If you find good cat-related items, send them along for future Caturdays. Thanks!

This is from the Independent (click to read); the cat’s entire name is “Duke Ellington Morris”.

From the article (and a a photo). At 14, though, he should be retired!

A cat has been hired as the newest employee of a US airport to help calm nervous flyers.

Duke Ellington Morris, known as “Duke”, is the latest member of San Francisco International Airport’s “Wag Brigade”.

The appointment of the 14-year-old black and white cat was announced by the airport’s Twitter account, with the caption: “Purrlease welcome our newest Wag Brigade member, Duke Ellington Morris!”

Underneath, a professional snap of Duke wearing a tiny pilot’s hat and shirt collar was also shared.

The Wag Brigade programme was first launched by the California airport in 2013, with the aim of using animals to help sooth anxious travellers.

The Duke!

Purrlease welcome our newest Wag Brigade member, Duke Ellington Morris! 🐱 pic.twitter.com/FDSw1a55Ef

— San Francisco International Airport (SFO) ✈️ (@flySFO) June 8, 2023

More:

Initially the scheme was limited to dogs, but over time it has been expanded to include other specially trained animals including cats, rabbits, and even the “world’s first therapy pig”, LilLou.

Animals are selected for their temperament and behaviour, and must be certified by San Francisco’s SPCA and have completed its Animal Assisted Therapy (ATT) programme.

Before getting the call up to wear the special “Pet Me” vest at San Francisco airport, Duke was initially rescued by the SPCA from a feral cat colony in 2010 while he was still a kitten.

He was adopted by a five-year-old girl and her mother, who had him certified as a therapy animal.

On his Instagram account, run by his owners, Duke’s latest appointment was announced with a post reading: “Happy is not the word… elated!”

Here’s Duke’s Instagram page and a photo of him with his staff. The caption for this one, apparently from the cat: “I picked her out as my guardian on November 1, 2010, when she was a sassy 5 year old. Best decision of my life.”  Clearly this was written by Duke:

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Here’s a great Kiffness video of a cat meowing, almost in English, about its loneliness. A musician turns it into a plaintive song: “Sometimes I’m alone.”

Here’s the original video (click below or here to go to the plaintive cat).

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kuma & George Rufus 🐺🐈 (@kumatron.the.shiba)

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In this article from Explore Cats, we get the answer to the question all ailurophiles have asked: “Can any species of cat climb down a tree head first?”  We know that a treed cat has to climb down backwards because its recurved claws will only give it a grasp when it’s facing forwards (see this article for more explanation). But is that true of all cats species?

The answer is no, and click on the screenshot below to see why:

The way to do it is to evolve the ability to rotate your ankles 180°, so you can walk down head first with your paws backwards. By “rotating 180 degrees,” they mean upside-down, as if you were able to walk on the tops of your feet.

From the article:

. . .certain wild cats have the hypermobility needed. Three wild cats are known to be able to rotate their rear ankles 180 degrees.

These arboreal cats have adapted to a life that is spent significantly in trees. Hypermobility provides these cats with the ability to move swiftly up and down trees.

The ability to rotate their ankles 180 degrees also gives these three species of felines the ability to climb down trees by holding on with their hind legs only as well as the ability to hang from tree limbs with just one rear paw.

Three known species of wild cats are known to have evolved hypermobility: Margery, clouded leopards, and marbled cats.

The Margay

The margay (Leopardus Wiedii) is considered by many researchers to be the most adapted to life in the trees. The margay is a small spotted cat that is native to Central and South America. Smaller than a house cat, the margay only weights 2.6 to 4 kg (5.7 to 8.8 lb).

Margays are found mostly in dense forests that range from tropical evergreen forest to tropical dry forest and high cloud forest.  The wild cat’s range once extended as far north at Texas but is now distributed from Mexico through Central America to Brazil and Paraguay.

In addition to ankles that are able to rotate 180 degrees, margay cats have large paw pads that help them to grip tree bark. Nocturnal cats, the agility of margays helps them to hunt small primates and squirrels as well as amphibians, reptiles, birds and eggs.

A video:

And here’s Professor Ceiling Cat actually holding a margay, which was pretty tame and was resident of a bar in Playas Del Coco, Costa Rica. The photo is from August, 1974 when I was taking an Organization for Tropical Studies Course in Costa Rica, and it’s a photo of a 35mm slide. The cat bit my ring, and for years afterwards, until the Turkish puzzle ring fell apart, it had a dent from the margay’s tooth.

This is the only time in my life that I held a species of cat other than a housecat.

Marbled Cat.

The marbled cat (Pardofelis marmorata) is a small wild cat native with a distribution from eastern Himalayas to Southeast Asia. Like the margay cat, the marbled cat is also adapted to life in the trees and has the ability to rotate its ankles 180 degrees (Kitchener et al., 2010). This lets the marbled cat descend trees head first as well as hang on to a branch with one hind leg only.

The marbled cat lives in forest up to 2,500 m (8,200 ft) altitude. Similar in size to a domestic cat, the marbled cat weighs between 2 and 5 kg (4.4 and 11.0 lb).

This is a short video as the cat is elusive:

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Finally, the clouded leopard, perhaps the most beautiful of cats:

These arboreal cats (Neofelis nebulosa) live in dense forests from the foothills of the Himalayas through mainland Southeast Asia into southern China.

The largest of the wild cats with hypermobility, clouded leopards weigh between 11.5 and 23 kg (25 and 51 lb).

Notice the rotated ankles in this tweet:

Not only do Clouded leopards possess claws and paws specifically adapted for conforming to the shape of tree branches, but, they also have ankle joints that are able to rotate completely backwards. This makes them one of the best climbers in the cat family! pic.twitter.com/5TA2p5cRFn

— Doc 🐍🔜 Anthrocon (Dealer's F10) (@DrWildlife) June 12, 2018

I found this video:

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Lagniappe from reader Divy: Her master Jango approves of the paper by Luana and me:

h/t: Su, Ginger K., Debra

I am running low on cat-related items for future Caturday felids. If you come across an interesting cat-related piece, please send it my way.

Did you know that Wikipedia has a list of famous and notable cats? Yes it does, with lots of them! Click below to go down the rabbit hole, for many of the cats have their own entries.

Here’s just an excerpt (click on links to see cats). Oscar the hospice cat is the one that freaks me out the most.  He would lie down beside terminally ill patients right before they were out to die. In fact, as the article says,

Joan Teno, a physician at Steere House, clarified that “it’s not that the cat is consistently there first. But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours.”^[9]

After Oscar accurately predicted 25 deaths, staff started calling family members of residents as soon as they discovered him sleeping next to a patient in order to notify them and give them an opportunity to say goodbye before the impending death.  

He accurately predicted 100 out of 100 deaths, and nobody knows how he did it!  (Some say it was confirmation bias, but read this article in the New England Journal of Medicine. If you can’t get it, ask me.) This is one case in which I’ll suspend skepticism. Here’s Oscar, the Cat of Death.

• Beerbohm, a cat that resided at the Gielgud Theatre in London.
• Blackie the Talking Cat, a “talking” cat who was exhibited (for donations) by an unemployed couple on the streets of Augusta, Georgia. Blackie became the subject of a court case, Miles v. City Council of Augusta.
• Blue, a Siamese cat taken “hostage” in Gresham, Oregon in a grocery store in the United States in 1994.
• Browser, a Texas library cat.
• CC (Copy Cat, or Carbon Cat), the first cloned cat.
• Chase No Face, a cat who lost her face in an accident, was a therapy cat for people with disfigurements.^[55]
• Crimean Tom, a cat that helped British Army troops find food after the Siege of Sevastopol
• Dusty the Klepto Kitty (US), notorious for being an expert night cat burglar.^[56]
• Emily, an American cat who, after being lost, was found to have gone to France.^[57]
• Faith, a London cat that took up residence in St Faith & St Augustine’s church (by St Paul’s Cathedral) in wartime, and received a PDSA Silver Medal for her bravery in caring for her kitten when the church was bombed.^[58]
• Fred the Undercover Kitty, a cat famous for assisting the NYPD and Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office in 2006.
• Jack, a cat who was lost by American Airlines baggage handlers at John F Kennedy airport before Hurricane Irene.^[59] He was found later but was severely dehydrated and malnourished after his 61-day ordeal^[60] and was euthanized.^[61]
• Lewis, a cat who became infamous after being placed under house arrest.
• Little Nicky, the first animal cloned for commercial reasons.
• Marzipan (c.1992–2013), a calico cat who lived in the lobby of Astor Theatre in Melbourne, Australia. She was the theatre’s unofficial mascot and was often seen sitting on the couches, waiting for the patrons to pat her as they left the cinema. She was also known to stroll in the cinema and watch the movies, or simply wander down the aisle and sit on patrons’ laps.^[62] She had her own Facebook fan page.^[63]
• Mike (1908 – January 1929), a cat who guarded the entrance to the British Museum.
• Mittens (~2009–present), a ginger Turkish Angora who wanders Wellington, New Zealand, and has a Facebook-based fanbase who regularly posts photos of him climbing into rental cars, entering businesses, and napping in unusual places.
• Nora, a gray tabby cat who plays the piano alongside her owner.
• Oscar, a cat fitted with bionic hind legs following an accident in 2009.
• Oscar the hospice cat, written up in the New England Journal of Medicine for his uncanny ability to predict which patients will die by curling up to sleep with them hours before their death. To date he has been right 100+ times.^[64][65]

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You probably already know what you’re supposed to do to communicate with your cat. Guess first!

From ScienceAlert; click on screenshot:

An excerpt:

Never fear – research from 2020 has shown that it’s not so difficult. You just need to smile at them more. Not the human way, by baring your teeth, but the cat way, by narrowing your eyes and blinking slowly.

By observing cat-human interactions, scientists confirmed that this expression makes cats – both familiar and strange – approach and be more receptive to humans.

“As someone who has both studied animal behavior and is a cat owner, it’s great to be able to show that cats and humans can communicate in this way,” Karen McComb, a University of Sussex psychologist, said in a 2020 statement.

“It’s something that many cat owners had already suspected, so it’s exciting to have found evidence for it.”

Here’s a demonstration:

The SCIENCE:

Anecdotal evidence from cat owners has hinted that humans can copy this expression to communicate to cats that we are friendly and open to interaction. So, a team of psychologists designed two experiments to determine whether cats behaved differently towards slow–blinking humans.

In the first experiment, owners slow-blinked at 21 cats from 14 different households. Once the cat was settled and comfy in one spot in their home environment, the owners were instructed to sit about 1 meter away and slow-blink when the cat was looking at them. Cameras recorded both the owner’s and the cat’s faces, and the results were compared to how cats blink with no human interaction.

The results showed that cats are more likely to slow-blink at their humans after their humans have slow–blinked at them, compared to the no–interaction condition.

The second experiment included 24 cats from eight different households. This time, it wasn’t the owners doing the blinking but the researchers, who’d had no prior contact with the cat. For a control, the cats were recorded responding to a no–blink condition, in which humans stared at the cats without blinking their eyes.

The researchers performed the same slow–blink process as the first experiment, adding an extended hand toward the cat. And they found that not only were the cats more likely to blink back, but they were also more likely to approach the human’s hand after the human blinked.

“This study is the first to experimentally investigate the role of slow blinking in cat-human communication,” McComb said.

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The New York Review of Books has a cat issue with a review of five books on cats by Gregory Hays, an associate professor of classics at the University of Virginia.  If you click on the second screenshot, you can read his article for free!

I’ve put the five books below with their Amazon links.

John Gray’s book has gotten good reviews in other places, too. Here’s from Hays’s bit about it:

Cats aren’t preoccupied with being good, only with being cats. They are incapable of empathy, altruism, pity, or kindness, and likewise incapable of cruelty or sadism. They are beyond good and evil. Cats don’t know that they will die, though they may sense the approach of death when it comes. They do not search for meaning in their lives.

Cats refute continuously the claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, by living it. They are both Stoics and Epicureans: they live in accordance with nature and they seek to maximize pleasure. But they do this without reading treatises or attending lectures. Nor do they share the defensive outlook and rejection of the world common to both schools. That cats have no use for philosophy is an indictment, for Gray, not of cats, but of philosophy: “Posing as a cure, philosophy is a symptom of the disorder it pretends to remedy.”

If cats have the answer—that there is no answer, for there is no question—it follows that the best philosophers will be the most catlike. A cautionary example here is Pascal, who lived an anxious life trying to overcome his dread of death through faith and reason. Not a cat person, Pascal. Gray’s sympathies lie rather with Montaigne and Samuel Johnson, who recognize the futility of human striving and urge us to take life as it comes. Not surprisingly, both were cat owners.

Soden’s book is a fictional biography of Jeoffrey, the cat celebrated by Christopher Smart as his companion in the lunatic asylum. Smart’s poem (a fragment of Jubilate Agno) is my favorite bit of literature about cats, and you can read it here.  All cat lovers need to know this relatively short fragment of poetry that, to me, best sums up how humans see cat-ness.

Hays says this:

Unsurprisingly, the years with Smart are the heart of the book. The asylum period is an imprisonment for Jeoffry too. Used to the sounds and smells of London, he is now confined by a wire-topped wall to Smart’s room and tiny garden. We watch with him as Smart is force-fed his “medicine” and herded out naked into the rain with other patients, in lieu of bathing. Soden movingly imagines Smart’s mental illness as experienced by Jeoffry:

To Jeoffry, the man smelled of fear…. Around Smart stretched something that was not there, but which Jeoffry could see all the same: an absence of light, like a silk blanket that was not black but blank, that was not dark but vacuous, empty of meaning, devoid of sense…. On some days the blanket and its jabs sent Smart mad, and on other days it sent him still, and sometimes Jeoffry could see that it wasn’t there at all. Jeoffry knew it for what it was, but what it was he could not say.

Whether this catches a cat’s experience, who can know? But at least it takes seriously the gulf between cats and ourselves.

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h/t: cesar

Here’s a story from the New Yorker that will divide cat-lovers into the “innies” and the “outies”. Click to read:

It’s about the German town of Walldorf, which is legally required to monitor species that are locally threatened. It turned out that the crested lark (Galerida cristata), though widespread across Eurasia and north Africa, was locally rare.

The town set aside some nearby fields as lark habitat, but the birds stayed put, so Walldorf fenced in the vacant lots where the birds were nesting in the weeds. A community of sixteen thousand people—home to the software giant sap and one of the richest towns in Germany—was now spending more than eighty thousand euros a year to protect a small number of birds.

Here’s a crested lark from Wikipedia (photo from Morocco):

By last year, only two pair of the species were observed breeding in the town. And so the local government took more drastic action:

“From now until August 31,” it declared, “the free roaming of cats is to be prevented by their owners in the area covered by this decree.” The rule would take effect in just three days, not only in the new subdivision but also in Tredwell’s neighborhood, and recur each spring until 2025. The owner of any cat caught outdoors would be fined five hundred euros, or about five hundred and fifty dollars; any cat that injured or killed a crested lark could incur a penalty of fifty thousand euros.

And of course there are two sides. As author Crair writes,

As a city person, I have always thought of the countryside as close to nature—but many rural animals, struggling to survive in agricultural landscapes, are now seeking refuge in denser human settlements. Urban wastelands are becoming sanctuaries for rural birds; scientists in Czechia, where the crested-lark population has fallen by two-thirds since the nineteen-seventies, discovered the birds nesting in abandoned commercial developments, where native weeds still grow. These habitats were so fragmented that the birds stopped functioning as a single, healthy population. Baden-Württemberg likewise became a kind of crested-lark archipelago, with islands of birds in a sea of unpopulated fields.

Cats are most dangerous to wild bird species that live in small and isolated groups. On actual islands, for example, cats have contributed to the extinction of at least thirty-three creatures. The Birds of the World database, from Cornell University, warns, in an entry on the rare Razo skylark of Cape Verde: “One introduced cat could easily spell the end of this species.” This is why nations like Australia, where cats only arrived with European settlers, often regulate cat ownership. In Germany, where there are few restrictions on cat ownership, the nation’s felines kill more than fifty million birds each year. Peter Marra, a Georgetown biologist, argues in his book “Cat Wars” that “the most desirable solution,” for conservationists the world over, would be to “remove all free-ranging cats from the landscape by any means necessary.”

And yet it’s hard for cat owners to resist the insistent meowing at the door as many cats demand to go out. (I always kept my cats indoors, mostly to keep them safe, as I didn’t ever see them be predators.) But the cat-owners of Walldorf, and their moggies, resisted:

Last summer was “a real horror show” for Walldorf’s cats and their owners, Tredwell told me. Mimi and Fluffy refused to use a litter box for weeks, but Tredwell couldn’t open the windows for fresh air, lest the cats escape. The cats threw up, shredded the furniture, and clawed her face while she slept. She was allowed to let them roam with expensive G.P.S. tracking collars, but the cats ran away from her when she tried to steer them away from lark territory. She gave Mimi and Fluffy to her mom, who lived outside the lockdown zone, but they disappeared and turned up at Tredwell’s door two days later. When she was finally allowed to let them out again, on September 1st, they disappeared for another three days.

Oy gewalt! What is one to do? Well, the pecksniffs, with their authoritarian streak, came out to report people:

Many residents of Walldorf started to think that efforts to enforce the lockdown went too far. “There were people running around taking pictures, trying to gather information about the cats,” Marine Vetter, a local cat owner, told me. The country’s largest newspaper, the tabloid Bild, reported that locals received a letter asking them to report cat sightings to Fischer’s team. The paper called Fischer and his employees the “Katzen-Stasi.” In January, Walldorf hired a second conservation company to protect crested larks; Fischer resigned. In February, a state official said that Fischer’s team may have improperly collected private data. (Datenschutz, or data protection, is a –schutz about which Germans tend to agree.)

The author does make a good point, especially salient given that the species is only locally endangered, and because of human activity that reduced suitable habitat, not necessarily because of cats:

Still, my conversations with Lepp left me feeling sorry for the cats. There’s no telling whether last year’s larks hatched in Walldorf because of the cat lockdown, some other factor, or pure luck. Cats seemed to be bearing the burden of bad decisions that humans have made, which have transformed so much of the planet that many of our fellow-creatures can no longer survive—and no one talks about keeping people indoors from April to September. (Incidentally, when we were locked down at the start of the covid-19 pandemic, birds became more visible and produced higher-quality songs.)

Why not keep humans indoors, too?  We are, after all, the world’s most notorious and profligate predator.

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Maybe you already know the answer(s) to this question, but read the LiveScience piece below in case you don’t:

Most of the piece:

“It’s one of those behaviors that we mostly understand, but not totally,” said Mikel Delgado, a certified cat behavior consultant at Feline Minds, told Live Science. “Purring is likely reflexive, like breathing.”

The comfortable rumble of a cat’s purr is one of life’s little joys for cat owners. But is that true for the cat, too? Yes, generally, cats purr when they are feeling good. Whether sitting on a lap or sprawling in sunshine, a purring cat is usually a happy cat.

“Ninety percent of the time, purring is positive,” Delgado said. “It means that your cat is experiencing pleasure. It’s happy, content and feels safe.”

Other reasons cats purr

But research suggests that cats purr for other reasons, too. One is related to survival. Kittens are born blind and deaf; they start purring a few days after birth. In the wild, purring is safe because it is quiet, so it’s unlikely that predators will hear a kitten purr.

At first, purring helps kittens stay close to mother cats, Dr. Kate Anderson, a veterinarian and professor at Cornell University, told Live Science. “They actually find their mom by purring, and their mom checks on them and then she purrs back,” Anderson explained.

But wait! There’s more!

Kittens also purr while they are nursing. “The purr may even lead to some bonding between mom and kittens,” Delgado said.

Cats keep purring when they grow up. “They’ll purr with another cat that they’re friendly with,” Anderson said.

Often, cats purr while grooming each other, when “there’s some caretaking behavior going on,” Delgado said. Domestic cats purr around familiar humans and dogs. Cats also purr while resting, eating or enjoying their alone time.

What’s more, cats may purr to get what they want. Most of the time, said Delgago, purring is a reflex; but purring can be intentional as well. According to a 2009 study in the journal Current Biology, cats use a specific “solicitation purr” to ask for food or to nudge humans to get out of bed. This purr mixes in higher-pitched frequencies that sound a bit like a baby crying. “When humans hear cats purring loudly using a solicitation purr,” Anderson said, “they see it as urgent.”

And more: they purr when they’re stressed or injured, though why they do this isn’t fully understood:

Although cats usually purr when they’re happy; that’s not always the case. They sometimes purr when they are stressed, Delgado said.

“I had a cat that used to purr at the veterinary office — and my cat definitely did not like going to the veterinarian!” Delgado said. “So that was kind of a stress response.”

Anderson has treated many injured, purring cats; she also thinks purring can be a coping mechanism, as it may help them self-soothe when they are sick, scared or dying.

One idea is that purring may help cats heal. A 2001 study in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America noted that cats purr at frequencies between 20 and 150 hertz, which are similar to frequencies used in human treatments for bone growth and muscle pain.

But there is no strong evidence to support or refute this idea.

Now you may be asking this: “What is the loudest purr ever recorded?” The Guinness Book of World Records has your answer, and I’ve put a video of the champion below:

The loudest purr by a domestic cat is 67.8 dB and was achieved by Smokey, owned by Lucinda Ruth Adams (UK) at Spring Hill farm, Pitsford, Northampton, UK, on 25 March 2011. This was equalled by Merlin, owned by Tracy Westwood (UK) in Torquay, Devon, UK, on 2 April 2015.

Smokey is a domestic cat and achieved its record in its home, where it felt relaxed and happy.

Merlin was 13 years old at the time of its record.

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, I give you Merlin in full throat. That is one loud purr!

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Now the prospective law described below definitely makes sense, and was sent in by gravelinspector. He noted this:

I know you don’t want news of cat attacks, but this is somewhat different. Link below.

In the UK, Scotland and England/Wales, the law is currently that if you have a collision in your car (or bike) with a dog, you’re obliged to inform the police and RSPCA / SSPCA ([Royal or Scottish] Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) or a local vet. Because a dog is a piece of property with an owner and a value.

Ditto horses, sheep, cattle, deer … but not cats. Cats, in law, don’t have owners (well, we know that!), and therefore have no value, and no requirement to inform anyone of damage to this “non-property”.

Well, a case in Auld Reekie is leading to another attempt to change the law:

Click to read:

From the piece:

Hugo, an Arabian Mau, was well-loved around the cobbled streets of the upmarket retail area and, despite having a devoted owner, was looked after by hundreds of locals.

The tabby died last week after he was hit by a car that failed to stop.

Possibly, this time round the law will be changed. One significant difference from the 80s is that now all (domesticated) cats *should* now be microchipped, which disposes of the legal fiction of “not existing without ownership”. Probably it’ll drown in legalese – the normal fate for such outrage campaigns. Maybe not.

Yes! An article about cats in the New York Times, which has at last found a theme to unite all good people. This one is about why the Japanese revere cats, as we all know they do. Japan is the home of Miss Kitty, there are dozens of cat-themed retail objects, and Japan has several “cat islands” that you can visit to see gazillions of felines.  The article in fact begins with the author’s planned trip to Aoshima, a cat island, a trip that was sadly aborted by severe currents, making the author, Hanya Yanagihara, distraught. Click to read:

Some excerpts:

“You don’t need to see those cats,” Mihoko [Yanagihara’s companion] said. “Aoshima isn’t the only place in the country that has a lot of cats.” We were eating dinner by that point: My despair had lasted from brunch at an American-style coffee shop, the kind that no longer exists in America but became popular here after occupation; through a visit to Matsuyama Castle (built in 1627), one of Japan’s dozen or so extant castles; a stop at an orange juice bar (where you could order juice squeezed from different local varietals, some sweet, some tart); and, finally, dinner at a restaurant where we both ordered gyu, thin slices of grilled marinated beef, served rare over rice with grilled burdock and leeks. Throughout the day, as I sulked and broke into intermittent rants at the gods, the weather and the harbor master, Mihoko patiently pointed out cats — here was one licking itself near a makeshift shrine; there was another, staring at us through slit eyes — and fed me cat trivia: Natsume Soseki, perhaps Japan’s greatest modern writer and the author of “I Am a Cat” (1906), a satire of early 20th-century society narrated by a cat, had once taught English to middle schoolers in Matsuyama; earlier, at a gift store, we’d seen cookies stamped with an image of his face.

My desperation was, I could sense, beginning to perplex Mihoko. To her, Japan itself was cat obsessed. After all, cats were so elemental to the country that it had popularized the cat cafe, where you can pay to have a coffee and hang out with cats. So who needed Aoshima when you could get your fix right here in Tokyo? Who needed to travel to an island full of cats when you were already on an island of cats? To be in Japan is to be surrounded by cats: All you had to do was realize that.

Here are two cat icons you surely know:

The country’s two most enduring feline icons were born centuries apart. Hello Kitty, created as a cartoon figure in 1974, became the ambassador of first-wave kawaii culture, her image printed on erasers, aprons and sanitary pads and shipped around the world (according to her official origin story, Hello Kitty doesn’t even live in Japan but in a London suburb and, according to her creator, is a human, not a cat). But long before her, or her cartoon predecessor, Doraemon, a blue, earless, grinning cat-robot, there was the maneki neko, or “welcoming cat.”

The maneki neko is a blank-eyed cat figurine — usually white, often ceramic, its expression inscrutable but benign — with a bell around its neck and one paw raised near its ear as if in greeting. You’ve probably encountered one in your local Japanese restaurant; in Japan, they’re so ubiquitous that the eye stops registering them after a while. A few days after returning from Matsuyama, I met Mihoko for a trip out to Setagaya, a district in western Tokyo, where there was an Edo-era temple, Gotokuji, dedicated to the maneki neko.

Here is a maneki neko that I keep in my office:

A maneki neko store I photographed in Hong Kong (the Chinese go for them, too). Of course I bought a few:

And Hello Kitty:

More:

Anyone who’s been to Japan knows that virtually every neighborhood in every town has at least one Buddhist temple and one Shinto shrine. Most of these places are humble: a clean-swept yard and a darkened main building, opened only on New Year’s Day. But some are rich: their gardens well maintained, their trees trimmed, their bamboo fences fresh and green. Gotokuji is a rich temple; in the middle of the central walkway, we encountered a large, spectacular iron incense brazier with Ii’s mon, or family crest, an orange blossom, stamped in gold on its base. It’s rich because cat-loving pilgrims have come here for decades to make donations and ask for good fortune, and because (like many other savvy temples) it sells irresistible merchandise, in the form of ceramic maneki neko, which were offered in five different sizes. The largest was about a foot high; the smallest, just an inch.

The temple maintains a series of shelving units to hold the thousands of maneki neko that visitors have bought, scribbled their names and wishes on and left behind for luck. . . . There were, I noticed, no actual cats at the temple, presumably because they would have knocked over the maneki neko.

A photo of the temple:

Shintoism is no doubt also one of the reasons places like Aoshima exist. In Japan, there aren’t just (11) cat islands: There’s a monkey island. There’s a rabbit island. There’s a deer island (and deer cities, too, most notably Nara, Japan’s eighth-century capital and home to more than a thousand sika deer, who dominate the main park and occasionally try to butt visitors, who are warned by signs not to antagonize them). The Nara deer are exciting to encounter until they begin chasing you but, in general, the attitude in Japan seems to be that the animals are there to stay and, despite some annual culling, it’s our job to accommodate them.

Yanagihara never made it to the Cat Island, but there are plenty of pictures, including some of the five humans who inhabit the mile-long island and feed the cats:

There’s a lot of cat history I’ve omitted (it’s a long piece), including the ambivalent relationship of Buddhism and of Shintoism to cats.

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Here’s a piece from The Atlantic (archived) in which Sarah Zhang explains why people think cats are psychopaths, even though they aren’t. They’re just “aloof little jerks”.

An excerpt:

Cats, she pointed out, simply don’t have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog (or human) can. So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion. But that’s just its face. Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails. Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable—and even nonexistent—until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.

D*gs, on the other hand, have “learned to mimic humans”, imitating smiling, expressions of guilt, and appealing raises of the brow.  Feh: they’re sycophants! And their independence is one reason people think they’re “psychopaths.” But they’re not: they’re just CATS!

A common charge against cats is that they do not care about their owners as anything more than a source of wet food. In studies of pet-owner relationships, scientists have found that dogs are more “attached” to owners. These studies frequently rely on protocol called the Ainsworth Strange Situation, in which the pet explores an unfamiliar environment alone, with its owner, or with a stranger. Dogs are more at ease with their owners rather than with strangers. Cats can’t seem to care less about the human there.

Maybe this says something about pet-owner attachment, but Delgado noted that dogs are used to their owners taking them to new places. Cats are territorial, and they might only leave the house to go to the vet, so what looks like indifference to their owners might just be overwhelming anxiety about a new, strange environment. Plus, the Ainsworth Strange Situation was developed by Mary Ainsworth to study parents and infants—another example of us judging cats on human rather than cat terms.

And the closing:

Talk to experienced cat owners, of course, and you’ll quickly find that psychopathy, or something that looks like it, is hardly a dealbreaker. When the subject came up in the office, my colleague Rachel Gutman launched into a tribute to her childhood cat K.C., who terrorized everyone but her immediate family members and, for some reason, Carmine the electrician. He’d bite anyone who dared to pet him. He’d attack her grandfather’s ankles. He’d pee in her grandmother’s bed when she came to visit. “In conclusion,” she said, “he was the best cat, and I miss him every day.”

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This is a very sad story of an Australian hero cat who saved his human family by attacking a venomous snake. I’ve put the end of the story below the picture, or you can access the Facebook entry directly by clicking here.

The next morning Arthur’s hoomans found him collapsed again and unable to get up. They rushed him to our Tanawha hospital. Unfortunately, Arthur’s symptoms were too severe to recover. It was with the heaviest of hearts his owners had to leave Arthur after he gained his angel wings.

His family, understandably devastated, remember him fondly and are forever grateful he saved the children’s lives. Arthur was always getting into mischief; he had previously visited us before having been in accidents and was very much loved by our team.

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Lagniappe: A cool cat DNA tee shirt is for sale, and it’s not expensive ($17 from Quertee, item here). It appears to come only in blue, but there are both men’s and women’s sizes, and it’s a nice logo. (They also have a few different non-cat shirts on sale daily for $12).  This is a must for those who love genetics and cats.

Matthew, who fits that bill, tells me, however, that the DNA helix is twisted in the wrong direction! (It’s in the Z form—a left-handed spiral—as opposed to the more common B form described by Watson and Crick).

h/t: Karl, Barry, Malcolm

This article from Insider gives a brief history of cats on ships, and has a lot of cool photos of maritime moggies. Click to read (excerpted text is indented)

Much of the information comes from Scot Christenson,  director of communications for the US Naval Institute and the author of “Cats in the Navy.”

British, French, and Spanish explorers in the late-15th century carried cats to the Americas upon the discovery of the “new world” during the age of exploration.

The animals were so universally revered that local islanders visited by British trading ships would often sneak onboard the ships to try and steal a cat for themselves, Christenson said.

During the Age of Sail, from the mid-16th to the mid-19th century, rats were known to leave an easily-ignitable trail of gunpowder aboard wooden ships as they scurried across the deck, posing a risk to the sailors on board, Christenson said, and cats could help stop the rodents in their tracks.

Even in the modern era, rats and mice remained an inherent danger to many ships, spreading disease, chewing through sails, and eating food supplies, according to Christenson

“But cats are effective predators,” he told Insider.

. . .Cats were considered akin to crew members aboard the British Royal Navy, according to Christenson.

Some sailors would bond so closely with a cat that they would bring the animal home with them at the end of a voyage.

When the US Navy was founded in the 18th century, the military branch borrowed certain customs from its British predecessor, including a penchant for seafaring cats.

Long believed to be powerful and spiritual animals, cats served as omens and portents among early sailors, according to Christenson.

The Japanese believed cats could protect their ships from evil spirits, Christenson told Insider.

Sailors around the globe also believed that a cat’s behavior could predict the outcome of a voyage.

If a cat jumped on board a ship prior to setting sail, seaman believed their vessel would be protected on its journey. But if a cat deserted a boat ahead of its departure, sailors thought themselves doomed, according to Christenson.

The worst sign of all was the sight of two cats fighting on the pier ahead of a sailing, which some sailors interpreted as the devil and angel fighting for their souls, Christenson said.

Sailors initially believed cats were in control of their fate, Christenson said. The animals were thought to have a gale inside their tail because they would begin shaking during storms.

Sailors interpreted this behavior as angry cats calling down foul weather.

Seamen later discovered that moody cats weren’t in fact conjuring storms, instead, they were responding to the physical agitation they felt when the air pressure around them would drop.

Sailors started to watch cats’ mannerisms to detect coming storms.

The animals are also sensitive to high-pitched whines, so cats helped Navy sailors detect coming air crafts during the World Wars, Christenson said.

Feline members of the Royal Navy received a weekly allowance, which the sailors often paid themselves, contributing one shilling and sixpence to buy treats and milk for their cat friends, Christenson said.

The extra snacks helped make sure the cats were sustained on board even after they had caught all the rodents.

During World War I, the US Navy scooped up hundreds of thousands of stray cats and assigned them to ships, Christenson said.

. . . The animals would typically stay on the same boat for long periods at a time, becoming territorial over their space. But every once in a while, a cat would jump ship if they determined they could get better food options on another boat, even if it was with another country’s navy, according to Christenson.

The smartest cats claimed control of the ship’s galley where they received extra treats and grew extra fat. Other felines opted to spend time in a boat’s laundry room where there were plentiful soft and warm items on which to sleep.

Budget cuts after World War II dealt a death knell to Navy cats, Christenson said.

Advocates for the financial cuts ridiculed the Navy, accusing the military branch of complaining about a lack of funds while planning birthday parties for their cats.

The public relations aspect of the campaign embarrassed the Navy, even though more often than not, it was the sailors themselves paying for the upkeep of their feline friends.

But it was updated quarantine laws that ultimately led to the end of cats’ seafaring days, according to Christenson.

For years, Navy cats were granted special permission to forgo most country’s standard laws that required incoming private citizens to quarantine their accompanying cats and other pets for several months.

But as nations began cracking down on animal quarantine laws in the aftermath of World War II, ship captains faced serious repercussions if one of their boat’s felines escaped and went exploring in a port city, Christenson said, leading to the demise of the practice altogether.

And a story:

Christenson spent years collecting stories of the cats who served in the Navy.

Of all the cases he found, his favorite anecdote is the tale of “Mis Hap.”

Mis Hap was a tiny kitten found by a Marine [Frank Praytor] during the Korea War, Christenson told Insider. The animal had just been orphaned, and her human rescuer named her Mis Hap because she had “been born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The Marine was photographed feeding the cat with a medicine dropper in a heartrending photo that was picked up by dozens of newspapers around the globe, according to Christenson.

Prior to Mis Hap’s discovery, the Marine in question was at risk of being court-martialed after submitting one of his own photographs of wounded Marines to a photo contest, flouting military censors that had banned the publication of such content at the time.

But the marine’s newfound newspaper fame ultimately spared him from the charges and yielded hundreds of marriage proposals from women across the country who were moved by his tender care toward Mis Hap, according to Christenson.

Mis Map went on to become the mascot of headquarters in Korea.

Her Marine eventually brought her back to Chicago where she lived a long, happy life.

A video of Mis Hap and her marine. The story has a twist to it (but no worries: the cat was fine):

This is indeed a photo of Mis Hap and Frank Praytor. He became famous for this photograph:

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A liquid is traditionally defined as a material that adapts its shape to fit a container. Yet under certain conditions, cats seem to fit this definition. This somewhat paradoxical observation emerged on the web a few years ago and joined the long list of internet memes involving our feline friends. When I first saw this question it made me laugh, and then think. I decided to reformulate it to illustrate some problems at the heart of rheology, the study of the deformations and flows of matter. My study on the rheology of cats won the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics.

The prizes are awarded every year by Improbable Research, an organization devoted to science and humor. The goal is to highlight scientific studies that first make people laugh, then think. A ceremony is held every year at Harvard University

At the center of the definition of a liquid is an action: A material must be able to modify its form to fit within a container. The action must also have a characteristic duration. In rheology this is called the relaxation time. Determining if something is liquid depends on whether it’s observed over a time period that’s shorter or longer than the relaxation time.

If we take cats as our example, the fact is that they can adapt their shape to their container if we give them enough time. Cats are thus liquid if we give them the time to become liquid. In rheology, the state of a material is not really a fixed property – what must be measured is the relaxation time. What is its value and on what does it depend? For example, does the relaxation time of a cat vary with its age? (In rheology we speak of thixotropy.)

Could the type of container be a factor? (In rheology this is studied in “wetting” problems.) Or does it vary with the cat’s degree of stress? (One speaks of “shear thickening” if the relaxation time increases with stress, or “shear thinning” if the opposite is true.) Of course, we mean stress in the mechanical sense rather than emotional, but the two meanings may overlap in some cases.

What cats show clearly is that determining the state of a material requires comparing two time periods: the relaxation time and the experimental time, which is the time elapsed since the onset of deformation initiated by the container. For instance, it may be the time elapsed since the cat stepped into a sink. Conventionally, one divides the relaxation time by the experimental time, and if the result is more than 1, the material is relatively solid; if the result is lower than 1, the material is relatively liquid.

And the answer:  Yes, under some circumstances cats are indeed liquids.

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This piece from Gizmodo tells you the best way to summon a strange cat, either outdoors or at a friend’s house.  Click to read:

An excerpt:

The study was conducted by researchers at Paris Nanterre University’s Laboratory of Compared Ethology and Cognition, led by Charlotte de Mouzon. De Mouzon has been studying the ins-and-outs of cat-human interaction for several years now. Last October, for instance, she and her team published a paper suggesting that pet cats can readily distinguish their owner’s voice from that of a stranger’s and can also often tell when their owner is directly speaking to them.

. . .For this latest research, published Wednesday in the journal Animals, she wanted to get a better sense of how cats respond to our different modes of communication, both alone and when interwoven with each other.

“When we communicate with them, what is more important to them? Is it the visual cues or the vocal cues? That was the starting question of our research,” de Mouzon told Gizmodo.

They recruited help from 12 cats living at a cat cafe. The experimenter (de Mouzon herself) first got the cats used to her presence. Then she put them through different scenarios. The cats would enter a room and then de Mouzon interacted with them in one of four ways: She called out to them but made no gestures toward them otherwise, like extending out her hand; she gestured toward them but didn’t vocalize; she both vocalized and gestured toward them; and, in the fourth, control condition, she did neither.

THE ANSWER:

The cats approached de Mouzon the fastest when she used both vocal and visual cues to catcall them, compared to the control condition—a finding that wasn’t too unexpected. But the team was surprised by the fact that the cats responded quicker to the visual cues alone than they did to the vocal cues. De Mouzon points out that owners routinely love to adopt a “cat talk voice” with their pets, so they figured that cafe cats would respond better to vocalizations. They now theorize that this preference might be different for cats interacting with human strangers than it would be for their owners.

So, when calling out to a strange cat on the street (something I do EVERY time I get near an outdoor cat), extend your hand and call to them in a soft baby voice.

Langiappe from France (be sure to click the links):

A separate key lesson learned from this research is that French people seem to have their own unique way of getting cats to notice them. The paper details de Mouzon using “a sort of ‘pff pff’ sound” as her vocal cue, which is apparently widely used by people in France to call cats. When she demonstrated the gesture over Zoom, it sounded like a “kissy” sound, at least to this reporter’s ear. And importantly, it was subtly distinct from the “pspsps” sound that’s common among English-speakers trying to attract a cat.

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Lagniappe: Jared Leto as Choupette (the late Karl Lagerfeld’s beloved still-living cat) at the Met Gala:

h/t: Bill, Ginger K., Thomas

As I’ve mentioned before, many Muslims love cats but consider d*gs unclean.  Muhammad himself is rumored to have had a cat named Muezza, and this story is a popular one:

Many Muslims believe that Muezza (or Muʿizza; Arabic: معزة) was Muhammad’s favorite cat. Muhammad awoke one day to the sounds of the adhan. Preparing to attend prayer, he began to dress himself; however, he soon discovered his cat Muezza sleeping on the sleeve of his prayer robe. Rather than wake her, he used a pair of scissors to cut the sleeve off, leaving the cat undisturbed.

Cats are often welcome in mosques, and when I visit Istanbul I always notice the prevalence of street cats and cats in mosques. Here’s a cat at the Prince’s Mosque:

. . . and me feeding the famous Hagia Sophia cat Gli in 2008. (In Turkey I always carry a box of cat food in my daypack.) At the time I didn’t know that Gli, now deceased, was so famous and beloved:

But on to the topic: medival Muslim cats, which you can read by clicking on the screenshot below from Weird Medieval Guys:

It retells the story of Muezza, and adds that in the UK you can buy halal cat food named after Muhammad’s cat (click on screenshot):

An excerpt:

But it wasn’t just the prophet himself who loved cats! They occupied a unique place in the medieval Islamic world. The Middle East and Mediterranean are famously full of stray kitties nowadays, and it seems that 500 years ago, things weren’t too different. Medieval Europeans who travelled eastward were baffled by both the sheer quantity of free-roaming cats and the affection lavished upon them by locals. Flemish nobleman Joos van Ghistele wrote of his surprise at seeing a cat shelter in Damascus in the late 15th century CE, and a 13th century CE Mamluk sultan apparently mandated that all the strays of Cairo be taken care of by the local government. An English visitor to Cairo in the late 19th century attested that the sultan’s wishes were still being upheld, much to the exasperation (and expense) of the chief judge, to whom the responsibility fell.

As well as collective care for strays by the community, a number of sources describe cats’ status as beloved pets for people from all levels of society in the medieval Islamic world. For much of the Middle Ages in Western Europe, pet ownership was seen as an indulgence afforded primarily to noblewomen and monks. High-ranking men might have owned hunting dogs, but these animals served a largely utilitarian purpose. The keeping of animals for emotional companionship would have been rather taboo for a Christian man of the day. Muslim men, whether nobles or humble labourers, don’t seem to have been subjected to the same stigma surrounding their pets.

Prince Rokn-al-Dawla of the Deylamites (in modern day Iran) reportedly had a pet cat that he was so fond of, petitioners would attach written requests to its neck to make sure that prince received them. One Sufi sheikh is said to have had shoes made for his cat so that it could sit with him on his prayer rug without snagging the fibres on its claws. Women doted on their cats, too, with one Persian source reporting that it was common for noble ladies to adorn them with jewellery and even dye their fur.

And a story depicted in the painting below:

Let me close this post by sharing another Nasreddin joke, this time about his wife and his cat:

After the Hodja got a liver recipe from his friend, he bought some liver. Nasreddin loved liver and he wanted to eat it very often. But everytime he brought livers, he couldn’t eat it because his wife said that the cat took the liver and fled away.

One day the Hodja became very angry and said: “Woman, I brought liver! Where is it?” “Oh”, said his wife. “The silly cat took it and fled away.” At this same time the cat was in the room.

The Hodja caught it, brought a steelyard and weighted the cat. Then he said: “That is exactly two kilos. And the liver which I brought was also two kilos. Now tell me: If that is the liver where is my cat, if that is the cat, then I want my liver.”

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If you know about fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, you’ll know that the love of his life was his pampered longhair cat Choupette. Here’s a photo of Lagerfeld and his love that appeared on Choupette’s Instagram page, which is still going:

Harper’s Bazaar tells you everything you want to know about Choupette, including this:

The designer’s beloved Burmese has lived a lifestyle nearly as luxurious and chic as his, and following his death, she is rumored to inherit a portion of Lagerfeld’s €200 million net worth. Though, shockingly, that does not make her the richest cat in the world (Taylor Swift’s Scottish Fold, Olivia Benson, beats her with a reported worth of $97 million), she is certainly still amongst the wealthiest, and arguably the favorite within the fashion world.

Throughout her lifetime, the booked-and-busy feline has graced several magazine covers—including that of Harper’s Bazaar UKin 2013—and even had her own line of makeup and a book about her life.

She has traveled by private jet, alongside a handful of bodyguards, agents, chefs, and personal assistants. And she dined across from Lagerfeld every evening, during their time together, in the designer’s Paris apartment.

This content is imported from instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Lagerfeld told Numéro in 2016, “Now that she is an adult, she eats at the table with me. She sits across from me and only eats what she needs to eat. Before, she used to attack a shrimp, but now she only touches her four different dishes that are prepared for her the same day, served in lovely bowls. Everything has to be fresh, otherwise Mademoiselle sits in front of her croquettes in sauce for three quarters of an hour, giving me murderous looks, without touching them.”

The 11-year-old Burmese currently lives in Paris and is now owned by Lagerfeld’s former housekeeper, Françoise Caçot, who has since dropped her nanny role to care for the feline full-time.

From the article:

Choupette traveling (from Instagram):

As the Wall Street Journal reports below, Choupette was the theme of the Met’s Gala ball this year, honoring Lagerfeld, who died in 2009. Click to read:

An excerpt (my emphasis)

At this year’s Met Gala, the celebrity-packed museum fundraiser held on the first Monday in May, the most anticipated guest is a cat.

Choupette Lagerfeld, an 11-year-old Birman with enormous blue eyes and silky white fur, belonged to Karl Lagerfeld, the late German fashion designer and honoree of this year’s ball. For the former creative director of Chanel, Fendi and Chloé, who died in 2019 at the age of 85 without children, Choupette may be the closest thing to a living relative. Fans are hoping to see her strut the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in his honor.

“She was his baby,” said Françoise Caçote, Choupette’s caretaker. A former housekeeper for Mr. Lagerfeld, Ms. Caçote, 50, has been Choupette’s nanny since 2012 and inherited the cat permanently after her boss passed away. “He would say, ‘In my life, my priority is Choupette, and then everything else.’ ”

Mr. Lagerfeld often talked about how much he adored Choupette, and treated her to multicourse meals on Goyard dishes and supplied her with two maids. She has her own agent, coffee-table books, a skin-care collaboration and social-media followers spanning the globe.

Choupette didn’t show, but stayed in Paris.

Mr. Lagerfeld shared photos of the cat on his Twitter and Instagram and fans loved seeing the notoriously sharp-tongued designer, known for his long ponytail and signature sunglasses and leather gloves, be tender with an animal.

Choupette has graced the covers of British Harper’s Bazaar, Grazia and German Vogue and has posed with fellow celebrity catwalkers Linda Evangelista and Kendall Jenner. Most recently, she starred with Naomi Campbell in a May photo shoot for American Vogue. In 2015, Mr. Lagerfeldtold New York magazine that Choupette had earned 3 million euros from two modeling gigs.

In 2018, Mr. Lagerfeld told Numero, a French magazine, that he had left some money for Choupette in his will, which sparked rumors and some catty talk that the feline would inherit a fortune. But Ms. Caçote said she hasn’t received any money from the estate, and that the situation with Mr. Lagerfeld’s inheritance is complex.

 Ms. Caçote said she takes care of Choupette with her own money and does so happily, as it was Mr. Lagerfeld’s wish. She and Mr. Berullier said they are setting up a feline-focused charity in the cat’s name.

Choupette is content at Ms. Caçote’s Paris apartment, she said. The cat likes to wake up early, and her fur is brushed multiple times a day. Choupette relishes walks on the balcony and treats herself to the catnip planted outside. Choupette’s favorite toys are Chanel paper bags and Chanel ribbons, Ms. Caçote said.

Jared Leto dressed up at Choupette at the Met Gala (tickets run, I hear, around $10,000):

. . . and so did Doja Cat:

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Finally, here’s a story from Lady Freethinker about two women from Alabama who were arrested and fined for feeding stray cats on city property, but then had the charges dismissed. Justice was done!

PETITION UPDATE: Criminal Charges Dismissed Against Wetumpka Women Who Fed Stray Cats

An except:

Two women criminally charged after they fed community cats on public land in Wetumpka, Alabama, got a reprieve this week when city prosecutors said they’d no longer pursue the case.

Beverly Roberts, 84, and Mary Alston, 60, made international headlines in June 2022 when three police vehicles and multiple officers arrived on a vacant, county-owned lot and told the women to stop feeding and trying to trap the stray cats that liked to congregate there — or be arrested and go to jail.

Body camera footage showed the women asking questions about why they were being threatened with arrest. When Roberts attempted to hand her car keys to Alston, an officer told her, “It’s going to get ugly if you don’t stop.” Another officer handcuffed Alston’s arms behind her back, telling her she wasn’t listening “fast enough” and that “You wanted to keep talking so now you’re going to jail,” according to the body camera footage.

Wetumpka Municipal Judge Jeff Watson convicted the women of misdemeanor charges in December after a 5-hour long trial — Alston for reported criminal trespassing and obstructing government operations and Roberts for reported disorderly conduct and criminal trespassing.  He sentenced the women to two years unsupervised probation and 10 days, suspended, of jail time.

Attorneys for the women — including William Shasy, a retired Montgomery County Circuit Court judge — appealed the ruling to the 19th Circuit Court. A GoFundMe account to help cover legal costs raised more than $87,000, according to news reports.

Following the appeal, Wetumpka prosecutors submitted a motion saying they would no longer pursue the charges, without giving a reason for that action. Circuit Judge Amanda Baxley signed off on the plan, also without giving comment on her ruling, according to court records.

Here’s a news video of the ladies being arrested. DEFUND THESE COPS!

Charges could still be reinstated, though, and prosecutors have until June 25 to do so. If they know what’s good for them, they’ll leave this be.

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Lagniappe: Reader Peter sent me this photo and some notes:

Freddie Mercury of Queen (1946-1991) was well known as an ailurophile, as well for other things. According to the BBC (source: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-65375583), his friend Mary Austin is about to auction a large collection of Mercury’s possessions, including some great artworks, antique furniture, costumes, and of interest to WEIT readers, “his favourite waistcoat”, with hand-painted portraits of his six cats.

The BBC adds this:

h/t: Ginger K., Thomas