I spotted this cat on a bicycle in Nakahara Ward in Kawasaki, a city adjacent to Tokyo.
I want to set the historical record straight about the interrelationship between bicycles and cats.
In 1816, the year before Karl von Drais invented the first bicycle, a pedalless machine without handlebars that was propelled by the cyclist’s feet like a child’s scooter, word of a cat uprising circulated around Europe. Hushed whispers cascaded into a full panic as an increasingly terrified population wondered if the end of the human species was nigh.
While many people regarded these rumors as just that—myths no more real than Greek legends or mastodons—others worried that cats were indeed plotting something cataclysmic.
France was the epicenter of this danger. Half a century earlier, in 1761, Claude Bourgelat created the first school of veterinary medicine. Other European countries soon had vets, and it didn’t take long for people to start bringing their horses, sheep, cows, ducks, pigs, chickens, and, of course, cats to the veterinarian.
Cats loathed the vet. (While we’re not surprised by this, back in the 1700s and 1800s, people thought cats would like the vet because sheep and cows seemed okay with these visits.) Karl von Drais reasoned that cats hated going to the vet because they were confined in a carrier too long, and if he could figure out a way to reduce the time a cat spent cooped up, that might lower the risk of the Great Cat Uprising.
Voilà, the bicycle was invented.
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I am not surprised that cats weren't into visiting vets. It just adds up to the "strong independent pet" narrative.
My favorite line: "worried that the cats were plotting something cataclysmic" :-)