窓からは柔らかな光が射し込み、
[Soft light streamed through the window]
窓の外では鳥たちが歌う美しい朝に、
[Outside, birds were singing on a beautiful morning]
私に撫でられながら眠るようにそっと逝きました。
[As I petted her, she passed away gently, as if falling asleep]
長い間かぼちゃんを愛して下さったみなさま、本当にありがとうございました。
[To everyone who has loved Kabo-chan for a long time, thank you very much]
かぼちゃんは世界一幸せな犬だったと思います。そして私は世界一幸せな飼い主でした。
[I believe Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world, and I was the happiest owner]

かぼちゃんは今もまだにこにこ笑ってシッポを振って [Kabo-chan is still smiling happily and wagging her tail] 私に寄り添ってくれていると思います。きっとこれからもずっと [I believe she is still staying close to me. Surely, from now on and forever.]

Animal welfare experts urge fans not to buy Scottish folds as mutation can lead to abnormal bone growth

To any devoted Taylor Swift fan, the musician’s cats are almost as well known as she is, frequently appearing in her TikTok postings and with hundreds of millions of posts devoted to them across social media.

But as Swift’s planet-conquering Eras tour prepares to land in the UK next month, animal welfare experts have urged her fans not to copy Swift’s cats, saying the same characteristics that make the breed cute also condemn them to a life of constant pain.

A baffling misunderstanding of the charm and appeal of the grouchy cartoon cat is one of many reasons to hate this atrocious new take, along with the many, many ads

There’s not that much to Garfield. Understanding the orange tabby of funny-pages repute is pretty simple: he has a set of integral, inalienable traits – his ill temperament, his cynical outlook, his sedentary lifestyle, his motivation primarily in self-interest and his indifference to owner Jon Arbuckle – that define the grouchy yet likable pop-cultural fixture. Any depiction of a Garfield that eschews these qualities, even while adhering to such superficial markers as his love of lasagne or hatred of Mondays, ceases to be Garfield at all and instead becomes a common cat by any other name, no different than Get Fuzzy’s Bucky, or worse, the godless bastard Heathcliff. In fact, insofar as Garfield-ness is inscribed from the feline personality model projected on to cats by humans, a Garfield in spite of himself may as well be a dog, an unnatural oxymoron with nothing to distinguish himself from the rest of the herd.

The makers of The Garfield Movie chose not to heed this ontological lesson in their approach to Jim Davis’s blueprint. The all-new, all-animated vehicle for the newspaper comic-strip fixture mutates him into an on-trend, readily marketable rebrand of himself. Given slightly larger eyes and a slightly smaller mouth to up the cuteness factor on some of his expression models, this Garfield has softened his rougher edges, even going so far as to relax his staunch anti-Odie stance. To be fair, director Mark Dindal and the writing brain trust of Paul Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds had to do something, the source material’s premise of “lazy a-hole cat mostly just sits around” fighting the narrative needs of cinema. But audiences have spent decades of mornings with Garfield. We know Garfield. Garfield is a friend of ours. Senator, Chris Pratt is no Garfield.

Enlarge / A kitty named Clover prepares to play with a robot arm in the Cat Royale "multi-species" science/art installation. (credit: Blast Theory - Stephen Daly)

Cats and robots are a winning combination, as evidenced by all those videos of kitties riding on Roombas. And now we have Cat Royale, a "multispecies" live installation in which three cats regularly "played" with a robot over 12 days, carefully monitored by human operators. Created by computer scientists from the University of Nottingham in collaboration with artists from a group called Blast Theory, the installation debuted at the World Science Festival in Brisbane, Australia, last year and is now a touring exhibit. The accompanying YouTube video series recently won a Webby Award, and a paper outlining the insights gleaned from the experience was similarly voted best paper at the recent Computer-Human Conference (CHI’24).

"At first glance, the project is about designing a robot to enrich the lives of a family of cats by playing with them," said co-author Steve Benford of the University of Nottingham, who led the research. "Under the surface, however, it explores the question of what it takes to trust a robot to look after our loved ones and potentially ourselves." While cats might love Roombas, not all animal encounters with robots are positive: Guide dogs for the visually impaired can get confused by delivery robots, for example, while the rise of lawn mowing robots can have a negative impact on hedgehogs, per Benford et al.

Blast Theory and the scientists first held a series of exploratory workshops to ensure the installation and robotic design would take into account the welfare of the cats. "Creating a multispecies system—where cats, robots, and humans are all accounted for—takes more than just designing the robot," said co-author Eike Schneiders of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab about the primary takeaway from the project. "We had to ensure animal well-being at all times, while simultaneously ensuring that the interactive installation engaged the (human) audiences around the world. This involved consideration of many elements, including the design of the enclosure, the robot, and its underlying systems, the various roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and, of course, the selection of the cats.”

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