High tech kitten hunting
I promise I’ve got some interesting stuff coming… but two of the main things I’ve been working on are under embargo…. womp womp… in the meantime I will tell you one of the weird things I did because I have a bunch of review items laying around.
My house has become infested with kittens. Meet Salvador and Dolly, little kittens born at a vet’s office from a trapped severely malnourished broken mama cat (she and her four kitties were fine and healthy by the time these two catstards left the property.)
At the moment we’re keeping them out of the kids rooms while they’re sleeping both because they would wake the kiddos, and because if they got trapped under a landslide of Manufactured Americans, we might not know for a while. Also prevents the kids from getting angry when a cat treats the world as a kitty scratcher (which they have and refuse to use.)
Last night Dolly broke into my sleeping 8 year old’s room and hid in a room full of plush. I needed her out of that room so I could close the door better and keep little brother out but it was dark, and Dolly was reenacting the scene of E.T. hiding in the closet.
I remembered then that I had the ultimate cat tracking tool. The InfiRay P2 Pro thermal camera. It’s been sitting in my living room because I keep using it so much in the upcoming embargoed reviews. I’ll note, probably any thermal camera would have been fine for this job, my FLIR One would have soared. This was just the closest I had.
I snapped the camera on, the app launched, and I crept into my kiddo’s darkened room, listening for kittens while hearing my sleeping child breathing. I swept the bed and saw what I believe was thermal evidence of kitty paws but I’m not sure. There were no heat signatures on the lower bed and none other than my kid up top.
I followed the heat trail to the wall and noticed that I was getting some reflection from the gloss or some such. The power supply for a Nest Hub playing her bedtime music lit up the heat image and I noticed I could see some heat coming off the back of a shelf. I looked at the shelf, a Target special with cardboard backing, and figured I was probably seeing a thermal reflection of me as I did not see anything in that area.
Still, I watched and noticed the heat was moving ever so slowly to the left even if I kept the camera still. Then it started slowly moving up behind the shelf.
Suddenly kitten claws as the beast jumped from the shadows in an attempted surprise attack, and found herself grabbed mid-air because I was expecting it. I walked out with a phone in one hand and a mighty beast attacking the back of my other hand. Pocketed the phone for a second (still had the thermal cam attached,) closed the door properly and deposited the kitten next to her brother, whom she promptly attacked. The fight was epic, lasting until one of them decided to stop and walk away for some water.
Unfortunately I was not filming, but here’s an infrared photo of the two kittens I took shortly after the event.
If you ever want to feel like The Predator, get yourself an infrared camera and hunt kittens in an 8 year old’s stuffed animal sanctuary.
