Guess what will?
What's that? Mango?
So, I was looking online and I found this description for a job that's definitely not for us, professional cat cuddler.
Yeah, I'd have to agree with that. And first of all, why is that a job?
So? I have no idea. And this posting is from late January this year and it was put up by a cat's only veterinary clinic in Ireland. But here's a list of some of the questions you'd have to answer to see if this job is right for you. And these are all real. Are you a crazy cat person and love cats already? I'm thinking that's enough? Right? Does catitude come to you naturally? I wouldn't say we have high catatude levels? No, have you counted kittens before you
go to sleep? Do you feed stray cats in your locality? Does pett and cats make you warm and fuzzy?
I mean, I gotta be honest, Mango, I can't say that any of those sound like me.
So I can't think of a job you're less suited for. And the job basically involves calming down skittish cats and mister me them into a zen like space so the vets can see them but one of the biggest criticisms of our show has been that we're not kind enough to cats on the program. You are, of course scared of them, and I have let's call it a healthy respect for them. So I thought it was time for
a cat intervention, or a cat invention. We're gonna increase our empathy of cats and try to understand them a little better and maybe even call out some of their achievements. And perhaps by the end of this all you and I will be begging for that cat cuddling job.
Well I'm not sure I see that happening, but let's dive in. Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh how Ticketer and sitting behind that soundproof glass surrounded by cat themed music albums, and there are far more of these than I expected from him. But
he's got cat power. Cat Stevens, I think letti Grey Acoustic Kitty, and I didn't see the album cover for this, but I swear is that Garfield's smooth Jazz I hear playing in the background.
It is so Tristan was showing me this earlier it's all Garfield inspired music, but my favorite is fat is where It's at, you know, because Garfield eats a lot.
Right, Thanks for explaining that that guy has the best taste in novelty albums, and that of course is our friend and producer Tristan McNeil nw Mango. As you know, we've gotten some criticism about not being cat friendly enough on the show, and I have to be honest, it's a little bit surprising how much we've heard from listeners about this.
Yeah, I mean it was really shocking to me too, and I actually love all animals, or at least most furry animals. And you know this, but maybe some listeners don't. There was a long period of my life where I've dreamed of the becase vet. And also, for the record, we had cats on a bunch of covers of Mental Flos Plus. The first story I wrote on mentalfloss dot com was about a cat piano, so I had no idea when he came across this anti cat.
That's right, you wrote.
About what was it called the cats and Clavier. It was this musical instrument that I think it was invented to cheer up a prince or something.
Is that right.
Yeah, So it was like a piano, but instead of strings, you just put kittens in a box behind each key and it was supposed to gently prod the kitten to meyow in tune. And there was this modern version of it that was made with toy cats all tuned to different notes with this dude playing over the rainbow on them by squeezing them in order. I mean, there's a video of this on YouTube, but all that meowing isn't exactly music, but it's also not not music either.
I have definitely seen that video a few times and it's pretty great. And you know, it is interesting how polarizing cats are. And for the record, I should say I don't hate cats. I just happened to be terrified of cats.
When I was growing up.
I was across the street from Triplet Boys. They had a family cat, and not intentionally, but just by being Triplet Boys, they tortured this cat, and the cat decided to take out all of its anger on me for some reason, attacked me every time I came over there. So I just wanted to put that out there. But it has been really weird as we just make these
little jokes about cats on the show. These I guess we think of them as like throwaway comments, and then the angry letters that we hear from people about I don't know if I can listen to this show because you guys hate cats, but we apparently are not alone in this polarizing world of cats. I actually found this quote by the American writer Carl Van Vectim, and he wrote a book called Tiger in the House, which is really all about house cats. And here's how he talks
about people's strong feelings about cats. And I actually really like this quote. So he says, one is permitted to assume an attitude of placid indifference in some matters, you know, elephants, cockatoos, hg well Sweden, roast beef, pouccini, even Mormonism. But in the matter of cats, it seems necessary to take a firm stand. The cat himself insists upon this. He invariably inspires strong feelings. He is indeed the only animal who does well.
It is true that cats definitely inspire strong feelings. And when we've joked on the show about not being cat lovers, people have ridden in and said, you know who also hated cats? Hitler and also Napoleon, and Mussolini, and I looked this up. It's true they were cat hitters. I mean, I'm sure all three of them also hated like broccoli and homework, so it doesn't really mean that much, like
a lot of people dislike a lot of things. But I was intrigued by the comments, so I looked up other famous cat haters in history, and it's not a good look for us to be perceived this way. So in addition to Napoleon and Mussolini, you've got Genghis Khan Stalin also hated cats. Caesar Alexander the Great, Eisenhower, for some reason, is on the list, but frankly, I'm a little surprised that Pollpond and Ediemine aren't on there as well. To around out, the list.
Has a lot of terrible people.
I mean, aside from Eisenhower, who we love for building highways and infrastructure.
Of course love infrastructure.
I love infrastructure.
But yeah, I think what's worse than the list of horrible people is when cat fans tell you about all the great people who were obsessed with cats. You've got Abe Lincoln, who was notorious for his love of cats, and his wife Mary Todd once said that cats were his only hobby. Also, they've got the prophet Mohammed, Nikola, Tesla, Saint Francis of ASSISI, Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Catherine the Great, Charles Mingus, and all of the Brontes.
All the Brontes, even Branwell Bronte.
I checked up on this mango. They got Branwell.
Well. Obviously, of those two sample sets, I'd rather be associated with the cat lovers than the cat haters. But I was trying to figure out why it is that dictators and world conquerors don't like cats. And here's one theory about it that I found that's popular on cat sites, and it goes like this quote. It might just be that cat people who have dreams of dominating the world can't get used to the idea that cats won't submit to them.
So is the idea that cats are just too independent minded for dictators or what exactly?
And truthfully, that's also a big part of what cat people like about cats, their total independence. Right, Like people are always saying cats have more personality than dogs and that they're less needy and they're like a little more
badass and rock and roll or something. And in fact, this is a little off topic, but one of the cat origin stories I read, and this is an Islamic tale I believe, is that Noah was on his arc and during the storm, he became really afraid that the mice on board would eat all the food, or even worse, that they'd nibble through the floors and create these holes in the arc, kind of just like putting all the
other animals in jeopardies. So he prayed for a solution, and God answered his wishes by having a lion sneeze, and out of both nostrils from that sneeze emerged two cats,
which is I guess how cats came to be. And I mean, it's kind of a sweet origin story in terms of myths, but I feel like you can interpret the story in two ways, right, Like cats are either God's gift to humanity, like what adorable little god bless yous they are, or no one needed a ruthless killing machine on a ship and God provided cats.
I think I might lean toward the ladder, but I'm gonna be careful. I don't need any more hate mail about this. But I have a different question here, mago, like how useless is every other animal on the arc, Like, why couldn't any of the owls on board pitch in for this effort?
I know, well, I mean, the truth is cats are incredible hunting machines. And I read this crazy story in the New York Times from five years ago, and that's when the Smithsonians Conservation Biology Institute teamed up with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to do some research on cats. And they wanted to identify how much wildlife these cats were killing every year, so they used cameras and created this new math model, and basically they were stunned by
the results. So listen to this between feral and domestic cats. The domestic ones, you know, are the ones that get to roam out doors while sleeping indoors. Together, they kill about two point four billion birds every year. And also they killed twelve point three billion mammals a year. Wow, and most of those things like shrews and chipmunks and bowls along with mice.
I kind of want to know how they came up with that estimate of twelve point three billion mammals, But either way, it's insane and terrifying. So I don't understand, Like, why would this make me like cats more so.
We've talked about this on the program before, but those mousers are also keeping places like Disney parks and houses and also city streets more free of vermin. And also I've read this thing about how there are all these cat islands in Japan that are super popular as tourist destinations, just places where there are all these feral cats, And initially I was thinking, like, who wants to go to
these islands? But one of the arguments I was reading online that I had actually never thought about was most people can go to a cat island and not be terrified because these small feral cats aren't going.
To bother you.
They just don't care about you. But you know, if you went to a wild dog island and there were just wild packs of you know, feral dogs there, you'd be terrified. Like, yeah, you'd want to call animal control because roaming packs of wild dogs aren't fun. But you know, the cats don't have that herd mentality.
I mean, that's an interesting point. But to be fair, if you put the word feral in front of any animal, like I don't want to be near those and I have no desire to hang out with I don't know like Australia's feral camel population or any of these other animals. But yeah, you started talking about cat origins and killer cats, and you were talking about how cat lovers tend to love the animals independence, And actually I had a story
that I wanted to share just real quick. You know, so, while free thinking critters might be great for pet owners, they're not great for filmmakers. I was reading this inner with the Cohen brothers about filming Inside Lewyn Davis, and they were talking about how hard it was to shoot the cat in the movie. So here's a quote from an NPR interview that Ethan Cohen did, and he says, the whole exercise of shooting a cat is pretty nightmarish because they don't care about anything. They don't want to
do what you want them to do. As the animal trainer said to us, a dog wants to please you. A cat only wants to please itself. It was just this long, painstaking, frustrating day shooting the cat.
Which to me is a little refreshing. You know that cats don't want to be seen as film stars. But you know, I've seen lowin Davis and I loved it. But how do they get all those shots eventually? Like, I'm guessing they didn't use CGI.
Well, first of all, they used a lot of cats, and a cat trainer told them specifically to use a marmalade orange tabby because it's easier to get a lot of.
Them on hand.
So they had three or four cats ready for each scene, and essentially they had to find cats that had a predisposition for doing whatever it was that they were looking for. So like, if you needed a fidgety cat to jump out of someone's hand, you have to find a cat that tends to do that all the time and hates to be held. So you get that type of cat for one angle. But then you know, if you want them to rub against the table or run down a fire escape, you need to find the cat that wants
to do that naturally. And even then when they had those cats on hand, the cats rarely did what they wanted. The Cohen Brothers actually compared the experience to having to film a vulture and true grit. They said the vulture was awful, and they said that was even by vulture standards, And even though the experience was really frustrating, they'd take filming a vulture scene over a cat scene any day.
So that is ridiculous, and I do love that story. But here's the thing, and maybe it's something that'll increase our own empathy for cats, But I don't actually think it's a cat's fault that they're so independent.
And why is that?
Because there's a theory that cats aren't actually domesticated animals. They've never had to be domesticated. But even more than that, the theory goes, these clever, adorable beasts have over a thousands of years, actually domesticated us. But before we talk about that, let's take a little break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, and we're talking cats. So, Mango, I know you were going to tell us about cats and domestication, but before we talk about a cat in a household, let's talk about cats breaking up households. And you know that totally unfair reputation they got for causing divorces in America.
So I obviously know people are attached to their animals, but I had never heard about this trend. So what's the scoop?
Well, this comes from Natalie Zareli at Atlas Obscura, and she reports that once the married Women's Property Act took hold in America, there was actually an uptick in the number of divorces, and essentially unhappy couples weren't doomed to stay together, but you still had to have someone at fault and it had to be irreconcilables. So a big strategy from the nineteen tens going forward were couples that they just started blaming their cats. That's pretty crazy. I'd never heard of that, you know.
I actually remember one of our friends from college had a grandmother who got divorced, and he told me that the couple staged her walking in on him with another woman, and it was purely so that they had a traumatic story to tell. The New York courtse But you know, just blaming a cat would have been so much easier.
Yeah, I would say that would have been a lot easier. There's actually a story from this piece in nineteen oh three where a man told the judge this horror story. He says a cat met him at every turn, with
an angry and a chorus of blood curdling mews. Apparently he'd find cats in his bed sheets, and when he tried to escape them, he was too scared to leave the bed, you know, lest he should expose his bare feet to the claws of numerous pussies and provoke a melody that would ring in his ears for the rest of the day.
So that feels so dramatic.
Well, he really had to sell it to the judge. And you know, if the judge asked why the husband and didn't just get rid of the cats. Often there'd be some story about his wife being involved in like the ASPCA, which I guess felt virtuous or something.
So, I mean there were lots of these stories.
Oh, there's tons of these stories. There's actually also a Civil War veteran who claims he could never sit in his easy chair because a cat was always there hissing at him. There was another there was a wife that said she didn't mind her husband's profanity, but it was too much when he heaved the family cat at her, and looking at that case, apparently she wanted twelve hundred dollars for the humiliation of being beamed by the family cat.
Just unbelievable.
There was also another dude who was upset that his wife kept fifty cats around the house and gave them more attention than him.
Well, I mean fifty cats would need a lot of attention.
Well, in court, she testified that she only had fifteen cats, but you know, since her husband didn't come home most nights, they were both interested in splitting up. And you know, most of these stories were either made up or just greatly exaggerated.
So how long did this cat blaming go on for?
According to the article, cats were scapegoats for really about a century, and it wasn't until nineteen sixty nine, when no fault divorce laws started becoming adopted by states that suddenly all the cat blaming disappeared from the newspaper stories.
Which is pretty insane. And you know, you feel sorry for the cats.
I know it's true, it's weird to say that, but I actually do feel a little sorry for them. But you were going to talk a little bit about this idea that cats aren't really domesticated.
Yeah, so, you know, aside from that lion sneezing theory about cats, researchers have actually found cat bones near human bones for a while. There's a New Yorker piece on this, but in China, by analyzing the bones and teeth of cat skeletons from about five thousand years ago, scientists can actually show that cats were eating rodents and grains as
well as leftovers from human meals. And basically cats were opportunistic, right, Like they realized that rodents were plentiful around these farmers' stores of grain, so they ingratiated themselves, and people were opportunistic realized that cats would kill off the disease carrying vermin for them, and it was relatively little investment, Like they didn't actually have to train the cats. All they had to do was give them some shelter and like a little extra food to eat, and then just lean
on their natural instincts. It was totally symbiotic. But you know, cats were never bred for traits the way dogs or cattle were. Like, you know, you look at a dogsund and you see how that dog was bred to go after badgers, right, it was supposed to chase badgers down badger holes and it's fearless, but it's also shape for that, with that sort of long noodleized shape. And you know, cat breeding is a relatively recent phenomenon by comparison.
So I mean, are there ways to prove out this theory that cats are only semi domesticated?
Yeah, there definitely are So there's this geneticist that Washington University in Saint Louis named Wesley Warren, and apparently he and his colleagues looked at DNA from wildcats and breeds of domestic cats. And this is from the New Yorker again. The research showed that genetically cats have actually diverged far less from their wildcat and than dogs have from wolves.
You know, you can kind of see this in the wild, right, Like house cats are better hunters than dogs, they can also fend for themselves in the wild, and according to the Peace feral cats have even routinely bred with their wildcat cousins. And according to Warren quote it's not the true differentiation you see between wolf and dog by comparison. His belief is that the modern cat isn't fully domesticated.
That is pretty interesting, and to be honest, it kind of explains why I don't fully trust them and I do still almost feel sorry for them.
Though, well you shouldn't feel too sorry for them, because some people like to joke that these wildcats have actually domesticated us, and you know, they've obviously stayed aloof while were keeping them shelter and putting scratching posts in our houses and allow them to go to the bathroom indoors. But the biggest argument for them having trained us is that they've conditioned humans to feed them on demand with something called solicitation purring. So this comes from the journal
Current Biology. But scientist Karen McComb from the University of Sussex analyze the acoustic structure of cat purs and she actually realized that cats dramatically exaggerate their purrs all to elicit this emotional response from humans. Apparently it's the same frequency that babies cry. And it isn't all cats that do this, it's just cats that have one on one relationships with humans.
That is pretty manipulative. I mean it's impressive, but it's pretty manipulative.
Yeah, I mean they've got us on a tight leash. And also they have a behavior where they rub up against our legs. As you know, we pull a can out to get their food, and that's supposedly rewarding us for being good to them. But there's one more thing that people say it as feline's clever control over humans, and that's that we actually taste test their food for.
Them, you know, I know, we talked about humans taste testing dog food before, but I can't remember it, Like, why do they do that again?
So this comes from a Brocky University study from Canada. But basically, the pet food industry has noticed over the years that cats are fussy eaters and they're quote unreliable, expensive test subjects in the pursuit of more appealing cat food flavors, and the study basically showed that human taste panels are you know, a much more cost effective way
to test can cat food. Apparently, the paper lists of methodology for human testers to quote profile the flavor and texture of a range of cat food products, including evaluating meat chunk and gravy to gel constituents gross. So, you know, if we're going to keep keeping our feline masters happy, more people are gonna have to get into the cat food tasting business.
Well, I definitely have.
Come away with some understanding of why cats act the way they do, and maybe even a little admiration for how they manipulate this. But why don't we talk about how cats became so popular in the first place. Let's take a quick break first, back to part time Genius
where we're talking cats. All right, Mango so obviously we know that the Internet has done a lot for cat appreciation, and you know, you had grumpy cat Little bubb ruling the Internet for a while, and all that I can has cheeseburger memes being such a big thing.
For a while.
But actually, looking back, Time Magazine kind of predicted this trend way back in nineteen eighty one, right.
That's right, and you and I found an old Time magazine cover story from nineteen eighty one that declared that cats were the hot new thing. But I'd almost argue that the thing that truly brought cats to the level of popularity and endearment they're at now isn't the Internet or Morris or even Garfield.
Comics, which are some of the things that are in this Time article, and I do think we should talk about.
Them, definitely. But one of the things I saw that writer Paul Ford points to is the rise of kitty litter, which is actually a relatively recent invention. I didn't realize this. It only came about in nineteen forty seven.
So what were people doing before then?
So I had the same question, And basically they had sandboxes outside, or they'd let their cats go in the yard Anyway, the story's pretty interesting and Ford wrote this up for Medium. But basically, this woman's sandbox for a cat was frozen, so she came to buy some sawdust from a local mill in Michigan. And the guy's name was ed Low. He had been working for his dad's mill at the time, and when she described what she
wanted for her cat, he gave her an alternative. He had this kiln dried granulated clay that they just started using for grease bills at the mill, and when she came back for more, he started labeling it kitty litter and tried marketing it. But what's amazing is what a business it became. So, according to his obit in the New York Times, he sold the product to Ralston Purina
for two hundred million dollars. And listen to this, he owned twenty two homes, a private railroad, a stable of quarterhouses, and an entire Michigan town. Isn't that incredible?
That is crazy?
So basically kitty letter changed how we interacted with cats.
Yeah, so, like all cats were indoor, outdoor cats until the advent of kitty litter, and then slow more and more cats became housebound. But it's also starting to think about how much kitty litter we use. So according to Ford's research, about twenty companies Strip mine about four billion pounds in the necessary clay each year, four billion pounds. And by comparison, Ford sites the Great Pyramid of Giza only weighs thirteen billion pounds.
I like that, that's the comparison to use.
So all right, so then you're saying, with three or four years of work, you could actually build this impressive pyramid of kitty letter then, which is amazing. But all right, well, let's talk about this time article because it is pretty.
Fun blind for it. So this piece basically argued that the nineteen eighties were this time that really primed the world to love cats, right.
Yeah, And here are just a few of the indicators they show that cats were on the rise. So the point you made earlier, these cat litter boxes in the eighties were now odor proof and kickproof, and that made keeping a box where your cat poops in the house far more appealing than it previously was. There were also three different Garfield books on the bestseller list, which means cat humor had truly arrived.
I'm not sure what.
It says about the taste of people in the nineteen eighties, that three of them were on the bestseller list, and the California suddenly there were a cat everything. You could find, a cat resort at, a cat department store, a cat rest home, a rent a cat agency, a cat dating service. I have no idea what that is, but it was one of the things. Cats psychics, cat acting coaches, and of course a special annual contest to judge cats mea house.
And then at that time you had Mars, the cat, who was officially declared a celebrity cat, you know, essentially the feline Burt Reynolds, if you will. And then, as the story reported, cats were quickly gaining on dogs. According to the article, thirty four million cats had worked their way into homes, which was a fifty five percent increase
over the last decade. If you look at those numbers now, some reports have cats that closer to ninety five million cats and homes, you know, plus the thirty or forty million feral community cats that you know, they're the ones that keep rodents at bay.
Yeah, I guess for all.
The jokes about this cat trend, like cats have really grown on us as a culture, and while you and I might not be cat people yet, I do think we have to grudgingly admit that they're pretty amazing creatures.
I mean, I'm not sure I'm there just yet, but maybe after a few amazing facts.
So let's start the fact off.
Did you know that jazz musician Charles Mingus trained his cat Nightlife to go on the toilet. In fact, he even wrote a step by step manuel called the Charles Mingus Catalog for Toilet Training your Cat.
Well, there is at least one thing you cannot train a cat to do, and that's hold a candle for you. According to the folks at QI, Dante desperately tried teaching his cat to hold a candle for him so he could write at night, but to no avail, I.
Mean, stupid Dante, Like, why wouldn't you just get a candle holder?
It doesn't make It never occurred to him for some reason.
So you know, I know will always talk about cats incredible ability to land on their feet, but did you know that cats can survive falls from sixty feet? Now, obviously this isn't a suggestion for listeners to go test this out on their cat, far from it, But in a nineteen eighty seven study on cats that had fallen from tall buildings. Apparently ninety percent of them survived, though they did have injuries. And this comes from an old
pal bill domain. But the study found that cats that fell from heights of seven to thirty two stories were less likely to die than those that fell from two to six stories, which.
Makes no sense. So do scientists know why this is?
So there's actually a lot of theories, and there's been a lot of research into it. And part of it might be that because cat's bodies act as a bit of a parachute, and part of it might be that cats relax once they've fallen in a certain distance. And you know, the reason babies and stumpmen often survive accidents is that they bounce because they don't tense up their muscles.
I mean, I always love that buttered cat paradox, you know, because cats always land on their feet, and butter bread always lands faced. So like, if you tie a piece of buttered bread to a cat's back and then drop it, will the cat just like hover above the floor.
I love that. So here's a quick one about cats making the world a better place. So in two thousand and seven, the New York Times board that Thailand was shaming wayward cops. You know, these were the officers who were littering, or parking in the wrong place, or even showing little abuses of power. And they did this with
an unusual method. They started making them wear pink Hello Kitty armbands, and, as a police chief told The Times after the policy came out, police were scared, it will be very embarrassing to walk around with Hello Kitty on your arm. What's strange, though, is that this is actually
the second variation on this armband technique. So there was a previous iteration where they gave bad cops plaid armbands, but unfortunately they were seen as like gestures of pride or something, and they started taking them home and treating them like metals.
All right, well, here's a strange bit of science. According to new scientists, cats don't understand the cause and effect of tugging on a string.
You'll have to explain what do you mean by this.
Well, there was a.
Study at Canterbury christ Church University in the UK, and there was a team of researchers and what they did was they attach fish or biscuit trees to the end of one string, and then they put another string with no treat attached, And according to the researchers, the cats couldn't see the cause and effect. The story states, chimps, parrots, ravens, they all understand that tugging on one end of a string will bring a treat closer. But cats don't, and
they aren't alone. So pigeons and human infants also don't pick up on this, and for the record, neither do dogs.
So speaking of cats and dogs, do you know that if your dog is overweight, there's actually a good chance you'll be overweight too? And in twenty ten, the Journal of Public Health Nutrition published a study from Ansterdam that showed that there's a significant relationship between overweight dogs and the BMI of their owners. But if your cat is overweight, it's not a good predictor of whether you'll be overweight.
It's because you and your cat are just you know, on your own, living your best lives.
Is that what it is? Okay? All right, Well here's a strange one.
So Japan is obsessed with cats, right, and that's no surprise obviously. It's the land of waving porcelain cats that sit in stores and responsible for Hello Kitty. I think it's where cat cafes started. But now also they have cat bars and cat cafe train cars, so they are definitely cat obsessed. There's even a hand lotion that's now cat paw scented, so your hands can smell more like the bottom of your cats.
I don't know why.
People want this, but it is available now. But you know how cats make biscuits in the morning, right.
Yeah, that's when they kind of like wake you up and gently need on owner's chests in the morning for attention.
So the craziest story I read is that there's a spa in Japan where they offer these cat treatments as back massages. You can actually pay to have a cat need your back. It was really hard for me to even just say that statement.
So terrible.
It's both amazing and terrifying to me. So do you know that cats aren't actually the only creatures they get hair balls? Cows and rabbits get them too.
Oh that's weird, all right. So here's one about Mark Twain, the notorious cat lover. As we mentioned earlier. Now, one thing he truly enjoyed was giving his cat strange names. So here are a few of them. He had Apollinaris, Beeesel, bub blatherskite, buffalo bill, Satan, sour mash, soapy sal pestilence, and Bambino. And actually add one more fact about Twain.
Apparently Bambino escaped one day and Twain was so worried that he did what any cat lover would do, and he put an ad in the New York newspapers and offered a five dollars reward for this. It was a large and intensely black cat. Now, Bambino showed up on his own in a few days, but putting an ad in the paper was a huge mistake. Years later, people were still using it as an excuse to try to
meet Mark Twain. They would just show op at his door with like random cat that they claimed, we're definitely Bambino.
Well, you know, I thought I had you with my Hello Candy fact. I think you best to be with that Mark Twain one to two. So I'm actually gonna give you the Cat Fact Trophy today.
Wow, it is truly an honor.
And listeners, I hope you've enjoyed today's list of facts about cats. If we have forgotten any great fact, please send those to us. We'd love to hear from you part Time Genius and HowStuffWorks dot com. You can also call our fact hotline one eight four four pt Genius or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.
I hope we have redeemed.
Ourselves a little bit with all the cat lovers out there with today's episode. I have a bit more respect for cats now. But thank you guys for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of How Stuff Works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand.
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