All of the cats at Hemingway’s house are born there. Tour guide Jessica Pita told radio host Arden Moore that employees vote on the names. Over the years, cats have been named after everyone from Zane Grey and Marilyn Monroe to president “Hairy” Truman, Fats Waller, Kermit “Shine” Forbes, Truman Capote, Bugsy Siegel, Billie Holiday, and Cary Grant. The Hemingway House and Museum website notes that Hemingway named all of his cats after famous people, a tradition the curators continue today. A 1985 article in the Fort Lauderdale News quoted a guest relating that a guide had told him, “Ernest met this sea captain at Sloppy Joe’s Bar one night and the two of them got drunk and then the sea captain gave Ernest a multi-toed cat off his ship.” 4. Later, a neighbor wrote that “his family had several polydactyl cats, possibly some of the forebears of the cats in Key West now known as the famed ‘Hemingway’s Cats.’”īut according to The Hemingway House and Museum website, Hemingway received a six-toed white feline from the captain of a ship, and some of the cats at Hemingway’s Key West house are descended from that cat. In her book Hemingway’s Cats, Carlene Fredericka Brennen writes that Hemingway’s son, Patrick, said in an interview that his father never had a cat in Key West.
Hemingway’s first polydactyl cat was named Snow White (or Snowball)-or so the story goes. And yes, it was named after the video-game character.”Īrney writes that two German scientists coined the name after noticing fruit fly maggots with a gene expression were “unusually stumpy and covered in bristles,” so they “picked a name for the gene to reflect what these unfortunate creatures looked like: hedgehogs.” In the ‘90s, three types of the hedgehog gene were found in mammals the third was named by Bob Riddle, who dubbed it Sonic after the hedgehog in his daughter’s comic book. The reason the cats have extra toes, according to Kat Arney in the book Herding Hemingway’s Cats, is “a mistake in the control switch for a gene called Sonic Hedgehog. The gene that gives Hemingway's cats extra toes is named after a video game character. Sometimes it looks as if they are wearing mittens because they appear to have a thumb on their paw.” 2. Most cats have extra toes on their front feet and sometimes on their back feet as well.
Cats normally have five toes in the front and four in the back according to the Hemingway House and Museum website, “about half of the cats at the museum have the physical polydactyl trait but they all carry the polydactyl gene in their DNA, which means that the ones that have four and five toes can still mother or father six-toed kittens. About half of Hemingway's cats are polydactyl.
(“Cats in every room so don’t go if you are allergic to them,” one reviewer on TripAdvisor notes.) Here are a few things you should know about them. The grounds of 907 Whitehead Street, now the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, house between 40 and 50 felines. When the eminently quotable Ernest Hemingway wrote that “one cat just leads to another,” the lifelong ailurophile was talking about the veritable clowder of cats at Finca, his home in Cuba-but he could easily have been referencing his home in Key West, Florida.
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