Showing posts with label tuxedo cat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tuxedo cat. Show all posts

Wednesday, 21 June 2023

Rescued, starving feral cat has come a long way and is now a therapy cat at San Francisco Airport

His name now is the elaborate 'Duke Ellington Morris'. He used to be a starving and ill feral cat back in 2010 when he was rescued from a colony. He spent some time at the SPCA before being adopted by a mother and daughter.

Duke Ellington Morris an airport therapy cat who was a starving feral cat until rescued
Duke Ellington Morris an airport therapy cat who was a starving feral cat until rescued. Image: Instagram.

They discovered that he had the character to be a therapy cat and became one. At that time San Francisco Airport used dogs as companion animals to calm anxious travellers. Airports are places where travellers can become anxious so it is a nice idea to use domestic animals to calm them.

The airport used dogs and has now expanded their little group of therapy animals ('the Wag Brigade') to include Duke Ellington Morris, who has his own Instagram account and a rabbit called Alex and LilLou the pig.

They are all certified by the San Francisco SPCA as therapy animals and have graduated from therapy animal school with a certificate to say that they have been passed the Animal Assisted Therapy Program.

Duke appears to have always demonstrated a temperament ideally suited to therapy animal work.


His is a regular male tuxedo cat; a black-and-white cat. He looks nice in his therapy cat uniform. As mentioned, he was rescued as a starving feral cat. He is 'paying it forward' as they say in the United States (respond to a person's kindness to oneself by being kind to someone else).

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

Black-and-White or White-and-Black Cat?

Here's a little dilemma. To be honest I have never given it much thought and probably shouldn't. We, who like cats, refer to black and white cats that have a coat made up of black fur and white fur. Obvious. Common sense. But have a look at this picture:

Main original photo by Mark Nockleby

In the old days it seems that when the cat had a predominance of white fur the cat was called a white-and-black cat (with the hyphens in between the words). The ground color is white with black markings on top. In fact they were considered "entirely different" to black and white cats.  In bygone days at cat shows black and white and white and black cats where exhibited and the general guide for success for white and black cats was that the black markings were evenly distributed over the white ground color in a nice balanced fashion.

For black and white cats the "chief points of excellence for show purposes are a dense bright brown-black, evenly marked with white". The classic black and white cat nowadays is what is termed the tuxedo cat and variations on it. The reference to brown-black in the quote is interesting because black fur is brown but today cat fanciers don't write about that in such an open fashion.

Note: Quotes from Our Cats and all about them by Harrison Weir. This book is available from Read Country Books (you can buy through Amazon). You can also download it for free on Kindle:

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