Pittsburgh ‘Refrigerator Cat’

No, I’m not referring to domestic cats would like to open refrigerator doors and creep inside to either ‘steal’ the food for have a snooze, I’m referring to a special race of domestic cat living in sub-zero temperatures in industrial-sized refrigerator plants at the turn of the 20th century (late 1800s to early 1900s). The truth is that this was a single family of albino cats which, I presume, happened to be discovered in a refrigerator unit.

The esteemed author, Dr. Desmond Morris, and many journalists, were fooled into believing the authenticity of a breed of cat called “Refrigerator Cats”. It is the name given to a special breed developed in Pittsburgh in the late nineteenth century to control rats and rodent pests in large commercial refrigeration plants. With their long fur and extra subcutaneous fat to protect them against subzero temperatures they patrolled freezing storage units to repel the cold storage rats.

They became a 19th-century urban legend and a cat breed lost to humankind. They were dubbed, “Eskimo Cats”. According to Sarah Hartwell, an expert on these sorts of stories, the existence of Eskimo Cats gained traction because, in part, of the writings of a respected naturalist in 1896, Lydekker, who “skimped on his homework and wrote the following in his Handbook to the Carnivora, Part I:

“It appears that in the cold-storage warehouses of Pittsburg there were originally no Cats or Rats. The temperature in the cold room was too low. The keepers soon found, however, that the Rat is an animal of remarkable adaptability. After some of these houses had been in operation for a few months, the attendant found that Rats were at work in the rooms where the temperature was constantly kept below the freezing point. They were found to be clothed in wonderfully long and thick fur, even their tapering, snake-like tails being covered by a thick growth of hair. Rats whose coats have adapted themselves to the conditions under which they live have thus become domesticated in the storage warehouses in Pittsburg. The prevalence of Rats in these places led to the introduction of Cats. Now, it is well known that Pussy is a lover of warmth and comfort. Cats, too, have a great adaptability to conditions. When Cats were turned loose in the cold rooms they pined and died because of the excessive cold. One Cat was finally introduced into the rooms of the Pennsylvania Storage Company which was able to withstand the low temperature. She was a cat of unusually thick fur, and she thrived and grew fat in quarters where the temperature was below 30 degrees [Fahrenheit]. By careful nursing, a brood of seven kittens was developed in the warehouse into sturdy, thick-furred Cats that love an Icelandic climate. They have been distributed among the other cold-storage warehouses of Pittsburg, and have created a peculiar breed of Cats, adapted to the conditions under which they must exist to find their prey. These Cats are short-tailed, chubby pussies, with hair as thick and full of underfur as the Wild Cats of the Canadian woods. One of the remarkable things about them is the development of their ‘feelers’. Those long, stiff hairs that protrude from a Cat’s nose and eyebrows are, in the ordinary domestic feline, about three inches long. In the Cats cultivated in the cold warehouses the feelers grow to a length of five and six inches. This is probably because the light is dim in these places, and all movements must be the result of the feeling sense. The storage people say that if one of these furry Cats be taken into the open air, particularly during the hot season, it will die in a few hours. It cannot endure a high temperature, and an introduction to a stove would send it into fits.”

This was followed up with a widely reprinted report published in The Pittsburg Dispatch in December 1899 and other stories such as the “Cold Storage Cats That Thrive in Refrigerators” from the Chicago Daily Tribune of February 17, 1901.

Sarah Hartwell puts the record straight on her website messybeast.com. She says that there is no strain of refrigerator cat but “just a single litter of kittens and the family did not thrive”. She goes on to write that Lydekker and a subsequent “imaginative reporter” (writing on a slow news day) failed to recognise the fact that this single family of cats were albino. The mother was pink-eyed and the father was also white. The kittens were all pink-eyed albinos. The parents were probably closely related. They had excellent hearing but they could not tolerate bright light because of the lack of pigment in the irises of their eyes. Although the Eskimo cats were described as longhaired, they actually had thick fur and apart from these aspects of their anatomy they were ordinary domestic cats.

Dr. Desmond Morris, in his book Cat World states that the Eskimo Cat was deliberately developed to be able to withstand very low temperatures and that this was “deemed necessary” because a race of rats had managed to survive in these cold storage units causing havoc. He states that the experiment was successful with the American authorities reporting: “This hardy race of Eskimo cats cannot stand the daylight nor normal temperature, but due to the cold have acquired heavily furred coats, thick tails like Persians, and tufted ears, with altogether a northern and lynx-like appearance”. I am afraid he was taken in.

Below are some more articles on celebrity cats.