Working cats

It’s a universally acknowledged fact that cats pretty much rule the Interwebs.

Oh, yeah—you got yer Dog Shaming sites and yer international anti-dog-poop reports and yer police dog Twitter accounts. But basically, without cats and cat videos, no one would have bothered to build out the ARPANET. No eBay, no Drudge Report, no nude selfies of Anthony Weiner going viral.

Well, maybe that last one is a bit of a heavy burden to lay on the feline spine.

In the proud tradition of How Cats Saved Civilization, then, here’s a story from NPR about distillery cats. Those are the hard-working…er, diligent…um. Well, distillery cats fulfill a vital function in ensuring that those precious waters of life keep flowing, on both sides of the Atlantic.

In times of yore, they protected the grain used in distilling whiskies from marauding mice. Apparently they were fierce and fearless in the pursuit of their duties, as evidenced by Towser the Mouser’s Guinness entry of 28,899 kills at the Glenturret, the oldest distillery in Scotland. (Although I do worry about who might have been keeping track.)

These days, mousing skills aren’t as important as they used to be. I expect that EU and FDA helth regulations have reduced a distillery’s options as to how they can store grain, so non-human vermin aren’t as problematic as they might have been 50 years ago.

But—and this is kind of a self-fulfilling beauty of the Internet—it seems that having a cute, photogenic cat purring around the visitors center is instant and almost free marketing. Hint: it’s not photos of a plastic thimble of whisky in the tasting room that people are tweeting the hell out of.

I got a kick out of the still master at the Woodford Reserve distillery in Kentucky admitting that no one knew whether their long-time resident cat Elijah was any good at mousing, because “everybody fed him. He didn’t have to mouse that much.”

But he gave great photograph.

Well, different times, different capabilities. The thing I really like about these distillery cats is that even when they’re sleeping on the job, they’re on the job. They’re the perfect employee—working 24x7.

Sadly, Glenturret’s most recent DC was struck by a car and killed just before NPR’s story aired. But look at what a great job he was doing: