Sit, down and out: Most people don’t expect much from their pets. Cats shouldn’t scratch all the furniture and shouldn’t have a mouse slaughter party in the apartment. They shouldn’t heel like dogs, catch balls and maybe turn male or female. Only ambitious people expect their favorites to enroll in universities to study social sciences, quantum mechanics or Egyptology.
However, Pebbles, a black and white cat from Colchester, England, has been attending the University of Essex voluntarily for 14 years. The animal feels so comfortable at the university that it roams among the students every day and dozes in lecture halls. Cats are mysterious creatures, no one knows what keeps Pebbles at university significantly longer than most students. Instead of an honorary doctorate, the University of Essex gave the “Campus Cat” a special honor for her loyalty to science. A bronze statue depicting Pebbles one and a half times larger was inaugurated on the university campus.
“It’s only natural that such a clever and hospitable cat would choose Essex as his home,” said Catter Sarah Perry, sorry, Chancellor Sarah Perry, at the unveiling of the statue. The student union held a “Campus Cat Day” with whimsical poems and a cat content photo contest. Students, university staff and Chancellor Perry wore cat ears as headdresses. With all due respect, it is hardly “a given” that university chancellors with cat ears attend a ceremony.
Throughout cultural history, people have not only worshiped lions, eagles, bears and dragons as symbols of strength, but also dogs, cats and other fluffy friends. In Istanbul, a bronze statue commemorates Tombili the cat, who often hung around on stairs in a casual pose. The most famous dog statue in the world also has something to do with a university career. In front of Shibuya Station in Tokyo stands the statue of Hachiko, an Akita dog who lived in the 1920s. Every day he picked up his master Hidesaburo Ueno, a professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo, at the train station. After the professor died of a cerebral hemorrhage during a lecture, Hachiko continued to wait at the train station – for ten years.
Danes are also animal-friendly, but surprisingly self-critical when it comes to choosing statues. Danish Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt noticed that in Copenhagen “there are more statues of mythical creatures and horses than of women.” Of the 101 statues, 70 are dedicated to men, 26 to animals and only five to women. The government now wants to spend 50 million Danish crowns (6.7 million euros) on a better male-female-animal balance. Instead of men, horses and mythical creatures, more women should be shown. According to unconfirmed reports, Chancellor Sarah Perry and Campus Cat Pebbles are launching an accompanying study.