4 Responses to It’s Caturday!

1. Lucille says:

   April 18, 2026 at 12:13 am

   Happy Caturday!

   Cats VS Squirrels (Kitty TV)

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2. Lucille says:

   April 18, 2026 at 12:16 am

   Secret Army Of Cats

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3. WeeWeed says:

   April 18, 2026 at 3:48 pm

   A Caturday story from WWII (the big one.)

   “In the winter of 1944-45, the western Netherlands starved. The German occupation had imposed a food embargo in retaliation for a Dutch railway strike supporting the Allied advance. Twenty thousand Dutch civilians died of starvation between November 1944 and May 1945. It was called the Hongerwinter — the Hunger Winter. In Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague, people ate tulip bulbs, sugar beets, and — when those ran out — wallpaper paste and boiled leather. An eight-year-old boy named Willem de Vries, living with his grandmother in a canal house in Leiden, was down to eighty percent of his body weight by January 1945. His grandmother, Hendrika, seventy-one, was barely alive. The ration cards had stopped working weeks ago. There was nothing left. And then the cat started bringing rats.”

   The Hongerwinter remains one of the most devastating famines in Western European history. It was not caused by crop failure or drought. It was deliberate — a Nazi punishment imposed on October 1, 1944, after Dutch railway workers went on strike to support Operation Market Garden, the Allied airborne assault at Arnhem. The German command responded by blocking all food transport to the western provinces. Four and a half million people were cut off from food supply.

   By December, daily rations in the occupied western Netherlands had fallen to 400 calories per person — less than a quarter of what the human body needs to survive. By February, the ration dropped to 230 calories. People ate anything. They burned furniture for heat. They walked miles in snow to find frozen potato fields that had already been stripped. Twenty thousand people died.

   Willem de Vries was eight years old in December 1944. He lived with his grandmother Hendrika in a narrow canal house on the Oude Rijn in Leiden. His father, Johan, had been arrested in 1942 for hiding a Jewish family in the attic and sent to the Amersfoort concentration camp, where he died in 1943. His mother, Clara, had gone to The Hague in November 1944 to find food from relatives and had not returned. Willem learned after the war that she had collapsed from exhaustion on the road and been taken to a hospital where she died of pneumonia in January 1945.

   Willem and Hendrika were alone. They had a grey tabby cat named Grijs — Dutch for “grey” — who had lived in the canal house since Willem was three. Grijs was a mouser. She had always hunted — the canal houses of Leiden were full of rats, and Grijs had been an efficient killer for years.

   In the first weeks of the Hunger Winter, Grijs continued to hunt. She would bring rats to the kitchen door and leave them — a behavior common in domestic cats, often interpreted as a “gift” or a teaching instinct.

   Hendrika, in those first weeks, threw the rats away. She was a proper Dutch woman. She did not eat rats.

   By January, she was eating the rats.

   She boiled them. She removed the fur and organs. She made a thin broth with water from the canal — frozen, melted on the stove, boiled. The broth had almost no nutritional value. But the meat did. A single adult rat has approximately 650 calories. In a famine where the daily ration was 230, a rat was the difference between surviving another day and not.

   Grijs had been bringing one rat approximately every two days. In January, as the temperature dropped and the canals froze solid, she began bringing more. Two a day. Sometimes three.

   She was hunting in the dark — in the basements, the cellars, the sewers beneath the canal houses. Leiden’s rat population, ironically, was thriving — the same conditions that starved humans provided abundant food for rats, who fed on garbage, waste, and the remains of the dead.

   Willem, in an interview recorded in 1998 by the Dutch National Institute for War Documentation, described what happened next:

   “Grijs brought rats to the kitchen. My grandmother would take them. But then Grijs started doing something different. She stopped bringing them to the kitchen. She brought them to my bed. She would jump onto my bed at night with a rat in her mouth — a dead rat, she had already killed it — and place it on the blanket beside me. Not beside my grandmother. Beside me. Every night. As if she had decided that I was the one who needed it most. I was eight. I weighed maybe twenty kilos. She could see my ribs. She chose me.”

   Hendrika confirmed this behavior in a letter she wrote to Willem’s aunt after the war — a letter that is now in the Leiden municipal archive. She wrote: “The cat brings the rats to the boy. Not to me. She drops them on his bed and then sits and watches until I come to take them. She will not eat until I have taken the rat to the kitchen. She waits. And then — this is the part I cannot explain — she eats only the bones. I give her some of the meat. She eats a small piece. Then she pushes the rest toward the boy’s bowl with her nose. She pushes it. With her nose. Toward him. As if she is saying: this is for him, not for me.”

   Grijs was rationing.

   Not randomly. Not instinctively. She was making decisions about allocation. She was hunting rats, killing them, delivering them to the most vulnerable member of the household, and then — after the meat had been prepared — refusing to eat her full share and redirecting it toward the boy.

   Dr. Frans van der Berg, a veterinary behaviorist at Utrecht University who reviewed Willem’s testimony and Hendrika’s letter in 2003, wrote: “The behavior described is consistent with what we call ‘provisioning hierarchy’ in felids — a system by which nursing mothers prioritize food allocation to the most vulnerable offspring. What is extraordinary here is that the cat appears to have extended this hierarchy to include a human child. She identified Willem as the most nutritionally compromised individual in her social group and provisioned him accordingly. This is not random gift-giving. This is targeted allocation. And it is, to my knowledge, the only documented case of a domestic cat applying maternal provisioning logic to a human.”

   From January to April 1945 — four months — Grijs brought rats to Willem’s bed every night. Hendrika boiled them. Willem ate the meat. Grijs ate the bones and scraps.

   Willem survived. Hendrika survived — barely. She weighed 38 kilograms when Canadian troops liberated Leiden on May 7, 1945. Willem weighed 17 kilograms. Grijs weighed approximately 2.5 kilograms — down from a pre-war weight of about 4.5. She had lost nearly half her body weight.

   She had been feeding the boy instead of herself for four months.

   After liberation, Allied food drops — including the famous Swedish bread drops and American relief shipments — restored basic nutrition within weeks. Willem recovered. Hendrika recovered, though she never regained full health and died in 1952.

   Grijs recovered slowly. She resumed hunting, but Willem said she never again brought a rat to anyone’s bed. The behavior stopped the day the food arrived. As if she knew the emergency was over.

   Grijs lived until 1953, approximately fourteen years old. She died in the same canal house. Willem, who was by then sixteen and attending gymnasium in Leiden, buried her in the back garden beside the canal wall.

   Willem de Vries became a physician. He specialized in nutrition science. He spent forty years at Leiden University Medical Center researching famine physiology. He published over two hundred papers. His colleagues knew him as a meticulous, reserved scientist who rarely spoke about personal matters.

   In 1998, when the Dutch National Institute for War Documentation asked him to give testimony, he agreed. He was sixty-two years old. He spoke for four hours. Three hours and forty minutes were about the Hunger Winter, the occupation, and his father’s death.

   Twenty minutes were about the cat.

   Those twenty minutes, when the recording was made available online in 2015, were shared more than any other segment in the institute’s archive.

   Willem said, in the final minute of those twenty minutes:

   “I became a nutrition scientist because of Grijs. Not because she fed me — although she did, and I would have died without her. Because of how she fed me. She understood triage. She understood allocation. She understood that an eight-year-old boy weighing twenty kilos needed the meat more than she did. She ate the bones. She pushed the meat toward my bowl. She did this every night for four months. I have spent forty years studying how the human body processes food. I have never found a system more elegant than what a three-kilogram cat figured out in a frozen canal house in 1945. She did not speak. She did not need to. She looked at me. She looked at the food. She pushed it toward me. That was her language. And it was the most articulate thing anyone has ever said to me.”

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   • Stella says:

     April 18, 2026 at 4:01 pm

     Such a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing it!

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