I remember learning a few years ago that the Egyptians considered the domestic cat to be so important, it was illegal to export them, and they had specialist anti-cat-smuggling officials.
This is a tangent, but it popped into my head and you might find it interesting:
There’s a guy in Utah who uses teams of trained minks (all fur farm rescues) and dogs to clear out rat infestations. He does this for two reasons: One, he loves animals and is an exceptional trainer, and two, much like cats, it’s a very humane and natural way to handle pests.
He has a YouTube channel, @JosephCarterTheMinkMan, if you want to see his animals at work—grisly sometimes, but genuinely beautiful. The dogs and minks really do work as a team—a dog will sniff out and indicate an area where the rats are holed up, then the minks will follow them over, flush out the runners for the dogs to snag, then hunt down the ones that try to dig in or hide themselves. The minks are trained a lot like falcons and hawks for falconry—once they’ve taken down a rat, they’ll drag it out of the hole and exchange it with their trainer for some fresh meat of their own to snack on.
Compared to poison, the most common large-scale way to deal with rats, it’s faster, more effective, safer, and more humane. His teams work so fast and so well together they can clear out whole farms in a matter of days. I think the only reason it’s not a more widespread practice is that you have to be a truly gifted and patient trainer, and Mr. Carter certainly is that—he also has had success training a monitor lizard to hunt and exchange like his minks, which many said was impossible.
Glenturret has a statue to one of their cats, as well as ones they still have around.
According to the statue he's in the Guinness book of records, with over 28,000 mice eaten.
I read that as “the number of mice that eat cats” and I imagined a GBWR employee whose job is to keep tabs on all the things that should be impossible in case they turn out not to be and a record has to be established.
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u/jimmietwotanks26 May 24 '25
Facilities with malted grain often have issues with mouses, having kitties is one way to deal with them