WATERMARK

This special Friday Cat Blogging post is dedicated to PrairieMary, who says that cats aren’t cute:

. . . cats are not CUTE! . . . They have "edge" and insight and moxie — they are seductive,
duplicitous and morally impaired. They’ll love you until a sardine
comes along — so how cute is that?

Squibs and Crackers are at this minute wrestling under my feet,
wailing and growling and trying to snap each other’s spines. Not CUTE!

Well, OK, so she has a point — but a questionable one from someone who names her cats Squibs and Crackers. Just look at Boo and tell me she’s not cute:

She is CUTE.

Even Jon Carroll, who claims that cats play dangerous underfoot games, implicitly acknowledges that they are, nonetheless, cute:

[Bucket] is opposed to scritching, for
instance, and a cat opposed to scritching is an odd cat indeed. On the other
hand, she does have a purr of amazing volume, particularly considering how tiny
she is. I believe that once she startled herself with her own purr and ran
away.

And is this [via BoingBoing] not cute? Does it not remind you of Love Thy Neigh-Purr, which is also cute?

And what about all the cuteness that cats inspire, like this, and this, and this?

Or perhaps Mary is more concerned with the wildness of cats, with their ancestry — those teeth, those claws — and I confess that this picture of kitty’s close relative is not reassuring. This, from The Loom, via 3 Quarks:

The common ancestor of all living cats, according to their results,
lived in Asia about ten million years ago. This cat’s descendants split
into two branches. One led to lions, jaguars, tigers, leapards, snow
leopards, and cloud leopards. The other branch gave rise to all other
cats. These early cats remained in Asia until 8.5 million years ago,
when new lineages moved into the New World and Africa. The New World
immigrants gave rise to bobcats, couggars, lynxes, ocelots, bobcats,
and other species found in the Western Hemisphere today. The African
migrants were the ancestors of today’s servals and other small cat
species.

. . . this DNA evidence is important for suggesting just how fast cats could
migrate, and how splendidly they could adapt to all sorts of new
niches, from the cliffs of the Himalayas to the canopy of South
American cloud forests to the Sahara. Conservation biologists are
rightly concerned about the introduction of cats to Australia
and remote islands, where they’re wiping out endangered animals. But it
turns out they’ve had plenty of practice at being invasive species,
without help from us.

Still, it’s hard to argue with this, just one of many from Cute Overload:

Or Gracie, currently keeping my mother company:

Photo by Bonnie Pinkerton
(click for larger image)

And, unquestionably the cutest cat in my family, the famous PeeWee:

Photo by Sue Pinkerton

I believe I have adequately assembled my evidence, but if you need more, try:

Friday Ark
I and the Bird
Carnival of the Cats
Carnival of the Dogs
Circus of the Spineless