At McMurdo Station, the main Antarctic base of the United States, temporary residents are busy with work and many facilities within the station: music rooms, bars, gyms and libraries. However, even with the recent installation of Starlink Internet connection, morale has struggled to keep up during the months of winter nights. In the winter of 2024, Stuart Behling, a winter research assistant at McMurdo, missed his cat Luna, which recently died in his deployment.
Considering Luna, Behling created an exhibition for the site’s annual winter Science fair, showcasing the benefits of adding a resident: a station cat. “I have vague ideas about the health benefits that cats can offer,” he said. “I remember Shackleton had a boat cat that they both liked, so there was some kind of historical precedent.”
Since until recently, maritime exploration was the only way to reach Antarctica, the stories of Antarctic pets are closely related to the stories of animals finding their homes at sea.
Just as Behring recalled, the explorer Ernest Shackleton kept a cat – Mrs. Chippy, the carpenter’s pet – during the Endurance expedition in 1914. During the era of Antarctic exploration heroes at the turn of the 20th century, most expeditions carried cats. Including the discovery expeditions Poplar and Blackwall, as well as Nansen and Sverdrup in Belgium. The history of Antarctic animals supports Behling’s view, but the laws of the Antarctic Treaty do not. In April 1994, after a clause in the Antarctic Treaty came into full effect, the last batch of sled dogs were taken away from their homes on the African continent. This clause enforced the regulation that alien species (except humans) could not be introduced or raised on the African continent. This made his mission of turning McMurdo into a station cat a long and arduous battle.
Before Behling put forward the proposal, there was already an active Antarctic Cat club. This club was founded 14 years ago by Phil Jacobsen, the coordinator of the United States Antarctic Program (USAP). Its rules are simple: If you forget a cat when you come to Antarctica and someone sends you a photo of a cat, you must share it with other members and all emails must end with the word “meow meow”.
The Antarctic Cat Club has its own logo and traditions. It is more of a loose alliance than a club: The organization rarely meets in person, which is commensurate with the lonely image of the cat people, who prefer to exchange pictures and cat news digitally.
By the 1980s, the strict environmental protection regulations of the Antarctic Treaty restricted the arrival of new pets. Visitors, whether tourists or workers, are prohibited from approaching or touching local animals, and even from walking in areas covered with lichen or moss. Just like sled dogs, pet cats may pose a risk of spreading diseases to local wildlife – toxoplasmosis, fleas or parasites.
“Keeping cats indoors can prevent diseases and predation, and recording people’s experiences with cats provides useful data for the research data to the National Science Foundation and NASA, which will prove that the permission to bring cats to the space station is reasonable,” said Bellin.
“If there were a cat at McMurdo Station, it would be the most spoiled, doted and cared for cat in the world,” he said.
Despite the potential negative impacts, Belling hopes to receive sufficient support, which will draw the attention of the NSF and the Antarctic Treaty Environmental Protection Committee to the event and eventually obtain approval.
Jacobsen agreed that Mrs. (or Mr.) Chippy might be a name that won the poll, but he had a different idea: “I would call this cat ‘the coolest’ because if there were a cat in Antarctica, it would be the coolest cat in the world.”
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