Is your cat’s birthday coming up? Here are two articles on how to make your moggy a cat-friendly birthday cake. The first is from The Spruce (click to read):

And this one is from PetsRadar (also click), whichs gives eight different recipes of varying degree of laboriousness. I’ve put an easier one below, which is similar to the one from the link above.

From the Spruce, an easy tuna-cake recipe that takes only 5 minutes and costs $10 (but you’ll need a piping bag):

What you’ll need:

It comes out looking like this (there’s catnip sprinkled on the top):

And here’s another one from the second site, a salmon and sweet potato cake. But they left out the salmon and gave a tuna recipe. So I went to the Daily Paws and got their recipe, which this site supposedly copied. But they screwed up. Here’s the good recipe; I think any cat would like it so long as they like sweet potato:

Ingredients 

• ½ 5-ounce can chunk-style skinless, boneless salmon in water, drained well
• ¼ cup finely chopped cooked chicken or turkey breast
• ¼ cup mashed sweet potato
• 1 teaspoon rice flour
• 2 tablespoons plain yogurt*
• 1 teaspoon natural creamy peanut butter* (optional)

Directions:

Step One
Line a small baking pan with wax paper.

Step Two
Place salmon in a medium bowl. Flake chunks into very small bits. Add chopped chicken and mashed sweet potato and mix well. Stir in rice flour.

Step Three
Place a lightly greased 3-inch round cutter on the baking pan and spoon 1/3 cup salmon mixture into the ring. Using fingers, firmly pat mixture out into an even layer. Carefully remove ring and repeat with remaining salmon mixture. Place pan in freezer for 15 minutes to firm up the patties.

Step Four
To assemble cake, place one patty on a small plate. Spread with the peanut butter and top with another patty. Decorate top of cake with the yogurt, letting it run down the sides of the cake to create the drip cake effect.

Recipe courtesy of Daily Paws

And the Daily Paws video showing you how to make it:

I hope at least one reader will make a cake for their cat’s birthday (doesn’t every cat have a birthday?). Weigh in if you’ve made one.

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Archived from the Times of London, we hear about a law to ban “coaxing of cats.” It’s bizarre but probably of marginal value.

Click to read:

 

Some excerpts:

Listen, cat people are a bit shady. Not very, just a bit. I know this because I’m a cat person and in the right circumstances, I can be a bit shady. Most cat people are consciously or unconsciously aware of their shadiness and don’t do things like coax random cats off the street with dishes of cream and teaspoons of tuna. Because although we quite want to (because we are shady), we know that it is wrong.

 

But there are always deviants who spoil things for everyone. Every area has a local catnapper, who doesn’t think what they are doing — coaxing random cats off the street with cream and tuna — is bad.

And this is why the new Pet Abduction Bill is important. The bill, which is supported by the government and making its way through parliament, would make abducting a cat or dog punishable by up to five years in prison, a fine — or both.

But there are always deviants who spoil things for everyone. Every area has a local catnapper, who doesn’t think what they are doing — coaxing random cats off the street with cream and tuna — is bad. And this is why the new Pet Abduction Bill is important. The bill, which is supported by the government and making its way through parliament, would make abducting a cat or dog punishable by up to five years in prison, a fine — or both.

Pet abduction with regards to felines is defined in the bill as “causing or inducing the cat to accompany the person or anyone else” or “causing the cat to be taken”.

Due to the evidence required to convict, the crime of pet abduction as it relates to cats will be difficult to enforce and many will be wondering why the government has bothered.

Max Hardy is a criminal barrister. He says: “As a general rule offences that are effectively unenforceable make for unhelpful additions to the statute book. Some take the view that the existing Theft Act legislation sufficiently encompasses any situation in which a pet is stolen or an attempt is made to steal.”

OK, but we the public think of “stealing” as a sudden snatching or taking permanently. Most cats are “stolen” by non-permitted feeding or, in other words, “inducing”.

“It may be that the new offence will be considered to be sending a message that taking or trying to take a pet is a worse crime than taking an inanimate object,” Hardy says. “One assumes the message will go out that food should never be provided to or left out for a pet that is not your own. That does have the potential to mitigate neighbour disputes, if nothing else.”

Oy, I’ve been guilty in days of yore of feeding a neighbor’s cat.  Good thing I’m not in Britain!  And here’s some stuff about British cat law:

This is one reason cat people appreciate cats so much: because they have free choice, if they choose you it’s a sort of blessing. This is also why, historically, cats were not seen in the eyes of the law as “property” in the same way dogs were — because who can keep tabs on a cat?

This changed in 1968 with the Theft Act and now cats enjoy the same “property” status as dogs. In 2021 the government announced plans to make microchipping mandatory — all cats must be chipped by the time they are 20 weeks old.

The Theft Act, the mandatory chipping and this new abduction law are all important to any cat owner who has an outdoor cat. Indoor cat owners wag their fingers and say, “This is why I keep my cat indoors,” but a) this isn’t always practical, and b) being trapped in a house is the personal nightmare of outdoor cat owners and it is why they can’t inflict it on their pet. No one is right or wrong in this debate and if you choose to have an outdoor cat, you can still object to others seducing it away from your home.

The lesson: don’t feed a friendly moggy, even if it lives next door:

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This is probably not a great thing to do to your cat, but somebody went to a great deal of trouble to make a costume fitting a human but looking like the cat. There are even paw-like slippers and gloves.  What do you think the cat will do when it sees its staff as a huge doppelgänger?

Watch that tail bush out in fright! But then the cat shows some ambitendency and winds up aggressive—and then even friendly! I think it smells its staff inside the costume.

From Bored Panda (click on screenshot below) we get the story of Shrek, a messed-up cat that was rescued. Click on the screenshot to read:

Some excerpts:

An adorable and gentle cat named Shrek was found in a feral cat colony, but he didn’t really belong there, since he was bullied by other cats. Because of that, Shrek was malnourished and was covered in scars from catfights. But besides that, the poor guy was partially blind, with goopy, bagged eyes that resulted from a condition called entropion.

His story began when Emily Shields, the founder of Whiskers N Wishes Sanctuary in Marana, Arizona, took him in. Because of his weird look that resembled the ogre character from the animated movie, he was given the name Shrek.

Shrek’s story started at Whiskers N Wishes Sanctuary whose founder, Emily Shields, took him in from a cat colony where the poor guy was bullied by other cats

. . .After all of Shrek’s health issues were treated, he was adopted by a couple from New York, and now Shrek lives a comfortable house cat life.

Besides not getting enough food, Shrek also had entropion, which made it hard for him to see.

At first he looked like this (photo from Wishesrescue Instagram page):

“Shrek was living in a colony of cats near an airport in Tucson, but he was an outsider and was being bullied. He was found by Courtney of Poets Square Cats, which has over 1 million followers on TikTok. I was sitting in a movie theater – watching Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken with my kids – and Courtney texted asking if we had room for a friendly tom cat who was being bullied,” explained Emily.

Emily also described the condition he was in: “Shrek looked really rough. He wasn’t eating enough because of the other cats, and his eyes were pretty goopy and gross. Like many male street cats, he is FIV positive. He looked like a mess.”

Shrek had to get several surgeries due to his condition. Emily explained what was desperately needed and why

“Shrek had entropion, which is where the eyelids grow inwards and the eyelashes are stabbing into the eyeballs themselves. It’s painful and obviously made it hard for him to see. He was neutered and given his shots, then he ended up needing to have his eye surgery and dental surgery as well,” wrote Emily.

Here’s Shrek after surgery (photo form wishesrescue Instagram page):

In the end, Shrek had a happy ending and could leave his previous misfortunes in the past.

“Shrek was adopted by a wonderful couple in New York City, who run his various social media accounts. He is much loved and living an amazing life for a former Arizona street cat. His new dad flew to Phoenix, drove to Tucson, picked Shrek up, drove back, and flew back to New York all in one day to get Shrek home!” shared Emily lastly.

I have tremendous respect for those who take in sick and messed-up cats, giving them a nice, comfortable life with plenty of food and vet care.

Image: shrek.in.the.city

Photo from the shrek.in.the.city Instagram page:

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And, submitted for your approval, two videos. First, a bunch of cats doing funny stuff (7½ minutes). My favorites are “pool cat” at 1:11, yowling cats at 1:20, flehmen cat at 2:29, drinking cat at 2:55, banana-peel cat at 4:00, bath cat at 4:15 (what’s with that?), costumed cat at 6:16, “kissed cat” at 7:07, and cat mess at 7:20.

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And 4½ minutes of scaredy cats.  My favorites: cat scared by cucumber at 10 seconds in (I still don’t know if this is a real thing), sneezy cat at 0:19, bag cat at 1:04, lizard-encountering cat at 1:10, and toaster cat at 3:09,   But I don’t think people should deliberately be scaring their cats, as many do in this video.

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Lagniappe: I’ve told the story of Mrs. Chippy before, but reader Nigel sent a new link and visited her monument in Wellington, New Zealand (I can’t believe I missed it when I was there!) as well as his own photo taken in January:

I’m a regular reader of your blog and appreciate your robust defence of science as I know it. Keep up the good work. Knowing your interest in cats and NZ you may be interested in Mrs Chippy even if unlikely that you don’t know already.  Taken last week when I was there.

h/t: Ginger K,

Today we have an all-audio and all-video trifecta.

First, here’s an eight-minute video about why cats run away from home. If you let your cat go outdoors, watch this, and, more important, get your cat chippsed AND a collar with a phone number on it. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve known who have lost an indoor cat that accidentally went outdoors; and there was no collar with an ID tag and no chips.  In my view, all cats should be chipped.

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In this Purrli® program (click on screenshot), you can adjust six parameters of a cat’s purr to find out what kind of purr you like best. (“Meow-y” means that there’s an occasional meow, which I like. Below the screenshot I’ve given that I consider my favorite purr for a cat lying on my chest or lap.

My favorite settings. There are around two meows per minute, but I’d silence them if I were working at the same time:

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One of the great internet video sequences is to introduce the candy Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. It creates a huge fountain of the soft drink reasons given here.  An excerpt:

All the sites recommend a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke (not regular Coke) and a limited number of Mentos.

The carbonated drinks’ fizz comes from carbon dioxide added to the bottles at high pressure. 2-liter Diet Coke contains around 12-15 grams of dissolved carbon dioxide. The gas tries to escape and form bubbles around any irregular surface, called a nucleation site. Mentos also have nucleation sites because they are not as smooth as they appear. When added to Coke, the dissolved gas pushes the liquid out of the container at a super-fast speed in the form of bubbles. The candies simply catalyze the release of gas from the Coke bottle. Therefore, the chemical reaction between Coke and Mentos, in reality, is a physical reaction.

No matter how messy or sticky the experiment is, there are only two ingredients required to make this geyser. One bottle of 2-liter fizzy drink, preferably Diet Coke, and Mentos are needed in an adequate quantity to give a spectacular reaction. For a 2-liter bottle of Coke, at least five Mentos are good enough. Moreover, all Mentos must be added to the drink simultaneously, giving each of them equal time to create an effect. As Mentos candies are dropped into the Coke bottle, there is an explosion seconds later, and a “Mentos Coke Fountain” goes high up in the sky.

. . . The highest recorded explosion has been of Mentos and Diet Coke when the fountain touched up to 10 meters. Most people believe that the more Mentos are added to Coke, the bigger and higher the eruption will be. However, the number of Mentos that will make a difference is limited. Through various investigations, it has been deduced that seven Mentos are the max.

Well, try it (I wouldn’t waste two liters of Diet Coke when you can watch it on YouTube). But can you watch cats reacting to it? Here’s a 3-minute video of cats watching this chemical reaction set up to follow a domino-falling sequence. I wonder how many times they had to set this up to get it right, for it requires the cats to help.

There’s a related video, sans Mentos and Cokc, below. Actually, I like the second one better because there’s a treat at the end.

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Lagniappe: A short video of a cat encountering a giant tarantula (nobody gets hurt):

h/t: Barry

This link came from reader Stephanie, who added this:

This a tidbit but a cute story that has a more-or-less happy ending (I don’t like zoos or the smuggling of wild animals), but I thought you might be interested.  One of the more unusual aspects of the story is that the cat-smuggling event took place in April 2022, but the story was released in the last few days.  Note that the abbreviation for Denver International Airport is DIA.

An excerpt:

The Denver Zoo’s latest feline resident has been waiting in the wings for more than a year — first smuggled through the Denver International Airport on a commercial flight, then held as evidence in a federal investigation.

In April of 2022, a video went viral when a cat escaped its carrier on a United flight to Denver, reportedly scratching and biting other passengers as it attempted to flee the flight.

What passengers didn’t know is that this wasn’t a regular, domestic cat — it was a wild Geoffroy’s cat and the person transporting it had no idea what they’d gotten themselves into.

Geoffroy’s cats are small, wild cats native to southern and central regions of South America. Although they have a similar size and appearance to domestic cats, they are a wild species and should not be considered a pet, according to a release from the Denver Zoo.

“[The cat] was flying with a person who didn’t know what they had,” said Rebecca McCloskey, carnivore curator at the Denver Zoo. “She wasn’t the owner, just someone who was transporting what she thought was a regular, domestic cat from point A to point B, from a breeder to a buyer.”

McCloskey said the person wasn’t originally scheduled to end their trip in Denver, but she lived in an apartment in the city. After having a difficult and painful flight trying to wrangle the cat, she decided to go home for the night and skipped the connecting flight.

That’s when she called the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, who reached out to both Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Denver Zoo for assistance.

Zoo employees, including McCloskey, attempted to help identify the cat through photos, relying on its shorter-than-normal tail, distinct color patterns and white spots on the back of its ears to peg it as a wild Geoffroy’s cat, McCloskey said.

Imagine the commotion when this wild cat got loose! And it was being transported by a “mule” (an unwitting smuggler. Here’s an Instagram picture of the cat after it found a home:

The cat was fondly named Dia after the airport it was smuggled through and a play on the word diabolical from the viral video, McCloskey said.

Together, McCloskey and other zoo and CPW employees worked with U.S. Fish and Wildlife staff to wrangle Dia from the apartment bathroom into a crate, where she was taken to CPW’s wildlife rehabilitation center pending an investigation into her previous owner.

After several months of harboring the wild cat, CPW reached out to the Denver Zoo for assistance in housing Dia while the lengthy investigation dragged on, the zoo stated in a social media post Thursday.

“Dia came to stay with us in December of 2022, but at that point she was still evidence in both a federal and state investigation so we had to keep her under wraps,” McCloskey said.

The zoo’s Animal Health and Care teams immediately jumped into action to make sure Dia had everything she needed at the zoo, including an appropriate diet, expert care and a safe home.

It wasn’t until September 2023 when the case finally resolved and the zoo was able to talk about their newest visitor, now on track for permanent residency.

Now Dia is a lively 7½-pound resident of the zoo, but it’s sad that it has to spend the rest of its life behind bars. Still, it hasn’t lost its spunk:

“She just has the most confidence and the most personality,” McCloskey said, laughing. “At one point during the beginning of her stay with us, she had a room in the tiger house and just came charging up toward the mesh in front of the tiger and began posturing. The tiger backed down and fled to the other side of the room.”

In four days it’s World Geoffrey’s Cat Day:

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From BobCat TV: A caracal (Caracal caracal) gets introduced to the resident Maine Coon cats in a Russian home.

I have two questions: why is it always the Russians who own these exotic cats? And why are the “pet” cats always Maine Coons?

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From Bored Panda, here’s a series of 50 photos of cats being cats. I’ll show a few:

Freddie Mercury was of course a huge cat fan:

What a treat!

There are fifty of them at the site, and they’re all good. Go have a look!

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Lagniappe from a Facebook page via Mark. It’s “Norman Catwell” painted by Louise Herrernan (get it on Amazon). How we all see ourselves:

h/t: Jay, Stephanie, Ginger K.

From the NYT, we hear about how feral cats invaded a Chilean prison and then (as one expects) the prisoners became ailurophiles. Click below to read, or find it archived here.

Excerpts:

YES! “Even a d*g”!!!!

“A cat makes you worry about it, feed it, take care of it, give it special attention,” he said. “When we were outside and free, we never did this. We discovered it in here.”

Known simply as “the Pen,” the 180-year-old main penitentiary in Santiago, Chile’s capital, has long been known as a place where men live in cages and cats roam free. What is now more clearly understood is the positive effect of the prison’s roughly 300 cats on the 5,600 human residents.

The felines’ presence “has changed the inmates’ mood, has regulated their behavior and has strengthened their sense of responsibility with their duties, especially caring for animals,” said the prison’s warden, Col. Helen Leal González, who has two cats of her own at home, Reina and Dante, and a collection of cat figurines on her desk.

“Prisons are hostile places,” she added in her office, wearing a tight bun, billy club and combat boots. “So of course, when you see there’s an animal giving affection and generating these positive feelings, it logically causes a change in behavior, a change in mindset.”

Prisoners informally adopt the cats, work together to care for them, share their food and beds and, in some cases, have built them little houses. In return, the cats provide something invaluable in a lockup notorious for overcrowding and squalid conditions: love, affection and acceptance.

“Sometimes you’ll be depressed and it’s like she senses that you’re a bit down,” said Reinaldo Rodriguez, 48, who is scheduled to be imprisoned until 2031 on a firearms conviction. “She comes and glues herself to you. She’ll touch her face to yours.

Formal programs to connect prisoners and animals became more common in the late 1970s, and after consistently positive results, they have expanded across the world, including to Japan, the Netherlands and Brazil.

They have become particularly popular in the United States. In Arizona, prisoners train wild horses to patrol the U.S. border with Mexico. In Minnesota and Michigan, prisoners train dogs for the blind and deaf. And in Massachusetts, prisoners help care for wounded or sick wildlife, like hawks, coyotes and raccoons.

Connecting inmates and dogs has repeatedly been shown to lead to “a decrease in recidivism, improved empathy, improved social skills and a safer and more positive relationship between inmates and prison officials,” said Beatriz Villafaina-Domínguez, a researcher in Spain who reviewed 20 separate studies of such programs.

Dogs have been the most common animal used by prisons, followed by horses, and in most programs, animals are brought to the inmates, or vice versa. In Chile, however, the inmates developed an organic connection to the stray cats who live alongside them.

Chileans know best!

The program’s success has been partly thanks to the inmates, Ms. Sandoval said. The prisoners collect cats that need care and bring them to the volunteers.

On a recent day, four women lugged cat carriers into the prison grounds, on the hunt for a number of felines, including Lucky, Aquila, Dropón and her six new kittens, and Mr. Nuñez’s cat, Ugly.

The courtyard was chaotic, packed for an inmate soccer match, but prisoners politely made way for the women.

Quickly, men cradling cats in tattooed arms came bounding down stairs along the courtyard, handing animals through prison bars to the volunteers. In one stop, Denys Carmona Rojas, 57, a prisoner serving eight years on gun charges, doted on a litter of kittens in a box. He said he had helped raise many kittens in his cell, recounting one case in which he fed special milk to a litter after the mother died during birth.

From the NYT.  There is more at the site.

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From CNN, a short tail of a Thai farmer who plants rice at different times in a field so that the growing shoots, which change color, create the image of a sleeping cat hugging a fish. Click to read:

A sleeping cat hugs a fish in a picture seen from the air, picked out in sprouting rainbow seedlings in a rice field in Thailand to illustrate a traditional proverb about abundance.

Farmer Tanyapong Jaikham and a team of workers planted the seedlings at various spots in the field in the northern province of Chiang Rai to depict cartoon cats, hoping to lure tourists and cat lovers.

“We’re expecting tens of thousands to come and see the art in the rice fields,” he said.

The process relies on GPS coordinates to position the seedlings as designated in an initial artist’s sketch, he said, with the plants changing tint as they grow.

R“It’s crucial to position them accurately, and the rice will gradually change shades over time,” he added, until in the final harvest stage, the rice straw yields the portrait of Cooper, the cat on which it was modeled.

Viewing towers are being built in the surrounding area to give visitors a glimpse of the artwork, which is based on a Thai saying, “There is fish in the water and rice in the fields.”

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And here’s a 9.5-minute video of the Way Things Should be: cats cooperating to defeat predatory d*gs (TRIGGER WARNING: Scratching and biting of d*gs! What I don’t understand why the photographer, in the second clip, didn’t help the blind man and his guide dog. People would prefer to film violence than stop it.  Fortunately, it looks as if no dogs were hurt.

Notice the cats’ bushy tails.

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Lagniappe: A heartwarming video of a disheveled and sick stray kitten saved and turned into a lovely housecat.

h/t: Susan, Debra

For some reason there’s been a spate of recent articles on why some cats fetch (I had one that did it, too). Click on the headlines below to read. I’ll give a short anser for each one.

From The Atlantic (link goes to archived version):

Their “byproduct” hypothesis:

Evolutionarily speaking, that sort of checks out. Fetching is just a sequence of four behaviors: looking, chasing, grab-biting, and returning. Versions of the first three are already built into predators’ classic hunting repertoire, says Kathryn Lord, an evolutionary biologist at the Broad Institute, who’s had her own fetching cat. Returning is perhaps the wild card. Christopher Dickman, an ecologist at the University of Sydney, told me that, as solitary creatures, cats have little natural incentive to share what they catch. He hasn’t spotted much retrieval behavior in the feline species he’s studied in nature—or in the half dozen house cats he’s had throughout his life

 

But cats already have some of the behavioral ingredients for carrying fetched cargo. As Sarah Ellis, the head of cat mental wellbeing and behavior at International Cat Care, points out, feline mothers bring live prey back to their kittens to teach them how to hunt, and cats of both sexes have been known to move their food to safer spots before chowing down. (Ellis has had multiple fetching cats.) Maybe, Dickman told me, as cats were repeatedly invited into human homes and praised for eliminating pests, some of their retrieval-esque behaviors were rewarded—and possibly amplified. House cats with access to the outdoors are sadly infamous for hauling home wild birds, rodents, amphibians, and reptiles. And for indoor-only cats, chasing a furry object, gnawing on it, and bringing it to a secure spot may playfully scratch a predatory itch that might otherwise go unsated.

From What Your Cat Wants:

They don’t know! But they also include a video of a fetching cat. Mine was like this: he never brought the fetched object all the way back to me.

So why do cats fetch? We don’t know! It is likely this behavior is part of the predatory sequence of behaviors. There are two parts to this behavior – the pursuit of the object when it is tossed, and the retrieval. Some cats seem to do both (the true fetchers), most cats will pursue moving objects (likely predatory behavior), and some cats will carry objects to home or their owner (including cats who like to bring home things like clothing and toys). As previously mentioned, bringing objects home could be related to bringing killed prey home for a safer place to consume it. However, in the case of fetching behavior, the retrieval seems more likely to be a “request” for the human to engage in more toy tossing! So perhaps this is a truly social play behavior rather than strictly predatory.

A pretty good fetch:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Mikel Delgado (@mikel.delgado)

From the BBC:

Many cats instinctively like to play, the report says, and owners are being urged to think more about the types of activities they could do to keep their pets happy and active.

It found cats generally prefer to be in control of the game and do not require training to play.

Jemma Forman, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex School of Psychology, said: “Cats who initiated their fetching sessions played more enthusiastically with more retrievals and more fetching sessions per month.

“This perceived sense of control from the cat’s perspective may be beneficial for the cat’s welfare and the cat-owner relationship.

“I’d encourage owners to be receptive to the needs of their cat by responding to their preferences for play – not all cats will want to play fetch, but if they do, it’s likely that they will have their own particular way of doing so.”

The survey gathered information from 924 owners of 1,154 cats (994 mixed-breed and 160 purebred) that play fetch to better understand the behaviour.

From Scientific American:

The fun hypothesis:

 In some instances, owners described a scenario in which they dropped or accidentally launched an object, and their cat spontaneously fetched it. In other accounts, domestic felines simply brought their owners a cat toy or other random item, which the human then tossed aside—and a throw-and-retrieve cycle began. “We had an overwhelming number of people say their cat was not trained to do this behavior,” says Jemma Forman, lead study researcher and a Ph.D. student at the University of Sussex in England. “We even had some people say that their cats had trained them to play fetch.”

As a caveat, Serpell says humans are likely giving cats unconscious reinforcement by engaging with them in throwing an object in the first place, providing interaction and social reward. Contrary to popular sentiment, domestic cats are, in fact, very much attuned to their humans.

A good fetch of a tinfoil ball by a hairless cat (from the article above):

For your delectation, the Nature “Science Reports” story is here, and it’s also been covered by The Guardian, too.

Reader Jon Losos sent a photo of his own cat, Nelson, fetching a toy:

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This is bizarre but also funny. Someone had a cake made that looks just like their cat. Then they cut into its head in front of the moggy. . . . . .

Look at the cat’s expression!

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We met Felix, the Huddersfield Station Cat, in 2016. a moggy so famous that she has her own Wikipedia section along with another station cat, Bolt.   Here’s the short bit from Wikipedia:

The first station cat, Felix, joined the staff as a nine-week-old kitten in 2011. Since then she has patrolled the station to keep it free from rodents, and even has her own cat-flap to bypass the ticket barriers.  In 2016 Felix was promoted to Senior Pest Controller and local artist Rob Martin painted a portrait of her which now hangs in the station. In 2019 Transpennine Express named a Class 68 locomotive (68031) after Felix.

Felix was probably the most famous cat in Britain, and you can read the details about her in the sad article below announcing his death early last December:

A train station cat which became famous across the world has died.

Felix has been a pest controller at Huddersfield Station since 2011, but it was today confirmed that “she peacefully went to sleep” in the company of the station’s staff.

The moggy shot to fame after a Facebook page dedicated to her life was created by a commuter in 2015 and quickly attracted more than 170,000 followers.

She made several television appearances including on Good Morning Britain and her first biography for charity, Felix The Railway Cat, was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Here’s the announcement of her death:

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved Felix.

On Sunday, she peacefully went to sleep, in the loving comfort of Angie Hunte (Station Manager) and Jacqui Cox (Station Team Leader).

We will miss her dearly pic.twitter.com/5ThAk5fzyW

— Felix and Bolt (@FelixhuddsCat) December 5, 2023

Here’s a video of the pre-mortem Felix:

You can find the Facebook page of Felix and Bolt here.

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Lagniappe: Reader Reese sent two photos of his cat Rocky:

Rocky likes to bathe while I fill the birdbath.

From Doc Bill: “Here’s a photo of Kink the Cat fetching “Mousie. 2007.”

h/t: Jon, Ginger K., Reeese, Pyers

From Politico, we hear and see the stalwart War Cats of Ukraine. Click the headline to read:

Excerpts and text (indented) from the article. There are also videos, but I can’t embed them:

Wars are fought by soldiers using bullets, shells and missiles, but also with ideas and propaganda — which explains why cats have become the latest battlefront in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s social media are full of felines, showing how they help soldiers as emotional support animals, attract donations to the military with their fluffy cuteness, and also fight invaders — in this case mice.

Russia is fighting back by humanizing its invading soldiers — often used in “meat wave” attacks against Ukrainian positions and accused of atrocities against civilians — by showing them with their own cats.

They mention and show several cats. Here are two:

Shaybyk the lover

Oleksandr Liashuk, from the Odesa region in southwest Ukraine, gave a purr-out to Shaybyk — one of four stray kittens living with his unit on the southern front in 2022.

“Shaybyk had the biggest charisma. It was getting cold, so I took him with me one night into my sleeping bag. And that’s when I fell in love with that cat,” said Liashuk, 26. “He’s not just my best friend, he’s my son.”

Since then, Shaybyk has moved to different positions with Liashuk, with the pair becoming a viral sensation for their joint patrol videos.

Liashuk describes his cat as the perfect hunter. “Once we were at the position in the forest and he caught 11 mice in one day. Sometimes [he] brings mice to my sleeping bag,” he boasted.

Despite their bond, Shaybyk remains a free cat, but he has always returned to Liashuk. In June he disappeared for 18 long days until he was found by Ukrainian soldiers at a position several kilometers away, chilling with the local felines. “He just needed some love. I call it a vacation,” Liashuk said.

Shaybyk and Liashuk also collect donations for the Ukrainian army, with Shaybyk receiving a special award in September for helping to raise money to buy seven cars and other supplies.

Herych the high-bred

Unlike frontline strays, Herald, known as Herych, is a cat aristocrat. As soon as Russia invaded, Herych, a Scottish Fold, joined his human, Kyrylo Liukov, a military coordinator for the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation, which delivers supplies to frontline units.

Herych, who lives with Liukov in Kramatorsk, a city in Donetsk region, traveled to the front more than 20 times.

“Every time he was the star of a show, with so many fighters running to us to pet him and take a picture with him,” Liukov said. “Herych was patient — though a little shocked.”

Unlike other frontline animals, Herych remains calm during Russian shelling. “At most he just turns his head to the sound and that’s all,” Liukov said.

Like Syrsky, Herych uses his online popularity to help Ukraine’s army, fronting a campaign that raised several million hryvnias (a million hryvnia is about €25,000) to purchase cars for the military.

The site also reports that the Russians have “weaponized cats for propaganda,” but we won’t talk about moggies on the wrong side of history.

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From the BBC, a coincidental recovery (click screenshot to read):

An excerpt (indented):

Mike and Marilyn Chard from Bovisand lost their one-eyed cat Tigger back in October.

He was taken in by Gables Dogs and Cats Home in Plymouth but because he was not micro-chipped, his owners could not be contacted.

The couple spotted Tigger on TV when he was seen being held by the general manager at the rescue centre.

When he failed to return home three months ago, Mr Chard said they thought their pet had “gone off to die”.

The couple adopted the stray 12 years ago when he walked through their cat flap with one eye and a bent tail.

“He hadn’t been himself for maybe ten days and was due a vet appointment but there was nothing you could put your finger on.

“Apparently when he was out that day he must have had an epileptic fit and somebody found him the next day semi-conscious and took him to the RSPCA, who gave him to Gables. That’s all we know.”

The cat had been nicknamed ‘Bovi-Mort’ during his stay at the charity, but the couple said they were “100% certain it was him from the photographs”.

Mrs Chard said: “He was called Bovi because of Bovisand and Mort because they were thinking of putting him to sleep.”

Mr Chard said: “We were there when Gables opened because we couldn’t wait. They were over the moon he was going back to his owners.

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This story comes from NBC (Channel 4) in New York, recounting how Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass (who works with a cat-rescue group) was excoriated on social media after he missed a crucial kick. Bass and cat fans rallied, donating over a quarter million dollars to the cat-rescue organization.

Click to read:

The article:

Fans found the purr-fect way to show support for Buffalo Bills kicker Tyler Bass.

The Ten Lives Club, a cat rescue organization that Bass has worked with, received more than $250,000 in donations made in his name following the backlash he received after missing a heartbreaking field goal in Sunday’s playoff game, according to The Buffalo News.

The Bills trailed the Kansas City Chiefs 27-24 with under two minutes remaining in the AFC divisional round matchup when Bass missed a 44-yard field goal that all but ended the game and the season for a Bills team seeking its first Super Bowl championship.

After the game, the 26-year-old kicker reportedly began receiving online threats that led him to delete his social media accounts.

The Ten Lives Club made a post showing support for Bass, who has previously partnered with the Buffalo-based non-profit organization to help rescue cats.

Here’s the Instagram post put up by the rescue group 10livesclub.  DON’T BULLY OUR FRIEND! Note that the organization mentions how their phones are “ringing off the hook” with donations:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ten Lives Club (@10livesclub)

More:

Donations — with the $22 amount being a nod to Bass’s No. 2 jersey — came in from Bills fans, Chiefs fans and other supporters.

The organization raised donations through its website and its social media accounts, which feature a profile picture of a cat wearing a Bills jersey.

“That money came in very, very quickly and will make a huge difference for our rescue cats here in Western New York,” Kimberly LaRussa of the Ten Lives Club told The Buffalo News.

This is very sweet:  “Leave our friend alone.”  I’m glad that although he missed a kick, the cats are the beneficiaries.

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Lagniappe: A battle royale between a Siamese cat and a sand fox (Vulpes rueppellii). What a sound the fox makes! The cat just hisses, but he seems to have the upper paw. I think the fox just wants to cuddle.

h/t: Gregory, Jez