Bonus: Mail Cats?

[00:00:02] Begin PodFix Network Transmission in 3, 2, 1 This is BewilderBeasts, an infotainment show dedicated to inspiring curiosity for all ages by investigating the ways animals intersect at humanity. I am not a historian, an ethologist, a researcher, a scientist, a zoologist, a trained audio engineer, or an expert in... well... anything.

[00:00:26] Y'all, I'm lucky if I can remember to put my clean laundry in the dryer before it gets funky. And while I make every effort to present things as accurately as I can with a fun flair, I'm going to mess up. And that's okay.

[00:00:38] I hope I've given you a nice place to jump off from on your own adventures into curiosity or at the very least, I've given you the key to win your next round of trivia. When welcome to BewilderBeasts, this is a Patreon exclusive.

[00:01:13] I am your host, Melissa Mucumagrab and I... hoped to be recording zero miles from Edinburgh, Scotland. So I took my microphone all the way over there, had too much fun and didn't record a dang thing. So now I'm recording 3,001 miles from Edinburgh, Scotland.

[00:01:26] And we're talking about the postal service's most unusual choice. Not ponies, not dogsled, not even reindeer. Cats, y'all. Cats in the post office. Let's do this. It's 1870 in Belgium. Specifically, Liège. I often say it was the 70s when choices were made.

[00:01:57] And I thought even though it's the 1870s in this case, it's still very fitting. You see, the Liège government thought, hmm, let's hire 37 cats. Let's tie a waterproof bag to the feline's neck, tuck messages into it so they... cats can effectively deliver the mail. Y'all, they did.

[00:02:20] See, it was the 70s. If you're thinking, wait, what? That is the correct thought. The people of Liège went so far as to create the Belgian society for the elevation of the domestic cat in an attempt to, A, prove that cats rule in dog's drool because there

[00:02:39] was a huge push to win the war on dogs as the postal service was sick and tired of being ambushed and attacked by dogs. Fun fact, I work with dogs and totally understand this.

[00:02:53] To this day, kids under the age of 4 years old and postal delivery folk are the two largest demographics of reported dog bites every single year in the United States. Still over 100 years later. So to elevate cats and put dogs in their places, the Belgians thought, cats.

[00:03:13] Cats are nice. Let's try getting cats to deliver the mail. And B, help the public gain confidence in the domestic cat's natural sense of direction. The feeling from some, and somewhere really just the six dudes covered in cat hair who

[00:03:29] started the Belgian society for the elevation of the domestic cat was that cats were not being given a fair shake. That they really could do this, right? That they were smart, they were intelligent, and they were able to do anything a dog could do.

[00:03:43] Listener, it went about as good as you could imagine. Not well. According to cracked writer Cedric Voetz in 2020, quote, the experiment was as simple as it was pointless. The house cats were taken about 20 miles away and just told to find their way home.

[00:04:05] Now I'll give it to cats to defend and protect the mail. And by the mail, I mean themselves. They're cats. They don't care about your mail. They do care about getting attacked by dogs, pet for four seconds too long and knocking

[00:04:21] all of your important stack of papers onto the floor from a significant height. It turns out that the most effective of the cats once made it to his destination in under five hours. Basically that's a flight from Boston to San Rafael del Saur, Nicaragua in about

[00:04:38] the same amount of time, but to deliver a postcard from Aunt Myrtle in that length of time who lives maybe three houses away from you, five hours to make their way home was considered fast.

[00:04:54] In fact, many cats took an entire day to make their little journey and many needed way more than 24 hours to get home if they made it at all. So how did they do it? OK, so the Belgians ended up putting little bowls of milk around specific destinations

[00:05:11] in the city of Liège and assuming quote how hard can this be pigeons can do it. And we know that making assumptions is often the first mistake. It may explain why this program was extremely short lived.

[00:05:26] And it's here that I will say that these cats proved their intelligence. They thought, hmm, I don't really want to do this work. So hey guys, let's just be terrible at this, right?

[00:05:38] And then for the rest of our days, we'll let the Postal Service bring us boxes that we can just sit in, right? I think it's been working really well for cats since the 1870s, don't you? Belgium, my God.

[00:05:51] Belgium was not the only country to use cats in the Postal Service. Guys, have you all met cats? This is a terrible idea. OK, well now let's go to London. About a decade before the Belgians tried their cat's pyramid,

[00:06:09] the good folk of England employed cats in a much more appropriate way at least. Three cats were interviewed given a six month probation period and paid a shilling a week to eat mice at the Money Order office in London.

[00:06:24] So how did these cats fare compared to their Belgian counterparts? Much better than the kitten not express in Belgium. In fact, these cats did so well that they were given a raise. And other postal buildings started putting in ads in the classifieds, I'm guessing, for working cats.

[00:06:42] And according to the Postal Museum, and guys, there is a postal museum. There was one mega chunk big boy who stood above all the other cats in popularity and also in heft. Tibs. Tibs weighed 23 pounds. That's 10.4 kilograms, y'all.

[00:07:03] That's more than a doxen and more than two gallons of paint. That is too heavy for a cat. Anyway, Tibs was born then immediately hired in 1950. And he lived in the basement of the Central London Post Office and he worked there for 14 years. Oh, the 50s.

[00:07:25] When you could just be born, go to work, and live in a basement for your entire life. Those were the good old days. So after Tibs's death, the Post Office magazine posted an obituary in his honor. Y'all, I really want to read it. So I am. Quote.

[00:07:46] Tibs, the Post Office's number one cat, the imposing 23-pound giant who was reigned at the Post Office headquarters for 14 years, is no more. Mr. Elf Talbot, cleaner at St. Martin's Le Grand, who has served his Tibi since the cat was born,

[00:08:03] never failing to come in at every bank holiday to see him fed. First realized something was wrong when Tibs failed to turn up for his morning meal one morning just before Christmas. Reports came in that he had been seen on the floor above his basement home.

[00:08:16] Mr. Talbot began to leave food at the strategic places and a little of it would go, but the big cat was not found until later in the week. Mr. Talbot needed the help of a colleague to carry Tibs to the people's dispensary for sick animals,

[00:08:32] where the veterinary surgeon was in no doubt. Tibs had cancer of the mouth. Almost exactly on his 14th birthday, the life of the Post Office's senior cat was brought to a close. Tibs was an official member of the Post Office staff and was paid two shillings, six D?

[00:08:52] I'm sorry, I did not, side note, I'm sorry. I actually didn't study British money when I was there. I just kept giving them my credit card so I don't know what the D stands for, but I'm guessing two shillings, six cents-ish a week. It's not a lot.

[00:09:08] Okay, back to the obit. He lived in the basement and all his life he never ventured from the precincts of his domain where no rat has been seen since Tibs sorted them out early in his career. He once brought a pigeon into the basement.

[00:09:21] It was freed, shaken but unhurt. Quote, I looked after his mother, Mini, said Mr. Tilbit. She was a fine cat too, but Tibs was a worthy successor. I don't think we'll have another cat. There will never be another Tibs. End quote. 20 years later in 1984,

[00:09:43] the last Post Office cat died and was never replaced. And thus ended the Post Office cat's living on two shilling six D a week on the government dime. And you thought raises keeping up with inflation today was bad. Did anyone else notice that these cats

[00:10:02] did not get a raise in over 100 years? Maybe cats chose not to go back to work because they knew that their worth was way more and they demanded better pay. Good cats. So thank you for joining me on today's Be Wilder Beast exclusive.

[00:10:26] This one is just for you. I got today's information from Mental Floss, BBC, VernonMorningStar.com, Cracked.com, Grunge.com and a book called The Comic Liar, a book not commonly found in Sunday schools. This was a book that was published in 1883 and according to Goodreads.com, quote,

[00:10:48] this work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it end quote. It has, he he, zero reviews or comments in Goodreads. Sorry, Goodreads. I don't think your opinion of this being

[00:11:04] a culturally important book is widely shared. I also got some information from the measure of things as I always do. And if you're curious, there are some extra things in some of those articles about museum cats and some war cats as well

[00:11:23] that I might be bringing up in other episodes for you guys in the future. Music is Tiptoe out the back by Dan Liebowitz and interstitial music is by MK2. Please tell your friends and I will see you guys after Labor Day

[00:11:37] in the main feed with some new stories for Be Wilder Beast. Thank you so much for everything and I will see you guys next time, bye-bye. You've been listening to a podcast of the PodFix Network. Discover more audible gems like this at podfixnetwork.com.

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