believers
Not endorsements. Nobody here agreed to anything. These are cats whose whole biography turns on one thing landing the way it landed, and every one of them is on the record except the last, which is the point of the last one.
Gotokuji, early 1600s
Raised a paw at a passing lord, who came in out of the rain and lived to endow the temple. Everything on this site descends from one cat sitting still at the right moment.
Legend, not record. The temple is real and the figurines are real.
St Augustine's, London, 1940
Carried her kitten down to the basement three days before the church took a bomb on 9 September 1940. The building burned. Both cats walked out.
Awarded a special silver medal by the PDSA.
HMS Amethyst, Yangtze, 1949
Wounded by shellfire, went back to killing the rats that were eating the ship's stores while it sat trapped in the river for ten weeks.
The only cat ever to receive the Dickin Medal.
Algeria, 18 October 1963
One of fourteen cats trained by the French space programme. She flew to 152 km, weighed nothing for five minutes, and came back. The other thirteen stayed on the ground.
The only cat to have gone to space. Statue at ISU Strasbourg, 2019.
Britain, 1988
The last of the fifteen cats in Ben Rea's house, and the one still alive when the will was read. Seven million pounds went to him.
Guinness World Records, wealthiest cat.
Rome, 2011
A stray who walked into the right flat. Maria Assunta left him ten million euros, and Italian law being what it is, a trustee had to be found to hold it for him.
Reported worldwide, November 2011.
North Atlantic, 1941
Said to have been pulled off the water after the Bismarck went down, then off the Cossack, then off the Ark Royal, all in one year.
Disputed. No wartime record puts him on any of the three, and we are keeping him here anyway, clearly labelled, because a story that good is exactly what a gambler brings home.
Seven cats, and the record only keeps the ones it worked out for. The strays who walked into the wrong flat are not written down anywhere, and there were a great many more of them.