Happy Wednesday Furiends!

It is finally beginning to feel like fall in our neck of the woods! For instance, it’s 2pm and 68 degrees. The Human and the Tribe are loving the cooler weather and fall happens to be The Human’s favorite time of year.

In honor of the new season, we tasked our Purrsonal Assistant to take some of our photos and make them “fallish”. She then got a bit carried away and tried out her new AI app to create some fall feline images. She came to the conclusion that she much purfurrs doing fun things with our photos rather than let a machine create a random image. You’ll be able to tell our enhanced fall photos from the AI pics. Meow at us and let us know what you think.

And here are the AI images celebrating fall.

And now, let’s get on with this week’s feline news.

Can cats cut the cost of power?

Oh my whiskers, I love our feline loving Japanese furiends!

Yamato Transport, is one of the top home delivery service companies in Japan. It’s known as Kuroneko (“Black Cat”) due to its logo of a black cat carrying a black kitten in its mouth and  uses its cat connection to its advantage whenever possible.

Recently, in an experiment reminiscent of the second episode of the Pokémon anime when a group of Pikachu band together to generate electricity on a wheel, the company decided to test whether cats might be the key to cutting costs by generating power via a cat wheel equipped with a generator. The study was part of the company’s goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 48 percent by 2030 using a variety of strategies.

The focus of the experiment was a two-year-old male Bengal cat named Mufasa. The goal was to document in 24 hours, from 12 p.m. to 12 p.m.  to find out how much money’s worth of electricity Mufasa would be able to generate?

Things didn’t start well when the normally exercise-loving Mufasa showed minimal interest in the cat wheel (could have been the generator that put him off). Throughout the day, his owner tried to lure him over to it with a laser pointer and treats, but he still only ran at a slow pace in small doses.

In fact, rather than expending energy, he decided to recharge by settling down for a nice long cat nap.

Ultimately, Mufasa’s time on the cat wheel would cover only 0.3 yen (US$0.002) of a monthly electricity bill. To put things in perspective, a hamster taking part in a parallel experiment throughout the same 24 hours generated 1 yen’s worth of electricity. Based on these results, the research team made one simple conclusion: “Maybe cats aren’t suited for the generation of electricity.” MOL!

Cat Plugging In His Own Food Dispenser Amazes Internet—’An IT Professional’

I guess if you humans insist on getting a smart feeder you might want to evaluate how smart your cat is.

A posted to TikTok by @robin_k44 on September 1 showed the moment her cat “figured out how to turn his automatic feeder on.” As the plug was only halfway into the outlet, the cat didn’t hesitate to nudge it back in and enjoy the extra food that came pouring out.

The owner wrote, alongside the viral clip that she “can’t make it up.” Since it was posted on TikTok, the video has been viewed more than 6.8 million times and received over 601,600 likes.

The independent cat’s hilarious antics have amused thousands of social media users, and the viral post has already been inundated with over 3,300 comments .

TikTok user @hey_im_jude wrote: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

While @3pmusic commented: “What university did cat attend?!”

Another comment, from @tarquinc read: “Oh dang, he’s an IT professional.”

Newsweek reached out to @robin_k44 via TikTok for comment. They could not verify the details of the video.

Pittie will do anything to be with his cats

Oh my whiskers, does it get any sweeter than this? Someone needs to tell this dog that he isn’t a cat but it is definitely a sweet story.

Flintshire cat burglar caught red handed after crime spree

A notorious feline named Gingee, a four-year-old Maine Coon, has been ransacking nearby homes in Buckley, Flintshire in Wales.

The most startling moment for the cats was when Gingee delivered a stolen knife to their bedroom at night. Hmm, I wonder what message Ginger was trying to send his humans.

“The list so far is: a child’s spade from the sandpit, a pair of goggles and – for some reason – a sieve.” The cat’s thievery was noticed several months ago when scissors and sticky tape was coming ujp missing in the house. Evidently not .content with treasure from her own home, Gingee soon began targeting the neighbors.

Some of the most unusual items were football cones for training. She managed to get them through the cat flap with ease. Gingee’s nighttime thievery led to her humans setting up a night vision cameral to catch her nightly arrivals with her ill gotten gains.

Gingee’s humans have taken to social media to attempt to locate the owners of stolen goods.

Alaska cat named Leo reunited with owners almost month after their home collapsed into flood-swollen river

A pair of Alaska teachers needed good news after they lost nearly all their possessions and their cat when their house collapsed into a river swollen by a glacial-outburst flood.

Elizabeth Wilkins was holding onto hope that if any animal would survive the house falling into the Mendenhall River on Aug. 5, it would be Leo, the couple’s resilient, big-eyed, black-and-white cat who shows no fear of bears.

“I knew that he’s pretty smart, and so I felt pretty confident that he would escape and be OK somewhere,” she said.

That faith paid off 26 days after the flood when Tonya Mead posted a photo of Leo to the Juneau Community Collective Facebook page. Wilkins immediately knew it was Leo, the kitten” they rescued in 2020. She rushed to meet Mead.

“I just started walking down the street calling for him, and he just ran out and was like, ‘Oh hey, here I am, you know, like, where have you been?’ ” she said.

The river flooding was caused by a major release of water from Suicide Basin, a Mendenhall Glacier -dammed lake in Juneau that eroded the river bank and the couple was out of town when the flood happened.

Ultimately, several homes were destroyed or partially destroyed, with others condemned or flooded. None of the destruction was as famous as the house being rented by Wilkins and Schwartz, with video of it collapsing into the river going viral.

The couple returned to Juneau three days later to sort out new living arrangements and look for Leo.

They returned to the site of the house, calling out Leo’s name and leaving food for him in the chicken coop.

By then, it seemed like everyone in Juneau was looking for him. There were plenty of sightings of Leo, but Wilkins said it appears that there are just many black-and-white unhoused cats in Juneau.

When he did turn up, he appeared to be in good health.

“Leo was a little thinner, but otherwise totally fine,” Wilkins said. “He ate four cans of tuna and went outside to kill a mouse. I imagine that is how he survived.”

She said it’s amazing to have Leo back, though he’s currently staying with a friend while they look for another place to live.

“It’s super joyful because everyone in their community was looking for him, and it’s nice to have some good news,” she said.

And just like Leo, some of their other possessions are finding their way back to them, but not in as good of condition as the cat.

“People have been finding some things, like some of our clothes and pictures were in 4 feet of silt in someone’s yard down the Mendenhall River,” Wilkins said.

Way to go Leo, this feline is very happy you’re home safe and sound!