While other cats spend their days setting up social media empires founded on the virality of their natural quirks, the United Kingdom’s Billy The Cat has achieved stardom thanks to good, honest work as a feline mail carrier.
Zack King shared the story of how Billy broke into a new line of work on Twitter, posting a thread detailing his cat becoming the go-between between himself, girlfriend Olga Shipunova, and their London neighbors. It all started with the neighbors attaching a post-it note to Billy’s collar to let his owners know he’d been hanging out at another house. King and Shipunova replied, encouraging their cat’s new vocation by striking up a written exchange.
Billy took to his new duties like a natural, carrying messages back and forth so a bunch of quarantined humans could share recipes and TV show recommendations with each other, find new ways to outfit him with advanced mail carrying outfits, and just help a few of his favorite giant hairless apes get through pandemic isolation together.
Even when times got tough, Billy losing his “mailbag” and having to pose with creepy little doll hands as a disciplinary measure, he’s kept on with his work.
We couldn’t be prouder of Billy The Cat’s progress as a cat mailman. Before long, with his career as an example to the rest of his species, we expect the streets to be filled with feline postal workers that dominate their new trade by establishing extensive cat delivery routes and the ruthless extermination of any rival non-human carriers.
[via Bored Panda]
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29 Comments
Eventual headline:Cat Collared in Coke Conspiracy
We all love Mailbag Cat, the adorable cat who carries a mailbag.15 minutes laterWe regret to inform you the cat is a coke mule.
Who narc’d on Billy???
Wait till you find out he’s in cahoots with a cabal of villainous cats and evildoers who are planning to flood the US with Swank…
watching that as a kid just made me want to try it. That and Slurm.
I was watching an episode of Futurama and Slurm turned into Diet Slurm for one shot… I wondered if they were the same thing or if we jumped universes temporarily
mmm.. Diet Slurm..
If Mailbag Cat turns into a Milkshake Duck, I officially quit.
What if he was a Deadly duck?
Have you met my cat, John DeLorean?
Unambitious. My cat’s role model is the Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Appointed to the position, makes a lot of noise without communicating anything, no apparent understanding of democracy, and stares in bafflement at mice.
As cute as this is, letting your cats roam around the neighbourhood freely isn’t great for their life expectancy or the local wildlife. Modern expert advice is to stop letting them out without close supervision, unless you’ve got a cat-proofed area you can keep them in.Though when keeping them at home, you should also be taking some extra steps to make sure they’re properly stimulated.
https://kb.rspca.org.au/knowledge-base/is-it-okay-to-keep-my-cat-at-home-all-of-the-time/
I keep trying to explain this to people and getting called a curmudgeon. 1 billion is the Audubon estimate for the number of birds killed annually by feral and outdoor cats plus even more insects, reptiles and amphibians, and small mammals.
Great job, fuckin internet.
Counterpoint: It’s cute though
I concur, carnage is cute.
As the chosen human of a stray that showed up one day about 3 years ago – and slowly acclimated to the point she sleeps in the crook of my knee most nights- I figure if the cat has managed to survive on its own before it claimed me, it can come and go as it pleases. But, she definitely prefers to spend about 80% of the time indoors. She is now vaccinated and spayed and collared and well-behaved, but does bring me dead rodents as “gifts” on occasion.
The U.K. is rather different. Most people with cats have cat flaps so the cats can come and go as they please. And there’s a very interesting documentary somewhere about a large study of cat roaming patterns. They tagged every cat in a village and charted their daily patterns. Some would enter a stranger’s house and eat another cat’s food. And they studied the cats’ kills. They had the owners bring in everything the cats killed and brought home. The conclusion was that cats don’t have a huge impact on the wildlife in the region, at least for rural England.In Canada, everyone says to keep your cats indoors and I agree. The population is to dense around here and there’s too much traffic, so my two have never been outdoors. (Not to mention the winters, when they probably wouldn’t want to go out anyway.)So I would say it’s location sensitive, but that they definitely enjoy the stimulation of being outside.
Barely a day goes by I don’t ask one of our cats why they can’t become one of them there intranet meem things and bring in some money.
I do that to my cat as well but she just gives me that patented feline stare that says “You think you’re some kind of comedian, pal? Go clean my litter box if you want to make yourself useful.”
They do cute stuff until they see the camera come out.
Your PR attempt here to make me love cats … Will. Fail.
How long till Trump claims cat mail carriers, trained by radical leftists, threw bags full of Georgia votes for him in a river?
Dammit. Beat me to it. +1
“Hero Cat Saves Democracy”
Democracy Cat purrs in the darkness
I thought “cat calls” were a bad thing?