News Feeds

Last week I wrote about the possibilities of genetically engineering humans. The quickie version is this – we are already using genetic engineering (CRISPR) for somatic changes to treat diseases, and other applications are likely to follow. Engineering germline cells, which would get into the human gene pool, are legally and ethically fraught, but it’s hard to predict how this will play out. I have also written often about genetically engineering food. I think this is a great technology with many powerful applications, but it should be, and largely is, highly regulated to make sure that anything that gets into the human food chain is safe.

I haven’t written as much about genetically engineering pets, and this is likely to be the lowest hanging fruit. That is because pets are neither food nor are they a human medical intervention. But that does not mean they are not regulated – they are regulated in the US under the FDA and USDA. Genetic engineering is treated as an animal drug, and must be deemed safe to the animals being engineered. The USDA also can regulate engineered plants and animals to make sure they do not pose any risk to the environment, humans, or livestock. This makes sense. We would not want, for example, to allow a company to release a genetically engineered bee, pest, or predator into the environment without proper oversight.

Pets, as a category, are domesticated, are not intended to be used as food, nor are they intended to be released into the wild. I say “intended” because pets can become food for predators, and they can escape or be released into the wild, and even become feral. But these contingencies are much easier to prevent than with food or wild plants or animals. For example, if you get a rescue pet, it has likely already automatically been spade or neutered. One easy way to reduce risk would be to make any GE pet sterile, which is likely what the company would want to do anyway to prevent violation of their patents through breeding. In short, it seems that reasonable regulatory hurdles should not be a major problem for any effort to commercialize GE pets.

Unsurprisingly there are companies already working on this. One company, the Los Angeles Project, is working on making rabbits that glow in the dark. This is actually pretty easy (I bought some glow-in-the-dark petunias last year), as we already have isolated genes for green fluorescent protein and have put them in many types of plants and animals. Another company, Rejuvenate Bio, researches genetic treatments for chronic diseases in humans. This, of course, involves a lot of animal research, so they are also developing these treatments for pets, to increase their health and lifespan. Scoutbio is another company working on gene therapies for disease, but they are focusing on treatments for adults. There are also pet cloning companies, which is not the same thing, but there is a lot of overlap in this technology and it is not a big leap to start tweaking those embryos.

So where is all this likely to lead? First, I think GE pets will happen a lot faster than GE humans, because the ethical and therefore legal bar is likely to be a lot lower. What kinds of modifications are we likely to see? Some we will see simply because it is already possible to do, like the green fluorescent rabbits. We are doing it because we can. But as the tech evolves we can see pets with much longer lifespans. That raises an interesting question – how long would you want your dog or cat to live? Most people I talk to feel that 10-15 years for dogs and 15-20 years for cats is too short. I have owned many pets, and their brief lives always seem to go by too quickly. But at the other end of the spectrum I have also known people who own parrots, which is a lifelong commitment. Also, even though the loss of a pet can be heart-wrenching, you then get to experience a new kind of pet with their own personality and go through the puppy phase again. I also wonder how difficult it would be to lose a beloved pet you owned for 30 years, say. How much harder would that be? There is a sweet spot in there somewhere, perhaps 20-30 years. In any case, it would be interesting to be able to choose the longevity of your pet. And of course, it would be great to reduce the many chronic illnesses that plague our pets.

One other difference between pets and humans is that we have already, through conventional breeding, significantly altered our pets, especially dogs. Just think of all the different dog breeds. Some of them, I would argue, are unethical, like making dog breeds that have difficulty breathing. I seriously think that the institutions that regulate purebred dogs should place a much higher priority on the overall health of any recognized breeds, and not formally recognize any breeds with inherent health problems. It may be too late for this, but that would happen in my perfect world. In fact, genetically engineering pets may improve their overall health and happiness. The compromises that come with breeding cute traits may not be necessary with the power of genetic engineering. We could engineer new traits into baseline healthy and outbred populations, and would not have to use severe genetic restriction to create these extreme breeds.

And of course genetic engineering could create pets that would not otherwise exist. Superficial traits, like eye color and coat pattern, should be easy. Do you want a long hair, short, or wire hair? What color? Short or long tail, straight or curly? Floppy ears or pointy? Non-shedding and hypoallergenic are a must. It would also be possible to engineer their personality – easy to train, family friendly, never bites, etc.  We are not far from the age of designer pets. We could also go outside the bounds of existing traits, to make exotic even mythical-seeming pets. This starts to get trickier the more ambitious we get, but is within the realm of possibility.

We could also use genetic engineering to domesticate species that would be difficult to impossible to turn into pets through breeding alone. Most people by now know about the Russian silver foxes bred to be friendly and tame. There is still some controversy about the research – how domesticated are they and did they already have some traits before breeding? But regardless, they do not make good pets. They are difficult to train (they pee everywhere), are destructive, and are very high maintenance. But, with some targeted genetic engineering, it would be easier to give them all the traits we love in dogs, for example. We could do the same possibly with racoons and many other species – GE away their problematic traits and make them easy pets. This starts to get into trickier ethical territory, but at least I would argue that fully domesticating a population of wild animal through genetic engineering is ethically no different than doing it through breeding.

It seems very likely that all of this will happen eventually, with the main question being the timeline. Personally, I have no problem with it, and have to admit I would love an exotic pet – as long as it is properly regulated with the welfare of the animals being adequately considered. In fact, I would like to see a higher standard than currently exists for traditional animal breeding.

My final question, however, is what will eventually be more popular – GE pets or robotic pets. There are interesting arguments to be made for both, and perhaps people will have both, in different contexts and for different purposes. If you could have one or the other right now, in a mature form of the technology (say from 200 years from now), which would you pick? Maybe it won’t matter much because the technologies will both converge on your perfect pet.

The post Genetically Engineered Pets Are Coming first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Today I’m stealing (with permission) the photos of Aussie biologist Scott Ritchie, whose Facebook page is here.  And what better subject than kangaroos? Scott’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

My last report from my Melbourne to Sydney trip. From Depot Beach in New South Wales. It was epic. Stayed in a National Park cabin that looked out over the ocean. And at 5 o’clock our front lawn became the bar for Eastern Grey Kangaroos [Macropus giganteus]. And in the morning, you could take pictures of the kangaroos watching the sunrise. What could be better for a boy from Iowa?

We had a ring-side seat for roos. There would have been over a dozen here, not including joeys in the pouch:

The boys like a bit of rough and tumble:

They are smart to avoid those claws:

. . . just barely:

Squaring off:

I missed the kick shot. A sudden loud thump. Then the fight was over. One kick!

I don’t know how this is going to work!:

But somehow it does:

 

White-faced Heron [Egretta novaehollandiae] loves a roo too:

Cute:

Hanging loose:

Don’t trip, mom!:

Just in time for a smoke:

I hate pan pipes!:

It’s a tight fit:

Come on big fella. I’m already familied up:

Sunrise at Depot Beach:

In the pursuit of powerful and stable quantum computers, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed the theory for an entirely new quantum system – based on the novel concept of ‘giant superatoms’. This breakthrough enables quantum information to be protected, controlled, and distributed in new ways and could be a key step towards building quantum computers at scale.

In the pursuit of powerful and stable quantum computers, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed the theory for an entirely new quantum system – based on the novel concept of ‘giant superatoms’. This breakthrough enables quantum information to be protected, controlled, and distributed in new ways and could be a key step towards building quantum computers at scale.

The answer is: Very likely not, at least not as long as MAHA embraces quackery and antivax pseudoscience—not that that didn't stop STAT News from ignoring the elephant in the room, vaccines, in search of a "kumbaya" moment between MAHA and public health.

The post MAHA and science-based public health: Can’t we all just get along? first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A colossal “cosmic volcano” has erupted in deep space, as a supermassive black hole in galaxy J1007+3540 roars back to life after nearly 100 million years of silence. Astronomers captured stunning radio images showing fresh jets blasting outward while crashing into the intense pressure of a surrounding galaxy cluster, creating a chaotic, distorted structure stretching nearly a million light-years.

The weak nuclear force is the eccentric cousin of the four forces — the one that only shakes hands with left-handed particles. That bizarre preference turns out to be absolutely critical for stars, nuclear fusion, and the existence of most matter. And neutrinos love it. There's just one problem: neutrinos appear to only exist in one handedness, which makes no sense at all.

Every piece of electronics ever sent to Venus has been destroyed within hours of landing, cooked alive by surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Now a team of engineers at the University of Southern California has built a memory chip that laughs in the face of that heat, surviving temperatures hotter than molten lava and it started with a happy accident!

What if the same collisions we think of as forces of destruction were actually the spark that created life on Earth? New research published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering is making a compelling case that meteor impacts didn't just reshape our planet's surface, instead that they may have built the very cradles where life first emerged.

A crater the size of two football pitches has appeared on the Moon and for the first time, scientists have been able to watch exactly what happened. Captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter before and after the impact, this remarkable discovery is giving planetary scientists an unprecedented close up of one of the Solar System's most fundamental processes. Here's what they found.

There’s no real “rule” here, but simply Maher’s assertion—one that many people won’t sccept in the Time of Demonization—that people can do both good and bad things (it’s better to say that then brand someone as good or evil, though of course people can lean toward one side or another).

This monologue was prompted, of course, by recent revelations that Cesar Chavez was a sexual predator and rapist. Maher mentions others with such ambitendencies, including Thomas Jefferson, Michael Jackson, and Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who’s particularly vexing.

Maher tries to accept the fact that sometimes the bad comes with the good, and that’s really the only life lesson you can derive from this monologue. But it’s worth pondering. For if you see what happens to people like Chavez, who are written off as too evil to extol in any way, you see the inability of many people to accept nuance (and no, I’m not saying that there should be Cesar Chavez high schools.)

The other guests include Lloyd Blankfein (former CEO of Goldman Sachs), Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted a mere ten days as Trump’s communications director.

For a long time the otherwise admirable organization Doctors Without Borders (also known as “MSF” for its French name Médecins Sans Frontières) has been accused of antisemitism.  The accusations have been credible enough to make me curb my donations to the group.  I still regret having donated over $10,000 to the organization after Kelly Houle and I auctioned off a copy of Why Evolution is True that I got autographed by multiple scientists and celebrities, including two Nobel Laureates. Kelly had also beautifully illuminated and gilded the book, so it was quite the showpiece.  I don’t know where that money went after we sent it to MSF, but the organization won’t be getting any more dosh from me. That’s a pity, as otherwise they’d be in my will and lined up to get a lot more money: in the six figures.  Well, such is the result of Jew hating.

Since the book auction, which occurred well before the Israel/Hamas war, more evidence has come out about MSF’s antisemitism. First, Israel expelled the organization from Gaza this year because it wouldn’t provide the names of its staff and operations in Gaza so they could be checked for membership in Hamas or terrorist activities. Second, as documented in the Jewish Chronicle article below, the organization has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide” while condemning Hamas only once (for the October 7 attack). The genocide canard, as Maarten Boudry shows in his article “They don’t believe it either,” is without merit; there’s no evidence that Israel has been on a campaign to wipe out Palestinians.  And since MSF’s accusations of genocide are public, you can’t say that Israel or Jews are making them up. (You can see one on MSF’s own site.)

Since any support for terrorism or ideological tilting towards Gaza and against Israel violates MSF’s own policy of political neutrality, there’s even less justification for its accusations. I’ve called out the organization before (see my posts here and here), and this will be the third and probably last time. Click below to read the Jewish Chronicle piece.

A few excerpts (indented):

. . . interviews and internal material reviewed by the JC suggest that the organisation’s principle of témoignage, or “bearing witness”, has taken on a political character in relation to Israel.

MSF public statements started using the term “genocide” to describe the Gaza war in November 2024.

One former employee described “pushback” when it was first adopted, citing concerns about the lack of “legal rigour” behind the claim.

MSF leaders have for years made such similar statements about the Jewish state. In January 2025, shortly before becoming international president of MSF, Javid Abdelmoneim reposted a message on X claiming that Israel had “transformed Jewish symbols into symbols of genocide” and was “the greatest threat to Judaism & the Jewish people on planet earth”.

In another repost, Abdelmoneim – who has endorsed a full boycott of the Jewish state – shared a message describing Israel as “a colony of settlers that continue to ethnically cleanse the native Palestinian population”.

Michael Goldfarb spent more than 15 years at MSF US. He claimed anti-Israel sentiment was at times “tolerated” by those at the top.

He said: “European colleagues freely told me, knowing I am Jewish, that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.”

He recalled one colleague expressing outrage at being mistaken for Israeli while abroad.

At a restaurant with MSF colleagues in northern Italy, in a town’s former Jewish quarter, one colleague told Goldfarb: “There better not be Israeli flags here.”

He said: “Nothing meaningful has been done to address antisemitism, to show solidarity with Jewish staff, or call out this hate. That creates a permissive environment in which it flourishes.”

And there’s this:

On October 17, 2023, after an explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, MSF’s international account posted that it was “horrified by the recent Israeli bombing… This is a massacre”. The blast was later attributed to a misfired Palestinian rocket. The MSF post remains online.

In November 2023, as Israeli forces said they would target Hamas operatives allegedly using Al-Shifa Hospital, MSF staff were present at the facility. The organisation said it had “seen no evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital as a military base. Months later, US intelligence confirmed Hamas had used parts of the complex for storing weapons and holding hostages.

This one is particularly telling, as everybody now knows that the rocket that exploded in the Al-Ahli parking lot was fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not Israel. But MSF won’t take down its false accusation. I’ve put its tweet below

We are horrified by the recent Israeli bombing of Ahli Arab Hospital in #Gaza City, which was treating patients and hosting displaced Gazans. Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed. This is a massacre. It is absolutely unacceptable…

— MSF International (@MSF) October 17, 2023

Of course MSF says that the “genocide” canard is justified, but read Boudry’s article to see the “genocidal statements” that supposedly support the canard. They were few, were directed at Hamas. and have not been translated into action. Futher, Hamas, despite its agreement for the cease-fire, has not disarmed and is still in charge in southern Gaza, and it’s still stealing and diverting humanitarian aid to Gaza. Hamas must be not only disarmed but dissolved.

The [MSF] spokesperson went on: “Like many others, we were horrified by Hamas’ massacre in Israel on October 7, and we are horrified by Israel’s response. While providing extensive humanitarian assistance in Gaza we have witnessed mass killings, indiscriminate attacks, repeated failures to protect civilians, immense destruction by Israeli forces, the near-total dismantling of the healthcare system, and the weaponisation and restriction of lifesaving aid. Israeli officials have made multiple, well-documented dehumanising statements calling for the annihilation or forced transfer of the population.

“The only reasonable conclusion is that the intention is to erase the Palestinian people from Gaza. For this reason, we believe a genocide is taking place.

So MSF won’t get dime one from me.  However, if you do want to donate to the civilians of Gaza through NGOs that have not been banned by Israel, and have a decent reputation, here’s what Grok suggests. I’ve added links:

ANERA (American Near East Refugee Aid): A U.S.-based, non-political, non-religious organization providing food parcels, hygiene kits, medical care, and livelihoods support directly in Gaza (with recent distributions in 2026, often partnering with WFP). It holds 4-star Charity Navigator ratings and GuideStar Platinum Seal for transparency and impact.

 

PCRF (Palestine Children’s Relief Fund): U.S.-based nonprofit specializing in pediatric medical care, surgeries, mental health, and emergency aid (food, supplies) for children in Gaza. It has earned consistent 4-star Charity Navigator ratings (one of the highest for accountability) and focuses on long-term recovery without political affiliations.

DIRECT RELIEF. Delivers medical supplies, kits, and grants to health facilities in Gaza via partners. It is internationally respected with 4-star ratings and focuses purely on health aid in crises. I haven’t checked all those organizations myself, so follow the instructions below before you give.

Tips for donating effectively:

• Visit the organizations’ official websites and designate funds for “Gaza” or “Palestine emergency” where possible.
• Check current Charity Navigator, CharityWatch, or GuideStar ratings for the latest financial transparency data (most listed above score highly).
• Aid delivery remains extremely challenging due to access issues, but these groups have documented recent distributions and work within approved coordination mechanisms.

This post-Easter cartoon of Jesus and Mo is presented as a “Friday Flashback: from 8 years ago, now that ‘Easter’ is over”.  Note that ‘Easter’ is in quotes. Mo continues to tease Jesus about Christian doctrine.

Once again I present the last photos I have in the queue. If you got ’em, and they’re good, please send them in.

Today’s wildlife pictures come from reader Jan Malik, and concentrate on one act of predation. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them.

In early April, I visited the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey, which encompasses both brackish coastal marshes and lowland mixed forest. The refuge, previously known by the more graceful name Brigantine, features a wildlife drive where a car serves as the ultimate “blind,” allowing for the close observation of birds.In one section, a group of herons assembled, intently staring at a culvert outlet—a sort of fast-food restaurant for wading birds. The Great Blue Heron (GBH, Ardea herodias) in the center has already caught a small fish, though this is not a meal an adult heron finds satisfying:

The same was true for this Great Egret (Ardea alba) with a small fry. All the birds were patiently waiting for a main course:

Finally, one heron caught a fish worthy of the hunting effort. Visible in this picture are the nuptial plumes of this GBH—wispy feathers on the lower neck, similar plumes on the wing coverts, and a long, elegant black plume on the head. These grow only during the breeding season:

The fish, likely a White Perch (Morone americana)—a predator of mollusks, arthropods, and small fish—displays a defense reflex here. It has two dorsal fins: the posterior fin is soft, while the spiny anterior fin is raised when the fish is in danger. This reflex is intended to make the fish harder for a predator to swallow:

The heron has speared the fish through its posterior region, but the prey is still alive, writhing to get free. The heron, now knee-deep in water, must finish the fish off and reposition it to be swallowed head-first:

To do that, the bird first walks to shallower water where it can momentarily drop the fish without risk of escape. Additionally, moving away from the group decreases the chances of the catch being stolen by a competitor:

Catch and release (but not for long): In the shallow, muddy water, the GBH releases the fish; it cannot swim away and is visible as a dark blob below the bird. Whether this GBH is male or female cannot be determined from these pictures, as the sexes are monomorphic. This suggests that both sexes are “choosy” in mate selection, as both provide significant parental care and investment:

The GBH delivers the coup de grâce—the perch is now speared through the head. For me, looking at these pictures raises the question: how many bird species are sexually dimorphic versus monomorphic and why? Some are strongly dimorphic—ducks, songbirds, turkeys, and grouse—while others, like herons, gulls, parrots, corvids, and raptors, are not. Others fall somewhere in between, like the American Robin. While males have darker heads and more vibrant breasts, they do not incubate the eggs, though they do guard the nest and feed the chicks.  Are these differences exclusively the result of parental care roles?  Or is it an adaptation to the environment?  For instance, a GBH cannot be too flashy, or the fish would easily spot its silhouette against the grey sky:

In one smooth move, the heron tosses the fish into the air and catches it head-first. The fish is now incapacitated, no longer resisting, and bleeding heavily. With its defensive fins down, it can finally be swallowed:

Only once have I seen a GBH unable to swallow a large eel—mostly due to its length rather than its girth. Otherwise, once prey is caught—be it a fish, a duck, or a rodent—it is swallowed whole, sometimes after a brief struggle:

The fish is now in the esophagus; the heron’s flexible neck tissue expands to accommodate the meal until it can be digested:

Here is a picture of a Great Egret also in breeding plumage, sporting its long, wispy feathers (aigrettes). These will be lost through molting or wear shortly after the breeding season ends:

A Great Egret in flight, with its head retracted—a trait that makes them easy to distinguish from cranes. While they occupy similar ecological niches to the Great Blue Heron, they are not identical.Egrets often hunt “on the move,” flying or hopping, while GBHs prefer ambush hunting or slow, deliberate wading. Egrets typically target smaller prey, while GBHs:

Mars may be hostile, but it might not be entirely unlivable. In lab experiments, yeast cells survived simulated Martian shock waves and toxic perchlorate salts—two major environmental threats on the Red Planet. Their secret weapon was forming protective molecular clusters that shield critical cellular functions under stress. Without these defenses, survival plummeted, pointing to a potential universal strategy life could use beyond Earth.

A major international effort has produced an ultra-precise measurement of the Universe’s expansion rate, confirming it’s faster than early-Universe models predict. By linking multiple distance-measuring techniques, scientists ruled out simple errors as the cause of the discrepancy. The persistent “Hubble tension” now looks more real than ever. It could mean our current model of the cosmos is incomplete.

A brilliant physicist vanished in 1938, leaving behind one strange, quiet paper. It described something that shouldn't exist: a particle that is its own antiparticle. To understand why that matters, we first need to rethink what a particle even is — and that means getting weird with chirality, the Higgs field, and the neutrino's stubborn refusal to follow the rules.

In my view, “Blackbird,” a Beatles song written by Paul McCartney and released on the Beatles’ “White Album” in November, 1968, is one of his finest works.  Here we see him rehearsing it in the the EMI’s Abbey Road Studios on the very day it was recorded: June 11, 1968. (The released version is here.)

A few notes on the song from Wikipedia:

McCartney explained on Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road that the guitar accompaniment for “Blackbird” was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, a well-known lute piece, often played on the classical guitar. As teenagers, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bourrée as a “show off” piece. The Bourrée is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney said that he adapted a segment of the Bourrée (reharmonised into the original’s relative major key of G) as the opening of “Blackbird”, and carried the musical idea throughout the song. The first three notes of the song, which then transitioned into the opening guitar riff, were inspired from Bach.

The first night his future wife Linda Eastman stayed at his home, McCartney played “Blackbird” for the fans camped outside his house.

. . . Since composing “Blackbird” in 1968, McCartney has given various statements regarding both his inspiration for the song and its meaning.  He has said that he was inspired by hearing the call of a blackbird one morning when the Beatles were studying Transcendental Meditation in Rishikesh, India, and also writing it in Scotland as a response to the Little Rock Nine incident and the overall civil rights movement, wanting to write a song dedicated to people who had been affected by discrimination.

You can listen to Bach’s Bourré here, but for the life of me I can’t hear the germ of “Blackbird” in it.

The sound is off at the beginning but starts 16 seconds in. There are a few other breaks in the sound.

It’s clear that the song was tweaked right up to the end, including the tempo, the pause, and the raising of the voice on the word “life” halfway into the song.

The guy speaking to John and Paul is of course George Martin, who contributed so much to the greatness of the group’s songs.  Notice that Paul breaks into other songs from time to time, including Helter Skelter and Mother Nature’s Son, both also on the White Album. At about 6:15, Lennon tunes his guitar to McCartney’s, as if wanting to accompany him on Blackbird. But no accompaniment was needed.

Check out Macca’s shoes! The woman sitting in the corner and then next to McCartney is identified by a commenter:

Francie Schwartz is the lady appearing in the video alongside Paul. She was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend during the summer of 1968, which coincides exactly with the White Album recording sessions. She wrote about her time at Abbey Road in her memoir Body Count (1972), giving a firsthand account of those legendary sessions. You can read about Schwartz here.

This is McCartney at the apogee of his powers. The song is a work of genius.  In all my life I will never figure out where the ability to produce songs like this comes from. All I can guess is that there’s a kind of neuronal wiring in such people that can turn thoughts into wonderful music.

The next time these doctors claim they were right, let's remind them exactly what they claim to have been right about.

The post Since They Won’t Remind You, Here’s What Drs. John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas, Actually Said 6 Years Ago first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Larry the Cat recently turne 19 (and celebrated his 15th year at 10 Downing Street), but the Senior Cat is still going strong. For example, he recently caught his third mouse, though that was nominally his job as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.  All Brits love him now (save for the miscreants), and he’s still getting into trouble, as this recent YouTube video shows:

********************

Quite a few readers called my attention to this Canadian cat, named Louis Vuitton (!), who lives in a town that straddles the border with the U.S. Despite new restrictions on immigration, Louis, as the CBC article below shows, repeatedly enters the U.S. illegally and then slips back to Canada. Click on the headline to read:

An excerpt:

On Zero Avenue in South Surrey, B.C. lives a cat without a care in the world, and a supercilious name to match.

Louis Vuitton has become a local legend for doing with ease what most humans wouldn’t dare.

Each day, he leaps back and forth across a narrow ditch that sits smack dab on the Canada-U.S. border.

“He hasn’t always been such a rebel, but he is extremely friendly,” Deb Tate, Louis’ owner, told As It Happens host Nil Koksal.

He just loves people, says Tate, and he doesn’t care what side of the border they’re on.

“He will walk up, greet people, get his pats and belly rubs and then continue on when he’s done.”

On one side of the ditch is a row of charming homes, including his own, on Canadian soil. On the other are the green fields of Peace Arch Historical State Park in the United States.

There aren’t any fences, just a street in between and a shallow divide. According to Tate, there are plenty of cameras and hawk-eyed border guards patrolling nearby, ready to pounce on illegal crossers.

But none of that seems to concern Louis, who trapezes across whenever he wants, with the air of someone who knows the rules, and chooses to ignore them.

Louis, who turns six on Canada Day,has been lapping up all the attention from locals since he caught the eye of Instagram user @pnwdaily360, who posted a now viral video about “the border-hopping kitty.”

There’s a cat that doesn’t really give a f–k about borders,” says the user in the video. “And he comes over and hunts in the ditch. There he is. What’s up buddy?”

The video has since garnered over 220,000 likes and three million views on Instagram.

Tate says Louis even has a habit of smuggling things across the border, dropping it ever so thoughtfully on her doorstep.

“He’s been known to bring home a treat or two from his adventures,” said Tate. “We’ve received everything from snakes and mice and squirrels, much to my chagrin.”

As for his name, Tate says it wasn’t given to him because he has a penchant for luxury goods at duty-free prices.

“He’s a rescue kitty, and we decided that coming from humble beginnings, he deserved a designer name,” said Tate. “We just named him Louis and … he has just grown in to fill the personality, and more.”

Click the video below to see a two-minute video of Louis in action.  I wonder if ICE will go after him. After all, he not only enters the U.S. illegally, but commits crimes (murder!) in our country, bringing mice, snakes, and even squirrels back to Canada.

 

********************

Finally, from 1000 Libraries Magazine we hear about a cat who got an honorary doctorate from a university in Vermont, so he is now known as “Dr. Max Dow.”  Click the screenshot below to get the details:

An excerpt:

That’s Dr. Max Dow, to you. Max Dow, a once feral kitten, has been granted an honorary PhD from Vermont State University Castleton. After making a name for himself around campus for the last five years, Max has become a staple on the grounds and a famously friendly mascot for the school. He is beloved by students and faculty alike — so much so, the university bestowed an honorary doctorate of ‘litter-ature’ to him at this year’s commencement ceremonies.

Much like many other great scholars, Max’s life started with humble beginnings. He was living on the streets of a neighboring city in Vermont as a feral kitten before being adopted by his loving family and owner, Ashley Dow. Dow and her family live in a neighborhood shared with Vermont State University Castleton, and about a year after moving into their new home, Max began to explore the campus for the first time.

In an interview with USA Today, Ashley Dow shares the first memories of Max making his way to campus. She and her family were worried when he hadn’t returned home. They went searching for Max and quickly found that he was exploring the university and was familiarizing himself with curious students and staff.

Max is well taken care of by students, much to the relief of his owner. Students have been responsible for looking out for Max’s well-being and regularly check in with his owners about his health and safety. Many residents on campus have Dow’s number and will send her update texts when Max is seen or is being cared for by a student or faculty member. After a run with some not-so-friendly stray cats in the neighborhood, Max was injured.

In response, Dow asked the school’s faculty and students to be vigilant about returning Max home by 5:00 PM so his family could keep an eye on him during the night. She shared that everyone has complied with her request on numerous occasions and goes out of their way to make sure he is looked out for when he’s around campus.

. . . Max has benefited from the many perks of being a ‘student’ on campus. According to Vermont State University, Max can be seen hitching rides across school grounds in students’ backpacks and has even been the artistic muse and subject of many photography major projects.

. . . After five years of dedication to Vermont State University and its students, the school decided it was time for Max to earn his degree. During the Spring 2024 commencement, Max was celebrated and met with applause when he earned his doctorate in “Litter-ature” alongside over 1,000 other students.

. . . Vermont State University shared their feelings about Max in one quote saying, “We are incredibly proud of Max and deeply grateful for the role he plays within the culture of our University and for his part in elevating VTSU’s reputation for academic excellence and outstanding commitment to animal welfare.”

Here’s Max’x doctoral diploma from the site:

. . . and a short video about Max—I mean Doctor Max.

I hope he’s chipped.

*********************

Lagniappe: From Stacy, a post from the FB Group the National Carousel Association:

Extra lagniappe from Cats Doing Cat Stuff. Safe treats for your moggy: