Caturday felid trifecta: Mimo the kitten discovers her ears; Nestor, the UC law school cat; cat pretends he’s too fat to squeeze through cat door

From Laughing Squid we get the full-length video that has, in excerpts, gone viral on Twitter.  The caption:

While sitting on her human’s bed, a funny little Scottish straight kitten named Mimo [see her Instagram account at the link] spotted a couple of floating triangles reflected in the dresser mirror just a few feet away. As Mimo got closer to investigate, she realized that those strange triangles were attached to her head as ears. To double check, Mimo reached up with her paw and struck a number of hilarious poses with her newly discovered pointy ears before scolding her human.

This resembles the “self awareness” test that animal behaviorists use on creatures to see if they have a sense of self-identity. Researchers stick a red dot on the forehead of an animal like a chimp or an elephant, and then show it a mirror. If the animal tries to touch the sticker on its own head rather than play with the animal in the mirror, that supposedly shows that the animal realizes that the mirror is showing it a reflection of itself, and thus that the creature recognizes that the reflection is of itself.

I don’t know if that test is universally accepted, but what Mimo is doing here resembles a self-awareness test that the cat passes when it touches its ears.

 

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I was over at the Law School last week, as its library is the only place where I could take out Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger (a book well worth reading). On the Law School Quad I came upon a friendly ginger cat with a tag and a barrel-like contraption on its collar. It was friendly, too, and tried to climb into my lap as I knelt down to pet it. One student passing by said, “Is that your cat?” I responded, no, it had just accosted me. Another student said that the cat was the most popular creature at the Law School.

Looking at its tag, I saw that its name was Nestor (a great name!), and the tag had a long message on it that I couldn’t read in detail as the cat was rubbing against me. But the message began with something like, “Hi, I’m Nestor, and I’m out having adventures. . . ” Clearly the cat is owned by someone and frequents the Law School campus.

I have two questions. If you’re a law student or know about Nestor, could you tell me his story? Also, what is in that barrel around his neck?

Two iPhone photos of Nestor:

What’s in that plastic cylinder around Nestor’s neck?

 

Nestor in front of the main building of our Law School and its reflecting pool

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This story came from The Dodo, where you can find a video of the World’s Laziest Cat, a moggie named Mischief.  I found it because of this tweet:

"We've just realized he's too precious and doesn't like squeezing through unless it's necessary" 😂 https://t.co/cjpyBD98GM

— The Dodo (@dodo) October 1, 2018

Mischief, who lives in New Zealand, has a cat door, and when people are around he scratches frantically at the door but won’t go through himself. He waits until someone shows up to open a real door.

Mischief is, as we shall say, “a cat of size,” though he’s not obese (he’s been on a diet for years). He could get through the cat door if he wanted, but he prefers to have others let him in. How do we know? Because his owners sometimes find him inside when they’ve gone out, proving that he can and does use the door if nobody’s around. That means, of course, that he’s really lazy. But he’s a cat, and cats like servants.

You can see videos of Mischief at the Dodo site. One more fact:

“He’s terrified of plastic bags,”  [staff Ngawai] McGregor said. “As soon as he hears the sound, he runs away. He only meows when he sees the blackbirds steal his biscuits, which is a daily occurrence. He runs sideways because his stomach sways so much.”

But it’s Mischief’s cat door antics that amuse McGregor and her family the most.

h/t: Grania, Tom