New Morning Nook

Charlie this morning pulled over the basket containing the newspaper recycling and after tentatively poking his nose in he settled inside it for his morning doze.

In other critter news, I saw my first Swainson’s hawks of the year this afternoon, two birds flying into the black walnut trees on the opposite side of the road.

Dryer Double

Charlie frequently settles in for his morning repose in the dryer, as he has done for a while. Today Diego decided to join him.

I Iz Not Impressd By Ur Clozur

Charlie refuses to show any excitement during the final pitches of today’s Giants game, which they won over the Chicago Cubs 5-1. We wonder if he’s a Tigers fan.

Witness To Kittens

When we were in Brunswick, Maine last month we visited the museum home of the Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, which led me into a bout of reading on the Civil War. First I started with a couple of books on the battle of Gettysburg (including Noah Andre Trudeau’s book Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage). I then followed this by reading David Donald’s classic biography Lincoln.

One of the less known facts about Abraham Lincoln is that he has a reputation of being a great lover of cats, showing up on lists of famous cat lovers together with folks like Albert Schweitzer, Mark Twain, and Winston Churchill. Of this characteristic Donald only has this to say:

From almost the day of his arrival in New Salem [in 1835, when Lincoln was 26], the good women of the village had matrimonial plans for him. They found his awkward clumsiness touching, and they noted how tender he was with small children and how affectionate he was to kittens and other pets.

Wanting to know more about Lincoln’s ailurophilia, I searched down the original source of a tale about Lincoln befriending three orphaned kittens on a visit to General Grant’s camp at City Point, Virginia in March of 1865. The following is from General Horace Porter’s memoir Campaigning with Grant. Porter was at this time Grant’s aide de camp. I was glad to find this citation — Lincoln is a figure about which there is no shortage of mythology!

The President now went aboard his boat to spend the night. The next morning he wandered into the tent of the headquarters telegraph operator, where several of us were sitting…Three tiny kittens were crawling about the tent at the time. The mother had died, and the little wanderers were expressing their grief by mewing piteously. Mr. Lincoln picked them up, took them on his lap, stroked their soft fur, and murmured: “Poor little creatures, don’t cry; you’ll be taken good care of,” and turning to Bowers, said: “Colonel, I hope you will see that these poor little motherless waifs are given plenty of milk and treated kindly.” Bowers replied: “I will see, Mr. President, that they are taken in charge by the cook of our mess, and are well cared for.” Several times during his stay Mr. Lincoln was found fondling these kittens. He would wipe their eyes tenderly with his handkerchief, stroke their smooth coats, and listen to them purring their gratitude to him. It was a curious sight at an army headquarters, upon the eve of a great military crisis in the nation’s history, to see the hand which had affixed the signature to the Emancipation Proclamation, and had signed the commissions of all the heroic men who served the cause of the Union, from the general-in-chief to the lowest lieutenant, tenderly caressing three stray kittens. It well illustrated the kindness of the man’s disposition, and showed the childlike simplicity which was mingled with the grandeur of his nature.

Now if only I could find the source to the story that when Mary Todd Lincoln was asked if her husband had any hobbies, she replied “Cats.”

Minding The Field

Oblivious to the approaching balloons, Charlie keeps the field safe from the ravages of the gophers.

Cat Bite Tuesday

I returned home this evening after waiting out a rain shower to find Pica having a cat bite party with our neighbor Leila. This tale begins with Leila’s housemate Mary befriending a feral cat around here that she’s named Sophia. A couple weeks ago, with Pica’s assistance Mary tried to take Sophia to the vet to get spayed. The cat however bolted when she was almost in the carrier, and early this morning was the time for a second attempt. About 15 minutes after going across the street to help out this morning, Pica returns holding her hand in a paper towel, saying she needs to go to the hospital, and oh, Leila got bit too. The exact sequence of the events cannot be recalled by Pica, Leila, or Mary.

Anyway, Leila came over for a dinner of dal and to exchange war stories and tales of antibiotics (two separate courses for Pica; a big shot and one course for Leila). Mary comes by later and enjoys some dal. All parties are joking about the incident now, except for the poor cat, who is now under quarantine at the vet’s.

Knitting Assistant

Charlie makes the best of finding an interloper in his chair and proceeds to supervise the knitting.

Minding The Laundry

In addition to his habit of dozing in the dryer, Charlie these days is back to the practice of spending some of his morning sleeping in the laundry hamper.

Self-Aware

Magpies have recently been identified as the first non-mammals to exhibit self-recognition, using the usual protocol for self-recognition experiments of daubing paint on the animal and seeing if they react to it while looking in a mirror.

Surely self-awareness comes in more cognitive flavors than can be captured by the mirror test. Often when I scritch Diego, for instance under the chin or behind the ears, he’ll reach for my hand with his paw and use it to guide my hand to the spot he really wants scratched. Is that glimmerings of self-aware behavior? I don’t know but it’s pretty endearing.

Printer's Companion

Diego is not the first cat to develop an interest in the printing arts. The special collections librarian Donald Kerr at the University of Otago discovered on page 250 of the library’s copy of Astesanus de Asts Summa de casibus conscientiae, an extremely rare work from 1472 or 1473 printed in Strassburg by Johann Mentelin, three cat paw prints in ink.

Kerr noted that Mentelin had been described as “a careless printer”, so perhaps this was a good example. He checked with several other libraries holding copies of the work to see if there were any other cat paw prints to be found, but no such luck. The librarian at the State Library of Berlin noted however on their copy that there was bad damage on the initial and final leaves from rodent nibblings, which could explain why Mentelin kept a cat around the print house.

(From PhiloBiblos.)