Feral Cat Tired of Appearing in Stranger’s Snapchat Stories

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 17:54:08 -0400

UMBC residents and miscellaneous wanderers throughout the Terrace apartments may come across what appears to be a black British Shorthair cat, commonly referred to as the “Erickson Kitty”. Shy and reclusive in nature, the cat mostly lives out its days napping in the woods, only coming out after dusk to prey on small rodents and Information Systems majors. Yet, despite having accomplished literally nothing in what we’re told is the fifth of its nine lives, we learned in an exclusive interview last weekend that the cat is entirely convinced that it is some kind of local celebrity. That’s right, during daylight hours, this cat is entirely incapable of escaping UMBC’s resident paparazzi. In fact, merely wandering into public space warrants the attention of countless amateur photographers attempting to capture the cat’s furry visage on their cellular cameras.

Ever since the pathogenic spread of image-sharing applications across college campuses started in the early 2010’s, campus squirrels and stray cats alike have been immortalized in fifteen-second snippets of poorly recorded video, and UMBC’s own Erickson Kitty is no exception. Of course, social media has been obsessed with cats since the ancient Egyptian era, where as we all read in the Bible, the internet was invented by King Ramses II for the purpose of honoring his cat and reblogging gif sets from The Avengers. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

-Keith Mias