I had often heard of rabbit-cats, but had never met one until, quite recently, I was introduced to Swamp Angel, formerly of the Great Swamp near Chatham, New Jersey, but at the time of our meeting living in a New York apartment, and not liking it very much.
One is always seeing newspaper stories about rabbit-cats. They tell of a hybrid creature with a cat’s head and eyes, short forelegs, long hind legs, a brief tail like a rabbit’s, close, soft fur like a rabbit’s, and a trick of hopping instead of walking. The mother is always a cat, but the assumption is that the father was a rabbit, and no matter how emphatically science declares that the Carnivora and the Herbivora do not interbreed the rabbit-cat theory persists.
“No scientist could convince me that there is no such animal,” one woman writes me. “I know I could swear to one. Twenty-two years ago, at Winthrop Rifle Range on the Potomac River, I saw an animal that had the general appearance of a cat but many of the characteristics of the rabbit. Its front legs were so short that it ambled rather than walked, and it would sit up any old ‘; time on its queer little bunny tail. Its fur was shorter and softer than a cat’s, its jaw was not shaped like a cat’s, and it made a sound quite unlike a miew. No one; who saw it had any doubt that its mother had met a rabbit in the woods.”
In the Culver Citizen of August 22, 1934, appeared an article by Samuel E. Perkins III, formerly president of the Indiana Audubon Society, and leader of many nature hikes. He describes three strange kittens, part of a litter of which the others were ordinary kittens, all of them born to a cat who liked to go adventuring in the fields behind the Morgan County farmhouse where she lived.
“One would guess that she had been wooed there by a gentleman cottontail rabbit,” he says. “Three of the kittens had rabbit tails. I felt the tail bone of one, a tawny male, and it had three vertebrae, each one-fourth of an inch long. It curved upward, hidden in a ball of fur. The kitten’s back was arched like a rabbit’s, and he used his hind legs as a rabbit does, hopping toward his saucer of milk. I suggested a Manx father, but no one had ever seen or heard of a Manx cat anywhere thereabouts. And in the Manx cat there is no tail at all, and no ball of fur such as these kittens had.”
A moving-picture man made films and snapshots of the kittens, and Mr. Perkins wrote to Dr. H. E. Anthony, curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, telling of his find arid of a queer kangaroo-like cat he had seen in Indianapolis. Dr. Anthony replied that a cat was a cat. He discounted the hybrid theory.
“So far as we are aware no such animal could exist,” he wrote. “It is possible that your specimens are of the peculiar types of cat which appear unexpectedly, and are well known to students of genetics, though puzzling to the layman.”
Swamp Angel was found by Charles Perry Weimer, the artist, in the course of a hunting trip along the margins of the Great Swamp. No man has penetrated into the depths of the Great Swamp, and strange creatures are said to inhabit it, but Mr. Weimer saw nothing strange in a nest of kittens he stumbled over until he lifted one, a coal-black atom, and perceived that it had no tail. All the others had tails, so Mr. Weimer left them to the mother, presumably off foraging, and tucked the odd one in his pocket. Mrs. Weimer named it Swamp Angel, and brought it up by hand.
Swamp Angel had Chatham people puzzled. His long, limber hind legs and his trick of standing erect on them, his lack of a tail, and his soft, thick fur led many who saw him to recall that there are numbers of black jack rabbits in the Great Swamp. Newspapers printed stories and pictures of him, and he became quite a celebrity.
His traits are as contradictory as his appearance. He has none of the cat’s sense of direction. If he wandered from the door of Mr. Weimer’s Chatham studio, where he spent the first year of his life, he could not find his way back but would sit under a bush waiting to be fetched. Yet he is very intelligent and responsive. He has no miew, but a musical purr. He has claws on his forefeet but none on his hind feet, so he cannot climb. He has a rounder head, a blunter nose, and a more amiable gaze than have most bobtail cats, but that is what I think he is-a nice bobtail. The only alleged hybrid I have seen, Swamp Angel leaves me on the side of the scientists.
Clyde E. Keeler, of Harvard University, explains these cat eccentricities on the ground of exostoses or bony distortions of the vertebral column. He writes me: “These distortions are commonly found in human beings suffering from arthritis. They characterize many Siamese cats, the Manx cats, and the bob-tail which is so often erroneously called rabbit-cat. In inbred stocks a particular grade of exostoses will become characteristic of the strain. The Manx cat is bred for complete loss of tail. The Siamese when affected has a kinky tail. These exostoses are found in bulldogs, and in several varieties of mice.”
Siamese-cat societies would excommunicate Dr. Keeler for mentioning Siamese and kink-tails in the same breath. They call kink-tails Malay cats. Kink-tailed cats abound in Malay Land, and they probably have corrupted Siam. People who have lived in the Philippines tell me that all the cats in those islands have kinks, as if somebody had tied knots in their tails when they were very young.”
It is ignorantly said that mutilations far back in the strain account for the crooked tails and the taillessness of some cats. Certainly there have been mutilations. James Baillie Fraser, a traveler-writer of the last century, told of islands off the coast of New Guinea where all the cats had docked tails. Their owners did it to protect them from impecunious neighbors who liked cat stew. By burying the tail of one’s cat with suitable incantations one could bring terrible illnesses on the thief who dared to cook and eat the cat. So docked cats were safe. However, we know that acquired characteristics are not transmitted.
An unbalanced diet has its effect on the bony structure of cats. An artist who used to sketch in Marblehead told me that the stray cats there were curiously deformed. One she saw was a hunchback, and another had two tails, one growing out of the other. Now these cats had nothing to eat but fish. They would gather around the docks when the boats came in, and when a fish fell to the ground as the men tossed their catch into the baskets they would make off with it and devour it. This may have been good for their brains, but it was bad for their bones.
Cats in the Orient have little to eat but what they find in the streets, and perhaps that is why there are so many kink-tailed cats in those countries. And it may be that Swamp Angel’s forebears found poor hunting in the Great Swamp, and became so reduced that they were unable to bequeath him a tail.