It’s National Cat Day, so we have the story of how one of the biggest museums in the world once had a large collection of feral cats.
This was the British Museum in London, home to the Rosetta Stone and countless other world-famous artifacts.
And around 1960 or so, the institution had a problem with wild cats.
Actually, all of London did: the problem had been growing since World War II, when cats fled the devastation of the Blitz and started roaming the city in packs.
The museum had its share of wild felines and then some; at one point there were close to 100 of them.
And there aren’t many curators of historic artifacts and antiquities that want feral cats roaming around clawing at the collection, or attacking the staff, or having kittens on the shelves.
So the museum tried to get the cats out: they bought nets, they set out traps, they reminded staff not to feed the cats or they’d never leave.
The government wanted to just call the exterminators, but the staff proposed an alternative: catch the cats, clean them up, spay or neuter them and send most of them to people’s homes where they could be domesticated.
They decided to keep a few to serve as mousers, something the museum had done in the past.
And one of the museum’s cleaners, Rex Shepherd, led a Cat Welfare Society, a group that made sure the cat population was both healthy and the right size.
In the 1980s and early 90s, the museum cats got famous; newspapers liked to report on their work as well as their personalities.
After that, the Cat Welfare Society disbanded, because there weren’t any more stray cats to look after in the museum.
Apparently the effort to address the feral cat issue worked a little too well.
Though the British Museum is far from the only workplace in the UK that had working cats.
There’s been a cat working as a mouser at the prime minister’s residence, 10 Downing Street, for decades.
Back in the late 1800s, the Money Order Office in London had three cats on staff, each earning a shilling a week.
The money helped pay for their upkeep, but they must have been good at their jobs, because a few years later they each got a 6d raise!
The British Museum podcast: The purrrplexing story of the British Museum cats (British Museum)
Bureaucats: The felines with official positions (BBC)
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Photo by B via Flickr/Creative Commons
