Silly Kittens With Too Many Mittens - Me and My Hemmingway

My silly kitten.

"Hey this is just my size".   This is a small bowl and Butter Bean was the runt of the liter anyway.  Please ignore my dirty floor. This is actually where my dog Mattie eats and she makes a mess constantly.

If you're really tired and need to stretch out you can just hang out of the bowl.

It's perfect for sleeping too.

Toes and more toes. She's a Hemingway kitten, meaning she's a polydactyl cat. Butter Bean has 7 toes on one front paw and 6 on the other, instead of the normal 5, plus she has 5 toes on her back paws.  She was so cute when she first started walking.  It was like her feet were to heavy and in the way.  When she ran she hopped like a bunny.  I always told Neil that her feet looked like a rabbits foot key chain.  Ewww...what a terrible thought!

• Polydactal A polydactyl cat is a cat with a congenital physical anomaly called polydactyly (or polydactylism, also known as hyperdactyly), a type of cat body type genetic mutation that causes the cat to be born with more than the usual number of toes on one or more of its paws. Cats with this genetically inherited trait are most commonly found along the East Coast of North America (in the United States and Canada) and in South West England and Wales.

• Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway was one of the more famous lovers of polydactyl cats, after being first given a six-toed cat by a ship's captain. Upon Hemingway's death in 1961, his former home in Key West, Florida, became a museum and a home for his cats, and it currently houses approximately fifty descendants of his cats (about half of which are polydactyl). Because of his love for these animals, "Hemingway Kitty Cat", or simply "Hemingway Cat", is a term which has come to describe polydactyls.

• Some sources state that these cats are rare in Europe because they were killed as witches' familiars,^[3] but other sources indicate that they are quite common in southern Britain.^[2]

• Naming 

  Nicknames for polydactyl cats include "conch cats", "boxing cats", "mitten cats", "mitten-foot cats", "snowshoe cats", "thumb cats", "six-fingered cats", "Cardi-cats", and "Hemingway cats". Two specific breeds recognized by some but not all cat fancier clubs are the American Polydactyl and Maine Coon Polydactyl, and named regional populations include the Boston thumb cat, Cardi-cat, Ithacat, and Vermont snowshoe cat.

  This is Butter Bean with Izzie, her older brother born last year.

  

   

I wish I could have kept her.  She was my favorite of the four. We already had four cats, more than we ever expected to have.  We found them all loving homes through Craigslist.  It was pretty wild around here for awhile with 4 cats, 4 kittens and a dog!  I was really sweating that whole "Cat Lady" name.

May is National Pet Awareness Month in the United States. I don't know what I'd do without a sweet furbaby to love.  Do you have any pets?  Are you like me, with maybe a few to many?  Come on share the dirt.  I won't tell.