Dan Broadbent
If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, there’s no way you don’t already know of my adoration for cats. I love cats so much that a couple of years ago, I made a cat companion (a catpanion?) page for aSE: Skeptical Kitten. If you love cats and like science/secularism sprinkled in as a type of bizarro David Wolfe, you should follow Skeptical Kitten.
Emily and I have three cats:
Jack, Garfield, and Little Man (from front to back) for a triple cat stack!
It doesn’t matter if the cat is big or small, I love them all:
It’s kind of weird to think that the only thing holding that 400+ pound lion back (as well as the tigers that were about 100 feet away from where I took the picture above) was a standard, run-of-the-mill chainlink fence. And as we learned last week, big cats truly don’t care about humans, especially if you’re a would-be rhino poacher who ends up getting eaten by lions.
I enjoy cats so much that I even decided to put it in my tagline for my logo: Science Enthusiast. Atheist. Lover of cats.
So, cats are important to me. I will never not click “like” on a cat picture on my Facebook feed.
And for the record, cats are better than dogs and that’s science. Deal with it.
Cats think humans are big, weird-looking cats.
Cats are great because they are generally ambivalent to your existence. This is evidenced by my girlfriend’s return after a week-long business trip. Our cats couldn’t have been less interested in her return:
The only logical reason I can see for people to like dogs more than cats is that dogs help people feel superior to a less-intelligent life form. Enjoy the ego boost.
We can also see evidence elsewhere of cats generally not giving a fuck about humans. Case in point: Dr. Jerzy Targalski’s cat, Lisio.
Dr. Targalski is a Polish historian, political scientist, and cat aficionado. He was doing an interview with Nieuwsuur about a political crisis in Poland when his cat decided that it was time or snuggles.
The subject of the erosion of democracy in Poland aside, I love everything about this interview. I particularly love how the camera operator clearly was more interested in filming the cat than the human, since they focused on the cat before Lisio even jumped up on Dr. Targalski.
Regardless of what his human is doing, you see Lisio’s request for attention, which is ignored by his human.
Realizing he’s been ignored, he decides he has to intervene in the situation to stop the tragedy of being momentarily ignored by his human.
Although his human reacts slightly by smiling, Lisio is unaware of this. It becomes clear that further intervention is necessary.
The tail around the face is sure to get his human’s attention. And it does:
… In the form of moving the tail out of the way. You can almost feel the disgust coursing through Lisio right now. Just look at his expression:
We can see another angle of the interview here:
The Polish historian & political scientist Jerzy Targalski remained completely unruffled during our interview when this happened👇🤨🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/4dLi16Pq1H
— Rudy Bouma (@rudybouma) July 7, 2018
A trained observer of felines will immediately have their attention drawn to the bottom left corner of the video to this gorgeous fluffy boi:
And yet he was noticeably absent from the video. What’s the real story here? What are they trying to hide?!
Lisio has made appearances in other videos, too. So he seems to be no stranger to the spotlight:
Good kitty.
