We've highlighted many different jobs for cats here, like therapy cats, barn cats, ship cats and post office cats, but did you know there was a physicist cat? Yes, his name was Chester, although in scholarly circles he used the name FDC Willard, and he was co-author of a paper entitled "Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3HeTwo-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He". AtlasObscura describes it as an influential and often cited physics paper about the behavior of atoms at different temperatures. Most cats I know don't know much about physics, (hell most people I know, myself included, aren't well versed in the behavior of atoms), so how did a cat end up as co-author of...
We've been featuring some cats with jobs on this blog, like therapy cats, ships cats and barn cats, but did you ever hear of a spy cat? In the 1960's the CIA worked on a project called Acoustic Kitty with the goal of creating a cat spy. Project acoustic kitty involved trying to create cyborg cats that could record sound. According to the Smithsonian magazine, the CIA was targeting an Asian head of state who had cats wandering around during his meetings with his advisors. It was thought that no one would notice another cat wandering through, so if they could implant a cat with a microphone, they could record some interesting intelligence without arousing suspicion. Another Smithsonian article says that the...
Here at catswhereitsat.com, we have featured blog posts about various kinds of working cats, like barn cats and therapy cats. This article is about another kind of hard working cat, the bodega cat! So, what is a bodega? It started as Spanish word meaning a wine shop or wine cellar, but we're not talking about cats who work in wineries (although based on the success breweries have with using cats for pest control, that's probably not a bad job for them!) The word bodega has expanded in many urban areas to refer to a convenience store or small grocery store. Like their more rural cousins, the barn cats, bodega cats are tasked with the job of rodent control - keeping...
Cats have often been used as a means of pest control and one place where it used to be common to see a working cat is at the post office. According to ThePostalMuseum.org, cats were first officially employed in September of 1868 (although there were likely cats in post offices prior to that, they weren't on the payroll!) The Secretary of the Post Office agreed to a 6 month probationary period for 3 cats at the rate of 1 shilling per week to help with a mouse problem at the Money Order office in London. The cats must have done a good job, because cats continued to work in post offices until 1984! The job of mail cat was often...
We've talked about some cats with jobs on this blog before, like ship cats and therapy cats, but did you know that there was a cat who had a job as a mayor? The place was a small town in Alaska named Talkeetna where, in 1997, a box of kittens was placed in front of Nagley’s General Store and manager Lauri Stec selected an orange kitten with no tail and named him Stubbs. As the story goes, it was around that time that the residents of Talkeetna were unhappy with their mayoral candidates and started a write in campaign to select a different candidate and Stubbs the cat came out the victor! Now Alaska's News Source notes that Talkeetna is an unincorporated community and doesn't have an...
