Doing a Tesco delivery order I lazily put fish in the search and got really excited when I found many really good and interesting items - and all were for cats it turned out Take care, folks... the clue is often Pouch in the title. I await the arrival of white coated people at the door in plain unmarked van. We do not have a cat.

Pet of the Week:

One for the captions thread, perhaps? What advice would the Leader offer to Boris Johnson at this difficult moment in our Nation's history?

I mentioned a couple of months ago that in the U3A Spanish class the book we are studying from had mentioned the Nazca Lines.  I read the other day that a cat figure has been found among the geogylphs.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/world/americas/peru-cat-nazca-lines-nasca.html

Given the time of the creation of the figure it's hardly likely to be a domestic moggy.  I looked up native South American cats on the World Atlas site and wondered if it might be a figure of a Geoffroy's Cat which looks something like felis catus and is about the same size.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

I mentioned a couple of months ago that in the U3A Spanish class the book we are studying from had mentioned the Nazca Lines.  I read the other day that a cat figure has been found among the geogylphs.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/world/americas/peru-cat-nazca-lines-nasca.html

Given the time of the creation of the figure it's hardly likely to be a domestic moggy.  I looked up native South American cats on the World Atlas site and wondered if it might be a figure of a Geoffroy's Cat which looks something like felis catus and is about the same size.

LiR, thanks for the information. I had a look to your "Geoffroy's Cat" and indeed it can be, given the data, that the cat was already present at that time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffroy%27s_cat
I had to look to your term: Felis Catus and I see now that it is about the "domestic cat"...

I had already a conversation with Dirk Marinus on this board about the Nazca Lines and I stick still to my opinion that it would be easy even nowadays to enlarge a small picture to a big one on the ground with a measuring stick putting marks on the ground that reflect your smaller original picture, for instance using the sun in a sundial for a short time as line and guide to measure from...or just a frame marked with ropes around the picture from where you measure the points of your Nazca line...?

Kind regards, Paul.

Geoffrey's cat (Leopardus geoffroy) seems to be more of a woodland animal mostly from the other side of the Andes to the Nazca desert - although that in itself need not exclude its depiction at Nazca - so I wonder if it's not a Pampas cat (Leopardus colocola) or the very closely related Pantanal cat (Leopardus braccatus) which are other small S. American cats but with a more extensive range and inhabiting drier more open scrub/grassland environments over to the west side of the Andes and extending further North into Peru.

Personally though I think it looks quite a bit like an Emily's cat (Felis catus bagpuss):

Maybe so, MM.  I'll admit I looked at the pictures of the various South American cats rather than their habitats.

You shouldn't take my comment so seriously, IiR ... I was just enchanted by the big, smiley, cuddly Nazca cat, and was using the scientific name of your Geoffroy's cat to link to the fat, saggy, old bagpuss, who I fondly remember from children's TV in the 1970s (although I was a bit old for it then).

But your post does raise the question - since I assume the Old World domestic cat (Felis catus) only got to South America with the Spanish conquistadores - did any of the South American civillisations ever domesticate their own native cat species?

Meles meles wrote:

But your post does raise the question - since I assume the Old World domestic cat (Felis catus) only got to South America with the Spanish conquistadores - did any of the South American civillisations ever domesticate their own native cat species?

 
MM, this board or is it you, push me to search for questions as you did...and so I learn everyday something interesting...at least for me...

As I found on the first sight no domestication of a cat species before the arrival of the Europeans...of course you have cats and cats...perhaps the South American "ocelot" cat can be a pretender?

As science has done for the Homo Sapiens, one can do it seemingly for cats too...and it seems that all those cats come from Asia

Perhaps in this Moggy thread we can once go to the very origin of the domesticated cat in this article from The Scientific American
http://www.bio-nica.info/biblioteca/O%27brien2007EvolutionCats.pdf

I said MM you pushed me and so I learn everyday something new and interesting.

Kind regards, Paul.

MM and Paul - unless there were any domestic moggies on the Polynesian Islands back then (though as far as I understand the Voyage of the Kon Tiki only confirmed that travel by raft from South America to the Polynesian Islands was possible and not that it actually took place.

Anyway, a bit of silliness so avert your eyes if silliness is a no-no for you.  A couple of clips of 'Owlkitty' where the owner of a cat has made short (very short) videos inserting his cat into extracts of films and TV programmes. The giant cats are dragons (CGI of course) in the original and in the other clip the original was a baby (as if you didn't know that).   

Brexit, Covid and now the destruction of that lovely 250-year-old wild pear tree (see Trike's rant of the day)...




As ever, Larry, channeling Edvard Munch, speaks for the nation:

And again today, this wise old moggy voices what the British people are thinking:


Boris Johnson: the first person to play a game of whack-a-mole where the mole has won.

I do not usually like daft cat videos, but when dealing with a barking-mad spiritual advisor, only a cool moggy will do. Thanks also to Eminem (sp?) for the remix. Love the chap wandering about in the background, but love the moggy more.

Daniel Kawczynski, Tory MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, has blocked Larry the Cat on Twitter. You must be a desperate sort of politician if you have to block a feline, even if he is a moggy as resolute as our lad in Westminster. Can't imaging Churchill or Disraeli - or even Neville Chamberlain - being so cowardly...

I don't want to annoy Temperance with cat videos of levity but I thought this old clip from 1906 was interesting.  It's scripted.  It's only 1:39 minutes long and the puss doesn't appear until 0:50.  

I can't see the video in my post so I'll try again.  I'll also put a conventional link rather than a YouTube link.     https://youtu.be/x2ZadzpwJZg

Larry has posted this this morning. We are all horrified by the mayhem in the USA, but are glad that this image reveals the somewhat lesser anarchy here at the seat of power in the UK. We do seem to be "muddling through" after all.

That said, deciding that a royal park (St. James') is an alternative lounging area/litter tray is really not acceptable, Larry.

Has this been posted before?  I haven't seen any of these automatic litter trays on sale in the UK but I thought whoever came up with the advertisement had been inventive. 

Tilly the Tabby

Experimenting to see if I could post an image of my cat from imgur.com but doesn't seem to be working.  Though if one clicks on the yellow link it takes you to imgur.com and the picture.  I don't know why insert an image or host an image didn't work unless it's my laptop.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Tilly the Tabby

Experimenting to see if I could post an image of my cat from imgur.com but doesn't seem to be working.  Though if one clicks on the yellow link it takes you to imgur.com and the picture.  I don't know why insert an image or host an image didn't work unless it's my laptop.

Is it this one LiR?
Just clicked with my right "mouse" tab (nothing to do with cats) on "copy picture" and then paste it here. Just that the picture was very large, but nordmann's site seems to reduce it to normal size...
Kind regards from Paul.

That's it Paul, but it was I and not Temperance that went awry when trying to insert the picture  Temperance is au fait with inserting pictures as she demonstrates when keeping us informed about Larry, the 10 Downing Street cat.

If you want to insert an image (as opposed to link to it on another site where they might have their own way of handling shortcut addresses) you have to tell this site that it is in fact an image. In other words the quoted name of the image should end with .jpg or one of the other recognised image formats. The Imgur site doesn't really help you with their own "link" system - if you use that then you end up only with the shortcut version, which may work fine on other platforms but not on most of them, such as this one, which expects honest to goodness html.

To display your kitty (or any other Imgur hosted picture) here the solution is simply to right-click on the picture in Imgur and copy the address to your clipboard. That way you avoid the shortcut version and get the crucial .jpg bit included automatically. Then paste that, and only that, into the "Insert an image" field on this site. That should work a treat.

As Paul said, don't worry about size. We had terrible problems here with people posting monsters in the past so I coded a special size override on all images to make sure that they fit the frames here. The only framing problems we encounter now are when Paul occasionally posts single string URL links to books that are longer than the books themselves. Though I notice lately he's going easy on us ....

LadyinRetirement wrote:

That's it Paul, but it was I and not Temperance that went awry when trying to insert the picture  Temperance is au fait with inserting pictures as she demonstrates when keeping us informed about Larry, the 10 Downing Street cat.

Sorry LiR. Just edited Temperance to LiR...

nordmann wrote:

The only framing problems we encounter now are when Paul occasionally posts single string URL links to books that are longer than the books themselves. Though I notice lately he's going easy on us ....  

Excuses also nord. I pay attention about it now. If it don't fit I even post it anymore. And thanks to the "edit" function I could, mainly by MM's warnings, correct older messages of mine, which didn't fit.
Kind regards, Paul.

Thanks for the information, nordmann.  Shortening the URL string is something else I need to get my head around.  If and when I try to post a picture/photo again I'll either try to use a different host company to imgur.com or try or use the methodology you have described to work around the problem.

"You're in the way."

"Sorry, Larry."

I know that Temp likes him, though I'm not sure whether she means the dean or the cat. Anyway they've been doing their double act again in the gardens of Canterbury Cathedral:



But how come the yellow mimosa (wattle) is in full flower in Kent when it's only just starting here in southern France? I thought it had been unusually cold in England.

They are my dream combination, MM!!!

Not sure if the good Dean could cope with me after I've been at the Chateauneuf-du-Pape, though.

I'm starting to sound like Miss Prism, hankering after the Reverend Dr Chasuble - oh God, is it come to this? I'd better just stick with admiring the cat (but the Dean does have a lovely, mellifluous reading voice). Perhaps he was a bit wild in his younger days. You can never tell with the C of E clergy, especially if they went to theological college in Oxford. Only joking - but I do love the moggy. They could have come up with a better name than Tiger, though - a suitably biblical name like Hezekiah, for instance - Hezza for short.

No idea about the mysterious flowering of the yellow mimosa - this is where we need Priscilla, especially as she lives in the South East.

Temperance wrote:

No idea about the mysterious flowering of the yellow mimosa - this is where we need Priscilla, especially as she lives in the South East.

Temperance, don't know so much about the South-East cold, but I was once in summer in the South-West (is that Cornwales?)
(with a fortnight "go as you please" ticket from the British Railways) and they said to me that it was there the "mediterrean" of Britain...I only made it till Exeter...
https://cutt.ly/3lw6Okg

Perhaps as you can see it, I suppose that there, it is possible that that Yellow Mimosa blossoming can preceed Meles' ones? Meles?

Kind regards, Paul.

There was detail in this report from the Mirror's News and Politics section that surely did not need to be in the public domain: concerned readers may judge for themselves. 

Adding just half-a-kilo (about a pound) is surely nothing to worry about, especially after the political stresses and upsets of the past few year(s). Larry is not fat and is hardly an emotional eater, although who could blame him if he was? 


Piling On the Pounds? Totally Misleading Headline!



Number 10 staff have been told to cut down on treats for Downing Street cat Larry after he piled on the pounds over lockdown.


The 14-year-old - 72 in human years - was taken to the vet for an “MOT”, and is said to be “doing well for an old boy”.

But a memo sent to No10 staff warned: “Larry…has put on 0.5kg in lockdown so likely too many Dreamies. Please can we reduce these?”


The Chief Mouser is said to have been “noisy in the car, but remained dignified once in the vets - even whilst having his temperature taken in a place he wasn’t expecting.”

Deleted.

A lot of unnecessary fuss going on about minor casting decisions for the forthcoming TV drama, This Sceptred Isle, a production which will examine the British government's handling of the Covid crisis. A decision to cast an Italian mongrel as Dilyn, the Prime Minister's ill-disciplined pet, has caused outrage amongst readers of the Daily Mail.

Only one casting decision really matters - who will play Larry? Negotiations are still in progress, but if Meghan Markle can be offered $50,000,000 (that really is fifty million) to play herself in Season Six of The Crown (the mind boggles), surely Larry must be invited to play himself? The thought of some narcissistic French moggy-luvvie perhaps being offered the part does not bear thinking about. 

EU Dog Cast As Dilyn


PS Kenneth Branagh as Boris looks more like Boris than Boris...






Branagh as the PM





Larry as himself.

Larry's got a comfy new bed in the refurbished flat in Downing Street. He says it's a modest piece - a taxpayer-friendly IKEA flatpack thing; and that donations from rich Tory cat lovers have had nothing to do with it.

An official photograph published this week - a rather splendid shot of Larry's bottom (and tail).

There is no truth in the rumour that the Chief Mouser has signed a deal to do a tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey: Larry continues to maintain a dignified silence about the difficulties of his early life at the seat of power ( notably how Cameron kept turfing him off the posh chairs in Number 10 - this trauma has been confronted and dealt with).

At first I thought this must be a piece of BBC April 1st reporting, but no - the giant carved Peruvian moggy really exists and is thought to be 2000 years old.

England needs one.


Peruvian Cerne Abbas Cat

In many ways it looks to me a bit like a kangaroo but that's impossible. While South America used to have a great many marsupials when it was separate from North America, they mostly all became exinct when the Isthmus of Panama formed and the two Americas becames joined (about 3 million years ago) and the marsupials were replaced by placental mammals migrating down from the north. No living or recently extinct South American marsupial remotely resembles a kangaroo. I assume the animal depicted is a small native South American cat species such as a Geoffroy's cat, an Andean Mountain cat or a Pampas cat, as I'm pretty sure common domestic cats (Felis catus) were unknown in the New world until introduced by the Conquistadores in the 16th century. Which then begs the question: did the Incas or other South American civillisations domesticate local wild cats independently of the domestication of the African wildcat, the ancestor of the common Old World moggy?

Of course it can be argued that humans have never really domesticated cats - and I'm sure cats themselves would say that they domesticated us - but at least some species of 'wild' South American cat can certainly be at least tamed to some degree.


Dali with Babou, his beloved ocelot.

EDIT : Yes it seems that while the Incas venerated the jaguar some of the earlier civillisations favoured smaller native cats. This ceramic bottle in the form of a grumpy cat dates from about 2000 years ago, is from the Viru culture of North Peru and resembles any one of several closely-related species of South American wild cat.

We had a bit of a chat about a Nazca line geoglyph that looks much like a cat (is it the same one?) in October last year upthread. Meles Meles you said then you thought it looked like Emily's cat from Bagpuss.

So we did ... I was sure we had discussed South American cats somewhere here however I couldn't find the posts. But then, d'oh, they were just up at the top of this page.

I do like that ancient Peruvian 'grumpy cat'. Here are three more, albeit from a slightly later culture:

   

These are all from the Moche culture of Northern Peru (4th - 7th century AD and so still pre-dating the rise of the Inca empire) and whether they depict mighty forest jaguars, mountain pumas, or just little native pussy-cats, is not entirely clear. The arched structure is, I think, a traditional form of carrying/pouring handle since they are actually ceramic jugs for serving liquids such as maize beer or fermented fruit wine.

This is an article from the BBC about a Belgian moggy - for Paul. It is about a silly Silly cat (Silly* is a town in Belgium - see below) who managed to get itself lost in High Wycombe here in England of all places. Happily this Belgian stray, Gizmo, had nine lives - one for each month he was lost. Gizmo's story ended happily, and he is now safely back in Belgium, a Silly cat again.


Silly Cat Found in High Wycombe




*Home of some of the best artisanal beer in Belgium, Silly is a town in the Walloon province of Hainaut...The name certainly has nothing to do with the English word which means ridiculous or idiotic. It’s called that way simply because of the Sille, a stream that flows through the Hainaut province. The town is best known for the Brassery of Silly, maker of specialty beers such as the Green Killer, the Pink Killer, and the Silly Pils.

I'm glad the kitty got home safely, Temperance.  Apparently the Belgian ladies' basketball team are known as the Belgian Cats.  Of course that can't trump Temperance's post about a real, furry Belgian moggy. 

I've applied to adopt one of Pen Farthing's Afghan rescue moggies. If successful, I shall call him Jellalabad (now Jalalabad) in memory of the battle fought in 1842. His current name is Harry which is quite unsuitable. I don't stand a cat in hell's chance of getting him, of course, but one can but hope. I believe there have already been several thousand offers of homes for this displaced feline and his compatriots. From the look of him in his photo, he would put the fear of God into the local cats.

The Battle of Jellalabad in 1842 was an Afghan siege of the isolated British outpost at Jellalabad (now Jalalabad) about 90 miles (140 km) east of Kabul.

Temperance wrote:

I've applied to adopt one of Pen Farthing's Afghan rescue moggies. If successful, I shall call him Jellalabad (now Jalalabad) in memory of the battle fought in 1842. His current name is Harry which is quite unsuitable.

The Battle of Jellalabad in 1842 was an Afghan siege of the isolated British outpost at Jellalabad (now Jalalabad) about 90 miles (140 km) east of Kabul.

Possibly named after a participant in the debacle of the First Afghan War:

Ah, the "Hector of Afghanistan"! But that Harry Flashman was a bit of a bully, was he not? I do hope Jellalabad was not named for him. I hope too that he has been neutered. I don't want him terrorising all the local females, especially Denis/Denise our transgender cat (previously mentioned on this thread).

That said, I believe all the rescue cats have been fully vaccinated, wormed and neutered. Probably safer than a British farm cat.

I hope you get a kitty, Temperance.

I had an unpleasant experience this afternoon in that I found a deceased cat that seemed to have died in its sleep in my back garden.  I took him/her to the vet to see if the unfortunate creature had a microchip so that the owners can be told. I might put a note on the gatepost just in case the kitty didn't have a microchip.  I found a collar too but the collar wasn't with the kitty so I don't know if they belonged together.  It upset me a bit.  My own cat has been dozing much of today.  It's been warm here today although yesterday started off cold.

I suspect something similar befell my little girl cat, Posca, who I believe is now buried in the neighbours' garden. Around the beginning of July she went missing for about a week, which wasn't unusual and she'd been in fine form up until then, so I really didn't give her absence that much thought. But then when she did finally turn up she was very thin, frail and clearly ailing. It was a Sunday evening so there was little I could immediately do but it was clearly a case for the vet first thing on the morrow. But I never saw her again. She had been a stray and had adopted me rather than the other way round, however after ten years I had still never managed to even pick her up let alone get her into a carrying basket, so visits to the vet had never really been possible. Although never particularly friendly to me, she was besotted with Tostig, my reprobate, roughty-toughty tom (another, don't-touch-me, stray) and was an excellent mouser. She was a good cat.

About a fortnight after her brief reappearance I was talking to the neighbours, had mentioned she was missing and that I feared the worst: they confirmed that they'd found a cat exactly like her, dead in their garden that following Monday. They hadn't recognised her as again they'd seen her only a week earlier in fine fettle and didn't think it could be her. So she's buried in their garden, which is fine as she reckoned it was all part of her personal fiefdom anyway. I didn't say anything here as at the time we were mourning Paul and it didn't seem appropriate.

But talking about absent friends, has anyone heard anything of our own Top Cat, Nordmann? The last time he posted anything here was early July, although I sent him a PM in mid August which I'm sure he picked up but he didn't reply although no response was required. He's probably just on his hols or busy working but in a time of global pandemic I get concerned when fellow Reshistorians unexpectedly stop posting.

I'm sorry to hear about Posca, MM.  Someone from the vet's rang me today.  The collar and the deceased kitty didn't belong together but the lady who owned the collar (whose cat had since returned home safely) asked if the vet staff gave me her phone number would I contact her so she could trace her kitty's movements.  I did so and though she lives on the east side of town like me it was a fair distance for a cat.  She thinks he crossed one main road near to her, then followed a local stream through a spinney and on exiting the copse had turned right and walked up the road where I live.  I have no idea about the unfortunate black cat though and may amend the note on my gate post to remove mention of the collar as the collar did not belong to the black cat.

I don't know - the things that are researched at Liverpool University these days:

Is Your Cat a Psychopath?

Published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the study, which involved 2,042 cat owners, illustrates the development of the first ever tool available to measure psychopathy in cats.

Every year, Larry Number 10 Cat presents his own psychopathic version of the Twelve Days of Christmas. It never varies. Day One today:

On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me, a partridge in a pear tree.
Ate it.

Actress Ksenia Moskalenko from Cosmic Voyage with the cat from the film.



There is a website dedicated to Cat appearances in Films.

Cinema Cats

We are now at the sixth day of Christmas and Larry reports that so far sixteen assorted festive avifauna have been received, killed and eaten. After some thought, the useless five gold rings were flogged on E-Bay and cash put in Larry's personal treats fund. Leftovers were used with eggs as indicated below:


On the sixth day of Christmas my true love sent to me, six geese-a-laying, FIVE GOLD RINGS, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Goose, calling bird, hen, turtle dove and partridge omelette for breakfast.

PS As regards University of Liverpool ridiculous accusations about moggies showing psychopathic tendencies, Number 10 Cat has said of the embarrassing pigeon incident in Downing Street: "I decided to let it go - I was just reaching it a lesson."



Superb action shot from Justin Ng, Larry's greatest fan!