Compound Cats

November 9, 2011.  The Compound Cat Project is my effort to capture all of the cats in our apartment compound on film in an attempt to identify them, count them, and monitor the population.  This is a work in progress.  I have not yet taken the time to photograph the cats, but there are A LOT of them here.  Many of them do not have tails.  Rumor has it that a common pastime for children in Indonesia is to cut off the tails of cats.  I'm still looking into this.

Kopano - I think this is the cat that often hangs around when we are grilling

December 4, 2011.  I can't believe it's already December.  As part of my CELTA course, a four-week intensive course to become a certified English language teacher to speakers of other languages, I did a language skills lesson (reading and speaking) with the intermediate class on urban legends.  I started the lesson off by asking my students if they had seen cats without tails.  They all had.  Then I told them that I heard the reason they didn't have tails was because children in Jakarta cut them off.  They seemed horrified and immediately said that was not true.  One student was even able to get across that it had to do with genetics.  Some online sites have explained this lack of tails in cats as a recessive genetic trait.  I need some reliable evidence; perhaps we could try to breed the compound cats.  Mark doesn't like the cats.  Their crying annoys/scares him.  ;)  But, if we did some genetics experiments, perhaps he would show greater interest.  Obviously, there are a lot of challenges associated with doing such a study and I can already hear Mark waxing poetically about why plants are so much better for genetics, and pretty much everything else.  Anyway, my students understood urban legend and I aroused their interest.  More on the compound cats later...