Far Out, Cats – by M.T. O’Byrne
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I confess that I am more of a dog person than a cat person but am not so enamoured of man’s best friend that I am incapable of acknowledging the feats of cats, or that they have achieved such fame as to equal any dog, save Lassie. An average, healthy cat, for example, can jump six times its own length, which is double that of a chihuahua, assuming a chihuahua could be bothered. In human terms – according to the World Health Organisation in 2021 – this would mean being able to jump 10.2 metres if you’re a man and 9.6 metres if you’re a woman. Or, being able to jump as high as two London buses, or three stories of a building and still have enough left in the tank for a celebratory Black Russian and a Montecristo N4 cigar. Cats are also near-sighted, have excellent night vision, but are crepuscular rather than nocturnal. Other than camels and giraffes, they are the only animals to move both right feet first and then both their left, which gives them a swagger envied by canines. They are also the only mammals, alas, that cannot taste sweetness, although a mouthful of bloodied feathers would, no doubt, to them taste as sweet as any canine treat.
For a treat, a dog can sniff out a landmine but so can rats. A cat has the same olfactory capability as a dog and could be used to sniff out things like drugs, but to a cat that would sound like work for their staff. If we assess a cat’s prowess by images on the Interweb, then obviously cats are too busy being snipers or playing key roles in psychological warfare operations to be bothered with such prosaic pursuits as sniffing. Can a cat, however, reach the heights of the godlike Zeus, a dog purported to have walked 3000 miles to reunite with its owner? Well, there was a cat called Boo Boo that travelled 2600 miles, but I’m dubious that a cat so named would purposely travel such a distance if it wasn’t, in fact, looking for a new owner who might give it a more dignified name; and cats, according to the literature, prefer trains.
Speaking of which, how can a cat compete with a dog from literature? A dog like Toto from The Wizard of Oz, for example? Well, maybe not Toto, who may have been, in fact – given how much it was carried – a chihuahua, and therefore of no consequence. And then there’s Tintin’s Snowy and Bill Sikes’s Bulls-eye, but these two are sidekicks and not fully developed characters. There’s Argos, who recognised Odysseus after two decades, when his close friend Eumaeus could not, but most dogs don’t live 20 years and so stories of his skills in recognition are probably apocryphal. Eric Knight’s Lassie walked a long way after he had been sold by his original owners. Abuse! Buck … well, Buck answers the call of the wild and becomes, um, a dog. Only Snoopy shows any proclivity for considered thought: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. But Snoopy’s not real; he’s just a cartoon.
Cartoon cats aren’t real, either, but seem just as smart as Snoopy – Garfield and Jiji, at least, not Tom who is outwitted by a bird! But, in terms of intelligence, it’s not possible to go past the likes of the martial artist, Varjak Paw, the Puccini-quoting Mimi in Kafka on the Shore, or the enigmatic Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. That is, it’s not possible to go past these two cats if you have not heard of Behemoth in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Dogs in literature are loyal companions, whereas cats are allegorical, play chess, drink vodka, understand and use sarcasm, and must have three different names.
“Dogs in literature are loyal companions, whereas cats are allegorical, play chess, drink vodka, understand and use sarcasm, and have three names.”
Despite this, it’s unlikely anyone could name the first and only cat to have travelled to space. Most people know that we sent some monkeys (Ham and then Enos) and that the Soviets sent a dog called Laika in Sputnik 2. But a cat? Yes, and not just any cat, but a Parisian Tuxedo cat called Félicette (aka C341), who was chosen from a field of 14 other moggies to fly from the French space launch facility in Algiers on 18 October 1963.
Félicette was her professional name – a feminisation of Félix, as in, Felix the Cat, the anthropomorphic wunderkatze created by the Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan. Who knows what her real name was. She was a stray, after all. But I like to think that it’s not improbable that she was, in fact, the progeny of Albert Camus’s cat, Cigarette, and was, as a consequence, the butt end of all jokes on the streets of Montmartre, despite the fact that she was well acquainted with Sartre’s cat, Nothing.
“I like to think that it’s not improbable that she was, in fact, the progeny of Albert Camus’s cat, Cigarette, and was, as a consequence, the butt end of all jokes on the streets of Montmartre, despite the fact that she was well acquainted with Sartre’s cat, Nothing.”
In any case, she was a stray and gathered up along with other strays for the purpose of science and the exploration of space. She was no doubt exposed to all manner of scientific experiments: probed, scanned, exposed and imposed upon. Horrid, is the word. But this was 1963; outside of the thousands of neurological and cosmetic testing laboratories, that kind of thing would be frowned upon today.
All credit to Félicette, though, as her actual training was more severe than a probe up the bottom or being made to hunt with a belled collar. Not being a scientist, but with the wonder of a scientist, I imagine that in preparing a cat for space, one should begin with aspects of weightlessness and therefore trampoline training – to ensure that the feline in question was a past expert at landing on its feet no matter the environment; next, surely, being able to navigate by the stars, recognise the Dog Star (Are you Sirius?) and the Felis constellation; and, I suppose, how to use a mouse in zero gravity? In fact, they had electrodes implanted in their brains (something I would prefer, frankly, to having to wear adult diapers as astronauts sometimes do, there being no gravity to tell you when your bladder is full), but other than that and some confinement training, they carried out similar training to humans, including centrifuge training, which no doubt made all the cats look like Garfield.
This training would prove useful when Félicette was launched at 8:09 am on a sub-orbital flight where she pulled 9.5 g of acceleration. Humans generally pass out way before that, so I imagine a cat would go catatonic or, at the very least, begin quoting Camus on the nature of the cat soul. Then again, cats do sleep a lot, so perhaps no discernible difference was observed; the electrodes, however, recorded that she was ‘vigilant’ during ascent so it’s possible that Félicette was ruminating on how she was meaner now than Boney M’s Ma Baker.[1] It’s 1963, so it’s unlikely that poor old Félicette was listening to anything else on the ascent but the French Elvis, Johnny Hallyday, and most likely his Pour Moi la Vie Va Commencer[2], but hadn’t it just.
Unlike Laika, first dog in space, life had just commenced for old Félicette as she made her return to earth 13 minutes after launch. A helicopter arrived to collect her. She became famous and then was killed so that her brain could be examined by scientists. She was forgotten for nearly 50 years until a small statue of her was commissioned through a Kickstarter campaign. Her statue can be viewed at the International Space University in Strasbourg.
While I am glad she has a statue now, seeing old pictures of how she was trussed up is disturbing to see today. From what I know of cats, they might have just asked her. Cats may not be as smart as dogs (chihuahuas being the exception), but they are more stylish and more gloried in the literature and would look spectacular in zero G, all paws to port and starboard, sartorially spectacular like Cat in Red Dwarf.
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[1] Time is immaterial for cats – past, present, future … they are all as one.
[2] Consider also quantum effects, chaos theory bound up with random subatomic events etc, Schrödinger … why toast always lands butter-side down, blah, blah. Cf. Arnold’s Cat Map for directions.
Image: Hanmer Zh
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