (they may have short hairs on their body) was developed around 1960. Hairlessness is caused by a recessive allele that makes the hairs fragile, so they fall out easily.  I don’t know anybody who has one, but I’ve encountered them at cat shows and even got to pet one (it was soft, feeling, as Wikipedia says, like chamois leather). They are known for their loving temperament. As Wikipedia says:

Sphynx are known for their extroverted behavior. They display a high level of energy, intelligence, curiosity and affection for their owners.  They are one of the more dog-like breeds of cats, frequently greeting their owners at the door, and are friendly when meeting strangers. Sphynx cats tend to be highly attached to their owners, often demanding large amounts of attention. This breed tends to cuddle for body warmth due to their lack of fur.  A study was conducted by the Journal of Veterinary Behavior in 2012, and while further research needs to be conducted, purebred Sphynx cats were rated by their owners as friendlier than purebred European cats.

Here’s a short video about a Sphynx cat named Gemini which freaks out its owner through incessant staring and “jump scaring”.  If any cat is a Halloween cat, it’s this one, not a black cat.

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Finally, we have a science paper published in PLOS One (first headline below) and a popularized account at ScienceAlert (second headline); click either headline to read for free. The upshot, happiness is associated with cat density across 93 countries, even when other factors correlated with cat density are removed:

The abstract of the paper above; bolding is mine.

National happiness is related not only to socioeconomic factors but also to biological and ecological factors. This ecological correlational study examined associations between national happiness, cat density, Toxoplasma gondii exposure, and socioeconomic indicators across 93 countries. We hypothesized that countries with higher socioeconomic indicators (e.g., GDP, health expenditure, income level) would exhibit higher happiness levels. In contrast, we predicted that higher T. gondii exposure, both acute (IgM) and chronic (IgG), would be negatively associated with national happiness. Data on happiness measures, cat density, GDP per capita, income classification, health expenditure, and T. gondii seroprevalence in pregnant women (as a proxy for broader population exposure) were obtained from publicly available sources. In line with our hypothesis, we found that national happiness was positively associated with cat density and some socioeconomic factors and negatively associated with IgM seroprevalence. In multivariate analyses, cats per 10,000 inhabitants and IgM seroprevalence remained the strongest independent predictors. Overall, these exploratory analyses suggest that biological and ecological factors are associated with socioeconomic variables in determining national well-being. Future studies of happiness at the national level should integrate both socioeconomic and biological perspectives and include longitudinal and interdisciplinary approaches to elucidate the underlying mechanisms and processes.

Toxoplasma gondii is a neural parasite that humans contract from cat feces. Infections are found in all warm-blooded animals but the only host in which the parasite can reproduce sexually appears to be felids.  Most infected people (10%-30% of people in these countries are infected) are asymptomatic, but some people develop flu-like symptom, muscle aches, and, if immunocompromised, could have seizures and even worse symptoms.

The authors theorized that toxoplasmosis incidence would be associated with poor countries because it’s spread by outdoor cats in areas with poor sanitation, rats, and so on. Because happiness is negatively correlated with such conditions, the authors theorized that toxoplasmosis incidence would be associated with lower happiness. In contrast, because having pets relieves loneliness, the authors also supposed that cat ownership in a country would be correlated with its inhabitants’ happiness.  Here’s a map from the paper showing the 93 countries that had data on toxoplasmosis (immunological data taken from pregnant women), cat ownership, economic conditions, and happiness:

Here’s a “heatmap” showing correlations between the measured variables,with positive correlations in purple, negative in red, and asterisks showing statistical significance. Note that these are not independent effects with cross-correlations removed. Cat density, for example, is highly correlated with both income and GDP (which of course are correlated with each o0ther), so the high correlation between cat density and happiness (0.623, highly significant), could result simply because people in high-income countries can afford to have cats, and are also happier because they make more money.

Eliminating cross-correlations between some variables to reduce spurious effects, the authors still found that cat density was highly significantly associated with happiness (my bolding).

Due to high multicollinearity between GDP and income (VIFs = 7.61 and 7.41, respectively) these variables were excluded from the exploratory regression analysis. While residuals showed a non-normality distribution (Shapiro-Wilk p < 0.05), the model was robust to this deviation given the sample size (N = 93) and the maintenance of linearity and homoscedasticity. Health expenditure was retained as the primary socioeconomic indicator, as it represents a more direct proxy for national wealth (for example, because it relates to public health infrastructure). Therefore, only cat density, health expenditure, and T. gondii IgM and IgG seroprevalence were included as predictors (VIF < 1.71 in all cases). Our model accounted for 47.0% of the variance in national happiness (R² = 0.470, F_(4,88) = 19.500, p < 0.001) and showed that cat density positively (β = 0.520, p < 0.001) and IgM negatively (β = −0.240, p = 0.021) significantly contributed to the prediction of happiness scores. 

You can read the article below for a more popular account:

An excerpt from the above:

The findings suggest that biological and ecological factors can play a role in finding that much-desired feeling of happiness, factors which aren’t typically included in studies.

“This goes against the simple assumption that having more cats necessarily means greater parasite exposure and suggests that factors such as pets management, sanitation, and socioeconomic conditions may be important,” says biologist Javier I. Borráz-León, from the National Institute of Psychiatry Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz in Mexico.

The popular presentation doesn’t discuss the picking apart of factors to make them independent, but the lesson is clear:  CATS MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY!

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Lagniappe: First, an adventure cat:

An attempt to create seeing-eye cats:

 

A cat airline:

Finally, a loving moggy:

h/t: Marion, Peter, Robert, Michael, Merilee