It is really difficult to determine whether a cat is really that old except to trust their owners to tell the truth. When we wrote ‘Oldest’ cat of the Netherlands dies, we put quotes around ‘oldest’ because it really is hearsay. And ‘our’ cat story had a 29-year-old cat. And we wrote about it because on the same day, my cat died at age 21.

Of course, when you’re a tabloid and the news is dominated by non-Dutch things and rainy weather, a cute cat story in a pinch will do (our story comes from the same paper). The article says the oldest living cat is 21, which means my cat and the two above made the record. It all sounds too easy to me.

The thing I want to heckle is the uneducated stupid attempt to calculate the cat’s age in human years, which is preposterous at best.

A 3-month-old cat is a kitten, a two-year-old cat is an adult, a 10-year-old cat is a senior. The development of a cat is not comparable to that of a human. If you want to try and come close to the animal’s human age with an adult cat, add four years to their cat age and multiply the outcome by four. I grabbed this calculation in a Dutch book called ‘Encyclopedie van misvattingen’ (The Encyclopedia of Misconceptions), which I highly recommend if you spread repeated nonsense about cuckcoo clocks being made in Switerzland (instead of Germany) and Inuits have, I dunno, 53 words for snow.

That crap of multiplying animals’ years by seven is for stupid journalists who repeat things like parrots do.

(The cat in the pic is our deceased Moonster.)

(Link: ad.nl)