The History of Cats and Dolphins Together On The Internet

The internet is a funny old place sometimes. This video has been going around like crazy over the last few days, and seems to be breaking news about the secret kinship of cats & dolphins. And it is cute as all hell. But it’s very much not new. Witness this brief clip, a small section of the same video on some non-English-speaking home videos show, which you can also find on YouTube from 2007:

So it’s been around for a while, though the entire clip seems to have appeared last month. But feline-porpoise encounters are compelling enough, that it seemed worth investigating other examples. Surprisingly most of what I found involves not domesticated kitties, but big game cats with dolphins. Don’t worry, it’s not bloody and still cute. The feline-centric site Kittenspet.com has a couple awesome examples. First here’s a liger cub with a few dolphins (more pix on the site):

Liger Cub with Dolphins

Ligers are what happens when a male lion and female tiger love each other very much (so it’s different than a tiglon, don’t you know). But what about a pure bred tiger and dolphins? Glad you asked, here’s a chance meeting at a zoo between a 6-month-old tiger and some tanked dolphins (more pix on the site):

Tiger meets Dolphin

Turns out there’s also a game (also from 2007, hmm) where you have to keep a cat riding on the back of a dolphin:

It’s super difficult to play, at least to start playing, at least for me. This article has some tips, if you aspire to go deeper into this dolphin-cat transport endeavor. In a roundup of the remaining examples of the crossovers between these species, there’s also a Taiwanese TV drama called When Dolphin Met Cat, a business tussle between Florida sports teams (Florida Panthers vs Miami Dolphins), and this rather less impressive Cat-Dolphin encounter:

mikl-em
Mikl-em

Actor, nerd, poet, producer, writer mikl-em made his name short so you wouldn't have to. In addition to his blog you can find his writing in "Hi Fructose" magazine and witness him almost life-sized in various plays at The Dark Room Theater in SF's Mission district.

He tends to write about theater, humor, San Francisco culture and history, and stuff that's just plain weird. He thanks Scott for sharing the keys to the Laughing Squid virtual HQ and promises to uphold whatever it is that the mirthful cephalopod would prefer to be uplifted.