When UW chemical engineering assistant professor Whitney Loo and her partner adopted their first cat, Potato, in 2020, she was the eighth kitten they’d applied for during a time when rescue animals were flying out of shelters. Four years later, they spotted a kitten named Augustus on the Madison Cat Project’s website while on a trip to Italy, and the little guy waited patiently for 10 days for a jet-lagged Loo and her partner to bring him home.
It only took 72 hours for Potato and Augustus Caesar la Salad (Salad, for short) to step into their respective roles of big sister and baby brother. Potato, the queen of her household, wasn’t sure what to make of the restless, rascally Salad but has since warmed to the idea of a kitten of her very own. Salad loved Potato from the start and set to work on gaining her approval through his signature screeches and rough-and-tumble play. Oh, brother.
“We can already see that she gets very tired of him and needs to take breaks, but she’s already so much more engaged and happy,” Loo says.
How did Potato get her name?
Potato was the name of the first kitten we applied for that we did not get, and then eight kittens later, we said whatever kitten we end up getting, we’re just going to have to name it Potato. [An homage] to the journey of trying to get a cat during a pandemic when everybody wanted to adopt kittens.
What was her initial reaction to her baby brother?
Anger. Confusion. What is this? Why does it smell like this? Why is it screaming all of the time? He’s a kitten with big kitten energy, so we would let them try to meet each other, and he would just run up and try to tackle her immediately. She’s like, “I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are.” … It took Potato about two days to become used to the idea of another creature in the house, and then I think she was like, “Oh, you got me a friend. I’m still the princess of the house. Thank you for the present.”
How has the new kitten taken to all of you?
It’s been a very different experience than when we got Potato. When we first got Potato, she was very much attached to us, wanted attention, wanted to play with us. And Salad Boy — we call him Salad Boy, our little Salad Boy, or Leafy Green — loves us and has a very, very cute purr, but he really wants to play with Potato, and he really wants Potato to like him. He’s like, “Well, you guys, I don’t know what you are, but my whole world revolves around this cat.”
It's been a different experience as pet owners to watch that because many cat owners say that their cat thinks that they’re a human. Not Potato; Potato thinks that we’re all cats. She thinks that we’re all cats, and now we have a new cat for her to play with, but Salad very much is like, “Potato is a cat, and you guys are just warm, large creatures.”
It’s been an interesting experience adopting a new kitten who very much is enamored by our cat and not enamored by us. He’ll still play with us, he’s still cuddly with us, but what he really wants is just to play with Potato, constantly.
Do you own Potato, or does Potato own you?
She owns us, 100 percent. Definitely queen bee of the household.
You mentioned that she likes the snow. Does she like playing in it? Is she an outdoor cat?
She’s not. They are both indoor cats. Potato, we love her, but she’s very dumb. In our old house, before we relocated to Madison, she fell out a third-story window. Because she’s a cat, she was perfectly fine, no permanent damage, but we don’t trust her.
What else does she like?
She loves to watch the birds. She has a nice little sill that sits in the window and there’s a bird feeder right out on the other side of the window, and she doesn’t understand why the birds don’t hang out with her more. They’ll come and start eating out of the bird feeder and she’s immediately smashing into the window and scares all the birds away, and then she gets very depressed. And we’re like, “You’re literally smashing your face into the window, and you think these birds are just going to come and play with you?” But she doesn’t understand that she’s a predator and they’re prey, because she’s an indoor cat.
Sounds like her cat skills could use some honing.
We’re hoping that introducing her to a new cat will help give her some more cat skills, because she doesn’t have a lot of those right now. She’s book smart from all of the lectures that she sat in on or listened to me give and all of the meetings that we had when everything moved online, but she’s not street smart, so we’re hoping that Salad will teach her some street smarts and help her out a little bit.
Have you been able to get a sense of little Salad’s personality yet?
I think he’s still very much figuring out who he is. He’s definitely a boy cat, loves to play. He’s a very chatty boy. He’ll just be sleeping, and he’ll just start screaming, and then he wakes up and he’s like, “Who made that noise?” And we’re like, “You did, Salad.” He has a very mechanical purr that sounds like a Geiger counter, and so every time we pick him up and he starts purring, we’re like, “Oh no, I’m contaminated. I’m radioactive.”
We think he's going to be a pretty big cat because he’s only about three pounds right now, but his paws are about the same size as Potato’s, and Potato’s about 10 pounds and a full-grown cat. So we think he’s going to be a pretty big boy that loves to play. He is a pretty lovable cat though. He likes to cuddle when he’s calm, and we think Potato’s just going to imprint on him, and he’s just going to follow what big sister does, and they’ll probably end up being fairly similar.
Is Potato cuddly?
She’s very cuddly. She’s probably the most cuddly cat I’ve ever met. She needs physical contact or to make eye contact with one of her “big cats,” which are the humans of the house. But she loves to be involved, and she gets upset when we don’t give her enough attention.
What does that look like?
She normally will just come and sit on you.
Cats have their ways of getting their way.
You don’t control cats is what I’ve learned. You can enforce good behaviors so that the cat kind of does what you want it to do, like small things. Our cats won’t scream for food because when Potato was little, every time she would scream for food, we just wouldn’t feed her. We’d wait until she stopped screaming. She will, however, lie on top of you, and very, very gently put her paw on your cheek when you’re asleep to be like, “Dear creature, would you maybe possibly think about feeding me right now?”
So you can impart behaviors that are small like that, but the cat’s going to do whatever the cat’s going to do, and you just have to go with it, because if the cat was truly trainable, it would just be a dog.
Are there any surefire ways into Potato’s heart?
She’s not food motivated at all, so really, you can’t trick her into doing anything. I would say she loves just to hang out and be involved. When you hold her, you have to hold her bottom feet, which is hard when you’re working and then you only have one hand left because you have to support her bottom feet with the other.
What about Salad?
Salad likes to play. His favorite thing to eat are toes, but he only has his baby teeth in so you’re just like, “Are you even there?” He has very little control over his body. He really likes fighting himself in the mirror and has not figured out that it’s himself yet, but every time, he’s like, “A worthy opponent,” and then runs into the mirror. And Potato’s also staring at him like, “Well, at least I figured that one out.”
And he’s a chatty boy, so he wakes up in the morning or wakes up from a nap or finishes eating and he’s just making noises to let you know like, “Wow, that was a great meal. That was a great nap. How are you today? Good morning. Hello?” He’s a very chatty boy.
He also likes to gather toys and then parade them around the house and put them in a pile somewhere, and then he gets mad when you don’t play with him. But that is typical kitten stuff. He loves to play with his sister and loves to just scream like he’s having a good time, like, “What a great day.”
Are either of the cats mischievous?
Salad is not yet mischievous, and I would say Potato is not very mischievous either. Sometimes when she wants attention, she’ll do things that she knows that we don’t like her to do, just so that we get up and play with her a little bit more or engage with her a little bit more, but I wouldn’t really call her mischievous.
When she drinks water, she really has to confirm that it’s water, and so she has to splash it a lot to make sure that it is, in fact, wet. So now, she’s only allowed to drink water from water cups that are inside the bathtub, because it was just getting the floor and the tables all wet. She gets in the bathtub every morning and splashes water everywhere and then drinks a little bit of it, and then we refill it, and it happens again and again.
Does she like water? Would she tolerate a bath?
No, she doesn’t like water. We gave her a bath once when she was a kitten because she wasn’t preening herself very well. It was a very traumatic experience for her, and now, she’s [especially good] about preening, so now she’s like the softest, cleanest cat, because she will never want to get a bath again.
How does having pets around make life better?
I think what I love about animals and pets is, first, that unconditional love. But I think that unconditional love is not completely unconditional because you have to be a good pet owner and respect them and love them, and then they will respect and love you back. And there’s something so nice about coming home at the end of the day to a little creature that’s excited to see you and excited to hang out with you and spend your evening with you, and really relies and depends on you. It’s also just something to love. It feels really good when you love your partner or your pet or your kids, and so getting to have another person or another creature to love is awesome.
We got the second cat because we felt like we weren’t being the best parents to Potato. Now that we’re traveling a lot with work and vacations and not working from home, she was getting a little sad. She was getting a little lonely. We said, “We should get you another cat so that you have something else to love and respect and hang out with during the day,” so we got the Salad really for Potato, so that we could love her even more, and she could love something else when we weren’t there.
If your cats were in college, what might they major in?
Potato would probably be in some major that’s a little bit more concrete and hands-on than something abstract, so I could see her working in the dairy school or forestry or botany where she’s in the lab doing things. … The way that she plays with the water, she needs to be in the lab, touching and feeling things.
Now, Salad, at this stage, he’s so young. I think he could be a sports star with his athleticism. The way he sizes himself up in the mirror, I think he’d be really good out in Camp Randall. … He could be a communications major because he’s really chatty.
