| Record | Holder | Number |
|---|---|---|
| Most mice caught | Towser, Glenturret Distillery, Scotland | 28,899 |
| Oldest cat ever recorded | Creme Puff, Austin, Texas | 38 years, 3 days |
| First cloned cat | CC ("CopyCat"), Texas A&M University | 2001 |
| Longest-serving honorary feline mayor | Stubbs, Talkeetna, Alaska | 20 years |
Towser, champion mouser
Towser was born in 1963 at the Glenturret Distillery in Crieff, Scotland, and spent the next 24 years protecting its barley from mice. When she retired permanently in 1987, Guinness World Records credited her with an estimated 28,899 mice: roughly three a day, every day, for her whole life.
Nobody filmed it. The figure was estimated from watching her daily catch. Towser now has a bronze statue at the distillery, and her record has never been broken, mostly because modern cats have discovered sofas.
Creme Puff, oldest cat ever
Creme Puff was born on 3 August 1967 and lived until 6 August 2005: 38 years and 3 days, the oldest cat on record. Her owner, Jake Perry, also owned a previous record-holder, which suggests either a secret or an extraordinary coincidence.
His reported regimen included breakfast of bacon, eggs, asparagus, broccoli and coffee with heavy cream, and an occasional eyedropper of red wine. Vets are unanimous that you should not do this. We counted the candles in our illustration and gave up at 38.
CC, the first cloned cat
In 2001 researchers at Texas A&M University produced CC, short for "CopyCat," the first cloned pet. She was cloned from a calico named Rainbow. There was just one problem: CC was a grey tabby-and-white, and looked nothing like Rainbow at all.
It turns out a calico's patches are decided partly by chance as the kitten develops, so even an exact genetic copy can come out with a completely different coat. Science had successfully cloned a cat and simultaneously proved that you cannot clone a cat. CC went on to live a long, happy, extremely normal life and had kittens of her own.
