If any animal ever seemed to be engineered to prompt social media posts about her with the caption “Me” underneath, it surely is “Mira” or “Miracle” (sources vary, and in either case, that’s not her Christian name, but one that was given to her after the ordeal this post concerns). For you see, Mira is feral cat who supposedly roamed the streets of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for a week with a jar of mayonnaise on her head.
“I saw this cat coming to eat and it had a mayo jar and I was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ and it ran away. The next day, I was literally able to get the mayo jar and try to get its head popped out and it ran away again,” is what concerned cat lover Linda Ruggere told 16 WNEP.
I do not mean to disparage Ruggere’s compassion or mock her attempt to help a feline condiment fiend, but how do you let a cat with a jar on its head get away once the jar is in your hand? Seems like as a human without a jar on your head, you have a huge advantage over the cat whose entire world has been supplanted with glass this close to her face. Shoulda busted out the lid gripper, I guess.
I have more questions and I hope you do, too: How the hell does a cat survive with her head in a jar for a week? How does she breathe? How does she eat? How does she drink? Another news story about this animal answers one of these questions with an account that is as unsatisfying as most things in life. The Standard-Speaker reports that Mira “survived with the jar on her head by drinking rainwater that accumulated inside.”
But how did that work? Unless Mira took to standing on her head (at that time, a mayonnaise jar) and consciously collecting rain like some castaway acrobat on a dessert island, how on earth was she accumulating rainwater? I want a sketch of the physics here. I’ve been fooled by cats in jars on the internet before, I don’t want to go through that again.
After Mira’s supposed week under glass, a rescue group named Whisker’s World trapped her and brought her to veterinarian Dr. Inayat Kathio. Dr. Kathio removed the jar, treated Mira’s chin wounds, hydrated her, and spayed her. The procedure would normally cost $2,500 but Dr. Kathio did it for free since Whisker’s World couldn’t afford that.
Mira was released back into the neighborhood where she came from. She returns to her world knowing she can stick her head wherever she damn well pleases and rely on humans to pick up the pieces. In a way, she is now uber-cat.