100 Cats Who Changed Civilization: History's Most Influential Felines

TIBBLES ^{THE CAT WHO WIPED OUT AN ENTIRE SPECIES}

Felines are famous for their skill at eradicating mice, rats, and birds. But no cat in the history of civilization can match the unbridled bloodlust displayed by a humble lighthouse keeper’s pet named Tibbles. He’s become famous—or rather, infamous—in the annals of science as the only animal to have wiped out an entire species by itself.

The unlucky species in question was the Stephens Island wren. By all accounts, it was as unusual as it was harmless. Because there were originally no mice in the corner of the world where it evolved, the wren adapted to fill that ecological niche. It lost the ability to fly, shrank to roughly the size of a rodent, and spent its days running at top speed through the underbrush. But though it couldn’t fly, the wren retained the ability to sing.

At one time this fragile, musical, mouselike bird called all of New Zealand home. But when South Pacific islanders arrived, they brought stowaway rats on their ships—rats that quickly invaded the local ecosystem. The wrens, completely helpless against the sudden onslaught of such a powerful and ruthless predator, were quickly exterminated. Their last rat-free redoubt was Stephens Island, a roughly one-square-mile spit of rock off New Zealand’s northern coast.

That’s how matters stood until 1894, when a lighthouse was established there. Its keeper, David Lyall, brought along his cat, Tibbles, for company. One can only imagine the feline’s delight at finding the island overrun with bite-sized, flightless birds. Not surprisingly, Tibbles got straight to work, attacking the little creatures wherever he found them.

Tibbles alerted his owner to his new hobby by hauling more than a dozen of his victims back to the lighthouse, all of them dead or nearly so. Lyall kept several, which because of their strangeness found their way into the hands of ornithologists. In 1895 the little animal was unveiled to the scientific world and given the Latin name Xenicus lyalli. Then, almost in the same breath, it was declared extinct.

The ecological destruction inaugurated by a pack of rats was, ironically, completed by a lone cat. It never occurred to the lighthouse keeper, or anyone else, that given the unique (and uniquely fragile) nature of the Stephens Island fauna, it might have been a good idea to make Tibbles an indoor cat.

SNOWBALL ^{THE CAT WHO CAUGHT A KILLER}

Douglas Beamish thought he got away with murder. And he might have, if it weren’t for the case-making evidence furnished by his cat.

It happened in 1994, when Canadian authorities on Prince Edward Island found Shirley Duguay buried in a shallow grave. Royal Canadian Mounted Police were called in to investigate. They paid particular attention to a blood-soaked leather jacket in a plastic bag that had been buried along with the body. Unfortunately, the blood was all Duguay’s, and therefore useless for DNA comparisons. But forensics experts discovered something else: twenty-seven strands of white hair that, upon closer examination, were determined to come from a cat. The Mounties recalled that Beamish, Duguay’s estranged common-law husband, lived not too far from the grave site with his parents—and that they owned a white feline named Snowball.

The Mounties obtained a blood sample from Snowball, hoping to compare it to the DNA in the hairs. The problem, they soon discovered, was that no one had ever done such a thing before. After a series of calls, the authorities located perhaps the only people on the planet who could help—a team of researchers at the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity in Frederick, Maryland, which was developing a map of the feline genome.

The academics had never before participated in a CSI-style criminal investigation, and it took some convincing to get them on board. Once they signed on, however, they were able to quickly isolate the genetic code in the jacket hairs and match it to the blood sample from Snowball. Using this evidence, and the expert testimony of the scientists who developed the technology, Beamish was convicted of murder and sent to prison. The case set a precedent for the use of cat DNA to place criminals at the scenes of crimes. Afterward, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded a $265,000 grant to create a National Feline Genetic Database. It developed the technology necessary to help forensics labs around the world trace cat hairs found at crime scenes to specific pets. Thanks to Snowball, criminals (about a third of whom own felines) can now be busted by their own furry friends.

MACEK ^{THE CAT WHO GLOWED IN THE DARK}

Physicist, electrical engineer, and inventor Nikola Tesla is considered one of the most prolific and enigmatic geniuses of all time. In addition to pioneering the systems that made home electricity practical, he was instrumental in developing radio. His more futuristic pursuits included building machines to communicate with extraterrestrials, creating remote-controlled vehicles, and even attempting to refute Einstein’s work on a unified field theory.

This was pretty heady stuff for a man born in 1856.

He was definitely ahead of his time. When Tesla, who became a U.S. citizen, died in a New York City hotel room in 1943 at the age of eighty-six, the FBI swooped down on his residence, rounded up his papers, and sealed them in a secret file. In his later years the great scientist was rumored to be tinkering with a “death ray.” The powers that be couldn’t afford not to believe it.

From his youth, Tesla was fascinated by the unknown—a fascination inspired by his cat. He grew up in an isolated farmhouse in what is now Croatia. As a child, his beloved companion was a large feline named Macek (Serbian for “male cat”). Tesla, who described his four-legged friend as “the finest of all cats in the world,” went everywhere with him.

As a boy of three, Tesla displayed no particular interest in science. But during one particularly cold and dry winter day, a huge charge of static electricity built up in the atmosphere. People who walked in the snow left glowing footprints, and snowballs exploded like fireworks when they were thrown against walls or trees.

But that was nothing compared to what happened to Macek. “In the dusk of the evening, as I stroked Macek’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement,” Tesla wrote in later years. “Macek’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.” Even more amazing, when the cat walked through darkened rooms, he faintly glowed.

The sight fired the boy’s imagination, and sent him on a lifelong quest to understand electricity. Some say that Tesla, through his work, helped make the twentieth century possible. If so, then the world also owes a debt to Macek, who inspired him.

BLACKBERRY ^{THE QUEEN OF THE MUNCHKINS}

Some cat breeds sport long hair, some short, some almost none. Some are lithe and athletic, others stocky and sedentary. All these differences have been readily accepted by cat fanciers, save one. In the early 1990s, the breeding community was set afire by a new kind of feline with very short legs. It was called the munchkin, and it is, without doubt, the world’s most controversial cat.

The saga began in 1983 in Rayville, Louisiana. A woman named Sandra Hochenedel found two cats trying to escape a bulldog by hiding under a pickup truck. Both were pregnant, and both had unusually short legs that made them look like a cross between a ferret and a dachshund. Hochenedel named the gray one Blueberry and gave it away. She named the black one Blackberry and kept it.

Blackberry promptly produced a litter of kittens, including a short-legged male. Hochenedel named him Toulouse and gave him to a friend, Kay LaFrance of Monroe, Louisiana. There Toulouse contributed enthusiastically to the local gene pool. Soon there were many short-legged cats and kittens slinking around the property. The two women, curious about the health of the little creatures, had them examined by Dr. Solveig Pflueger, chief of the genetics committee for The International Cat Association (TICA). She offered the opinion that the munchkins were physically sound. Interestingly, this sort of mutation seems to arise regularly. During the twentieth century, similar short-legged cats were reported everywhere from Russia to Germany to Great Britain.

Not everyone saw it that way, however. For years munchkin breeders were given the cold shoulder by cat shows and breed organizations, most of which saw them as unhealthy genetic aberrations. Words such as freak and abomination were used liberally. Munchkin owners were sometimes ejected from competitions. When TICA finally recognized Blackberry’s progeny as a new breed in 1995, one veteran cat show judge resigned in protest, describing the cats as “an affront to any breeder with ethics.”

In spite—or perhaps because—of the controversy, the munchkin has gained worldwide fame. The demand for munchkin kittens keeps rising, with some costing thousands of dollars. All because of poor Blackberry. Ever an outdoor cat, she one day simply vanished from Hochenedel’s property—unaware or unconcerned that she was the founder of a dynasty.

F. D. C. WILLARD ^{THE CAT WHO TAUGHT US PHYSICS}

Few humans can match the academic achievements ascribed to a certain Siamese named Felis Domesticus Chester (F. D. C.) Willard. He proved his mental mettle by coauthoring—with his human companion, Michigan State University professor J. H. Hetherington—two research papers on low-energy physics.

Willard earned his unique place in scientific history thanks to a typing issue. When Hetherington asked an associate to proof an article before submission, he was told that because he was the sole author, the piece couldn’t be published until the editorial we—used throughout—was changed to I. Nowadays this could be accomplished using the “find and replace all” function on one’s computer. But this was 1975, and Hetherington would have to spend days retyping.

Instead, he found a collaborator. He gave F. D. C. Willard second billing on the title page of his article, which was duly published in Physical Review Letters. The piece was so warmly received that in 1980 Hetherington presented a second scholarly work under his cat’s name alone. The subterfuge was finally exposed when a visitor to Hetherington’s office, upon learning the professor was out, asked to see Willard instead.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S CAT ^{THE INSPIRATION FOR THE CAT DOOR}

Physicist Sir Isaac Newton was one of history’s greatest mathematicians and theorists. During his lifetime he made numerous contributions to science, including developing the laws of celestial mechanics, codeveloping calculus, and conducting groundbreaking work on everything from the nature of light spectra to measurements of the speed of sound. But few realize that Newton was also a pet lover—or that sometimes his numerous animal friends could drive him to distraction. For instance, he once suffered an emotional breakdown when a favorite dog knocked over a candle on his desk, burning some of his important research notes.

His dealings with an annoying cat yielded happier results. The world’s felines (and canines, for that matter) owe an everlasting debt of gratitude to this overbearing pet, whose name is lost to history. According to legend, it constantly interrupted Newton with its demands to be let in and out of the house. Frustrated, the scientist quickly designed and implemented a solution—the pet door. Today, every feline blessed with the ability to enter and leave a room without troubling his or her human friends has Newton (and his restless charge) to thank.

TEE CEE ^{THE CAT WHO PREDICTED SEIZURES}

Were it not for their quirky, independent personalities, cats might be naturals for all sorts of jobs usually done by service dogs. Keenly observant and alert to the slightest changes in their surroundings, felines could make wonderful guardians. So far, however, they’ve firmly rejected any such callings.

All save for one.

The cat in question is named Tee Cee, and he has earned international fame for his uncanny ability to predict epileptic seizures—a skill he’s used to ease the suffering of his grateful owner. Ironically, the English feline had endured quite a bit at the hands of a human, who stuffed Tee Cee and his littermates in a box and tossed it in a river. He was rescued and taken to an adoption center, where he became the pet of Michael Edmonds, a Sheffield man who suffers from an extremely dangerous and unpredictable form of epilepsy. The disorder causes sudden, violent seizures that strike without warning. The problem is so serious that Edmonds can’t leave home unescorted, for fear of having an attack at some unexpected time or place.

Edmonds’s new cat provided almost providential help. Tee Cee took a great deal of interest in his new owner—particularly, it seemed, when he was about to seize. This was remarkable, because Edmonds displays no symptoms prior to attacks. Or at least, none detectable by humans. “We noticed that Tee Cee began staring at my stepfather prior to a seizure and then ran to my mother to let her know all is not well, acting as an early warning system,” Edmonds’s stepdaughter, Samantha Laidler, told the BBC. “Once assistance arrives, Tee Cee doesn’t leave Michael’s side until he regains consciousness, and his warnings have proved invaluable to the family.”

The behavior was so unexpected that it took a while for family members to make the connection between Tee Cee’s staring sessions and Edmonds’s epileptic fits. But once the link was established, the fame of the former stray spread far and wide. In 2006 he was nominated for a prestigious Rescue Cat of the Year Award—quite an accomplishment for a feline who was once, literally, thrown away as garbage.

CC ^{THE CAT WHO WAS A CLONE}

This cleverly named creature won fame for being both the most unique and un-unique of cats. Born in late 2001 in a blaze of publicity, CC (short for Copy Cat) was the world’s first cloned feline.

The mostly gray calico was the crowning achievement of a research program originally established to clone dogs. In 1997, millionaire entrepreneur John Sperling bankrolled a roughly $4 million effort to develop a replacement for his beloved mutt, Missy. After years of work on what came to be known as the Missyplicity Project, scientists at Texas A&M University learned one key fact about cloning canines: It’s hard. Cats, however, are relatively easier.

Emphasis on relatively. The group endured eighty-seven failures before producing CC. In 2000, Sperling and others founded a company to offer the process to grieving pet owners who pined for duplicates of their dearly departed friends—and could pay somewhere in the middle five figures to get them.

The birth of CC seemed to validate the business model of the company that created her. Bereaved but well-heeled former cat owners could turn to an organization whose name, Genetic Savings & Clone, sounded like something from an old Outer Limits episode. The company ramped up its program to something approaching mass production. Clients with an eye toward the future could PetBank some of their cat’s premortem DNA for future use in the Nine Lives Extravaganza cloning program. Then, when the original pet passed away, scientists at the company’s state-of-the-art Madison, Wisconsin, laboratory could use that genetic information to create an embryo to be carried by a surrogate cat mom.

Is it possible to put a price tag on such a miracle? Actually, yes. Cat owners can make a deposit in the PetBank for around $1,000, and get a copy of their kitty for roughly $32,000.

Unfortunately for the company’s backers, not enough people wanted carbon copies of their deceased kitties. Genetic Savings & Clone went out of business in late 2006. Interestingly, even though the firm trafficked in clones, it couldn’t guarantee that the cats it created would be exact copies of the originals. Nature, it seems, hates to repeat itself. Though the company’s clones carried the same genetic code as the original animals, environmental factors sometimes introduced slight—or not-so-slight—variations. For instance, while CC is an exact genetic duplicate of her DNA donor (a calico tabby named Rainbow), her fur is a different color.

ACOUSTIC KITTY ^{THE CAT THE CIA TURNED INTO A BUG}

The mysterious world of espionage reached its pinnacle during the darkest days of the Cold War. As the Soviet Union and the West struggled for worldwide military and economic supremacy, no intelligence-gathering scheme seemed too wild or harebrained if it offered a chance, however small, of gaining vital information.

Yet, even in the context of those desperate times, the CIA’s plan to turn a stray cat into an electronic intelligence gathering platform still sounds rather, well, nuts.

The project was revealed to the public in 2001, when it was mentioned in a passel of heavily censored documents declassified by the CIA’s Science and Technology Directorate. According to experts, the scheme, hatched during the 1960s, was to wire felines with listening equipment so they could eavesdrop on conversations. The prototype, called Acoustic Kitty, was surgically implanted with microphones, batteries, and a radio receiver, along with an antenna running up its tail. The $16 million project came to an abrupt end, however, during field trials. The bionic cat was released near a park and was promptly run over by a taxi.

It was a merciful finale for the poor creature. Perhaps God—or Mother Nature, or simply fate—realized that a bunch of idiots were tampering with biology’s most elegant design and decided to stage an intervention.

ALL BALL ^{THE CAT WHO PLAYED WITH A GORILLA}

Scientists once believed that the ability to make and use tools was a skill reserved only for humans. Now they’ve realized that creatures from chimps to certain kinds of birds can master this trick. So are there any behaviors that set us apart from the “lower” animals? Perhaps our inclination to keep other species as pets makes us unique.

Or perhaps not.

If the behavior of Koko the gorilla is any guide, other creatures crave this sort of companionship, too. The Woodside, California, resident, born in 1976, is world famous for her “speaking” ability. The scientists who care for her assert that she’s learned more than 1,000 American Sign Language symbols and uses them to communicate everything from her physical needs to her moods.

In 1984, Koko reportedly told her keepers that she’d like to have a pet cat for her birthday present. Shortly thereafter, a litter of abandoned kittens was brought in for her to inspect. After carefully examining each one, she chose a tailless gray male who she named All Ball. Though Koko was of course far larger and much stronger than her fragile new charge, she treated him with great gentleness. All Ball was cuddled, kissed, and allowed to ride around on Koko’s back like a baby gorilla.

Sadly, All Ball escaped from the compound in December 1984 and was killed by a car. Koko was inconsolable. She cried for days and tried to express her loss to her keepers through sign language. When someone asked what happened to her pet, Koko responded by signing “Sleep cat.” And when she was shown a picture of a kitten that looked like All Ball, she signed, “Cry, sad, frown.”

Can a gorilla really communicate using language? Maybe, or maybe not. Some scientists wonder if Koko truly comprehends what she’s doing, or if, perhaps, the words she uses are merely wishful thinking on the part of the handlers who interpret for her. But what’s harder to dispute is the depth of the gorilla’s reaction to her small friend’s death. Koko may or may not be able to sign the word for grief, but she certainly seems to feel it.

SCHRÖDINGER’S CAT ^{THE MOST ENIGMATIC CAT IN OUR UNIVERSE. OR ANY UNIVERSE, FOR THAT MATTER}

For more than a century, physicists have struggled to understand quantum mechanics—the rules governing the behavior of subatomic particles. This is important because the knowledge is essential for everything from nuclear power to computer science to genetic engineering. But it’s also maddening, because these incredibly small objects don’t behave in ways the average person would consider normal. Or even rational.

One of the most bedeviling problems is that while in the “big” universe one can chart the positions of planets and stars based on mathematical formulas, the subatomic world’s behavior can’t be easily predicted. For instance, it is physically impossible to determine both the momentum and precise position of an electron orbiting an atomic nucleus. What this means, in layman’s terms, is that our entire known world is constructed of things that can’t ever be known.

Great minds have expended enormous quantities of chalk and covered numberless chalkboards trying to reconcile the operation of the tiny quantum universe with our “real” world. In 1934, physicist Erwin Schrödinger tried to illustrate those complexities by using, of all things, an imaginary cat.

Schrödinger designed a thought experiment in which an atomic nucleus was used in a game of automated Russian roulette with a theoretical feline. Writing in the German magazine Natural Sciences, he ruminated about what might happen if a cat were placed in a sealed box with a canister of poison gas that was connected in some way to a radioactive atomic nucleus. The nucleus has an exactly 50 percent chance of decaying in one hour. If it does, its radiation will open the gas canister, killing the cat. If it doesn’t decay, the canister won’t open and the cat will survive.

Here’s where things get strange. According to our understanding of quantum mechanics, subatomic particles such as the nucleus could exist in many states at once, until some sort of outside stimulus forced them into one course of action. In the world of quantum physics, the mere act of observation can accomplish this. In other words, someone looking at it could cause the nucleus to stop fluxing between multiple states and, in essence, pick a side. Thus, an observer who opened the box after an hour would find either a dead cat or a live cat.

But what goes on inside the container before the human looks and forces the nucleus down one road or the other? According to some interpretations of quantum theory, inside this Twilight Zone of a box, both things happen at once. The nucleus is both decayed and undecayed, and the cat is both alive and dead. Furthermore, some physicists assert that when the box is finally opened and the results observed, both alternatives continue. Time and space split, and two entire universes shear off from each other—one in which the cat lives, the other in which it dies.

Not surprisingly, Schrödinger’s enigmatic cat has become a feline celebrity among the learned. Sly references show up regularly in science fiction movies and television series such as Dr. Who and Futurama, and writers from Ursula K. Le Guin to Robert A. Heinlein have coopted the feline in their books.

That’s a lot of press for an animal that isn’t real. However, fans can take comfort in the fact that while Schrödinger’s cat doesn’t exist in this corner of the space-time continuum, it may in some other bit of the quantum-ruled Multiverse.

OTHER FELINES OF DISTINCTION

THE FIRST KNOWN DOMESTIC CAT — Discovered by French archaeologists in a 9,500-year-old grave on the island of Cyprus. Near its final resting place sits the grave of (presumably) its human master.

THE DOCTOR’S DEVILS — The nickname of matching black cats owned by eighteenth-century London quack Gustavus Katterfelto, who conned the gullible by displaying “scientific wonders” such as rudimentary electricity tricks. Katterfelto used the static that built up in the cats’ fur to, literally, put the spark in his presentations.

SIZI — The prized pet of physician and theologian Dr. Albert Schweitzer. If Sizi fell asleep on Schweitzer’s left arm, he refused to use that limb until his feline friend moved of her own accord.

TAMA — Created in 2000 by Japan’s Omron corporation, Tama was the first mass-produced robotic feline. Pressure sensors enabled her to detect and react to petting.

THE HYPOALLERGENIC CAT — Recently produced by the San Diego-based company Allerca, these felines are genetically engineered to suppress a protein secretion that causes allergies.