A WINGED MOGGIE FROM MORAVIA
It’s been quite a while since I last reported a winged cat, so I’m delighted to learn of the following new example from Moravia in the Czech Republic, courtesy of Czech friend and correspondent Miroslav ‘Mirek’ Fišmeister. Publicised during May 2017 by the Czech media, the cat in question is known as Mike, and has been looked after for the past year by the Semrad family from Vržanov, a small Moravian village near the city of Jihlava on the border of Moravia and Bohemia. Until recently, Mike had sported a very dense coat that outwardly rendered him just like any other such cat, but when he shed it the hitherto unsuspected presence of a pair of long furry ‘wings’ was revealed, sprouting from his flanks just in front of his haunches. Moreover, whereas some such appendages are in reality nothing more than clumps of unshed matted fur, in Mike’s case his wings are apparently sensitive to touch, contain cartilage, and are still growing, according to various bemused scientists who have examined him. Consequently, it has been suggested that perhaps they represent externally visible indications of an otherwise concealed, internal twin, one that did not develop and separate normally during embryogeny.
Although many cases of so-called parasitic twins are indeed known from a wide range of animals, including humans, it is far more likely that the correct explanation for Mike’s wings is that they are the result of feline cutaneous asthenia (FCA), a rare genetic condition that causes the skin of those individuals exhibiting it to be abnormally stretchable, readily yielding wing-like extensions of skin if the cat rubs its back or flanks against an object or attempts to groom its body with its paws. Back in the early 1990s, I was the first person to propose FCA as the explanation for classic winged cat cases, and this has since been confirmed by veterinary experts with a number of such specimens, as I have documented in various of my writings, including several
FT articles on winged cats. An excellent video of Mike displaying his wings is contained in the online Czech news report cited by me here. http://tn.nova.cz/clanek/kocour-ma-nazadech-podivne-vyrustky-jsou-to-kridlavideo.html 25 May 2017.