Okay, the music is cheesy but the cats are adorable. Cubs (a male and female) born on May 25 at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.

The snow leopard (Panthera uncia), also known as the ounce, is a denizen of the mountains of central Asia. With its camouflaging cream-colored fur, speckled with black rosettes, it’s surely one of the world’s most beautiful cats. Its thick coat (most evident on the tail) and large paws are adaptations to the high-altitude mountain habitat. But these adaptations, and its beauty, have been the ounce’s downfall: hunted heavily to make hats and coats, only about 3500-7000 of these cats remain in the wild.

and when younger:

Just in (thanks to reader Sean): It must be snow leopard week, because there’s a nice video of a newborn snow leopard cub, named Yukichi, in Japan.

If you have a special cat, or just an ordinary moggie, send me a photo and a short description (my email is easily found on the web), and I’ll consider it for a Caturday Felid.

Today’s felids, Sadie and Zoë, come from two readers of this website: John Danley and Lori Anne Parker.  John and Lori Anne live in Nashville, where she is an artist and he a musician (several of John’s public performances are on YouTube).  They describe their cats:

At first their relationship was inauspicious and warlike: Sadie—the older of two with greater house tenure—flattened her ears and hissed at Zoë’s every approach. Nonetheless, a discovered mutual interest eventually acted as an unexpected catalyst for Carnivora solidarity. Beyond a shared lineage of Maine Coon alleles, Sadie and Zoë often collude via literary and gastronomic pursuits in an attempt to satiate their appetite for philosophical materialism and reconstituted albacore tuna.  Being of militant, neo-secular feline dispositions, no unfalsified argument or abstract concept of a metaphysical metazoan has been able to dissuade their New Felis catusism. This week they are engaged in vigorous discussions of A Natural History of the Senses, Why Evolution is True, and The Joy of Philosophy. Zoë, the more cheerful of the two, brought the third book to Sadie’s attention, reminding her that just because a cat is existential doesn’t mean she has to refrain from long cycles of hearty purr.

Figure 1.   Zoë (l.) and Sadie (r.)

Fig. 2.  The reading room, ready for kittehs. A selection of philosophy, science, atheism, and tuna is on offer.

Fig. 3.  Voracious kitteh reading. (They seem to be ignoring WEIT.)