Dr Johnson’s Cat
Posted by Science Oxford on April 26, 2011 | comments
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about cats.
I don’t really like cats – I’m allergic to them, and so even though I accept that other people find them cute and want to cuddle them, I’m scared of them in a visceral kind of way. But I have found myself sucked into a weird parallel universe populated by cat lovers, because one of my colleagues has a cat who (which?) is in the final stages of this competition…
God help us, but The Daily Mirror have entered into a Mephistophelean pact with Cravendale milk… with the aim of finding cats who have more than the requisite number of digits… so they can market their milk more effectively… and people have been voting… and my colleague’s cat got onto the front page of the Oxford Mail…
Now in itself this is odd enough. You have to have a kind of awe-struck respect for the advertising agency that dreamt it up, my colleague, and my colleague’s cat… But my mind has been gently boggling for a while now with issues that it raises – some science-y, some not.
Here are two of the science-y ones:
- why do these cats have “thumbs”? Are such things common among cats? What about other animals? I guess that for humans extra digits would be a positive benefit, as long as they could be manoeuvred like normal fingers. Wikipedia is mildly helpful and tells us a bit about humans, and the interesting (and not-that-surprising-on-reflection) observation that the incidence of extra fingers and toes varies in different ethnic groups. But then you go here, which is too disturbing for words.
- does “filtering” milk really make it last longer than just pasteurising it? I’m guessing this is basically just a jazzed up version of UHT for the 21st Century… Cravendale’s website is strangely silent on the matter, although they do claim that their milk will last for 21 days in a fridge… and you learn that in the UK has one of the lowest uptakes of UHT in Europe, behind the Scandiwegians (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland) and – at the other end of Europe – Greece. And then you are told that the UK’s reliance on fresh milk rather than UHT is a potential contributor to climate change…
Image By User:Boulgakov (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons
What do you think?