TNB Night Owl – Dead Cat Flying

Bart Jansen and his "Orvillecopter", the flying cat. Photo by Dennis van Zuijlekom.

Everyone mourns when a beloved pet dies.  I’ve buried a few, and it’s always painful.  Some people go an extra step and have the body of their pet stuffed, so as to keep part of them around forever.  If you’re a Dutch artist, however, you go one better than that.  You make your stuffed cat fly.

Bart Jansen is an artist who loves flight, and he believed his cat shared his appreciation of the air.  The cat was named Orville, after Orville Wright.  When Orville died, Bart wanted to pay tribute to his cat.  He had an idea.  Unfortunately for him, he lacked the technical expertise to go beyond taxidermy and into a working drone.

Arjen Beltman is a helicopter and drone expert, and exactly the man Bart wanted to meet.  When Arjen was first approached with the idea, he thought it was crazy.

That’s probably because it is crazy.  But… it’s successful.  For those who desperately want their dead animal to fly, they can contact AJ+ On Helicopters.

There should be more to this story, but once you get to the notion of dead animals flying through the air on rotors you’re already looking at live reconstructions of Terry Gilliam animation for Monty Python.  You’re not far away from Neal Barrett Jr.’s mystery novel Dead Dog Blues where local animals and murder victims are found on lawns, taxidermied and wired for music and mechanized action.

Drone cats.  This is the world now.  At least nobody’s recreating “Battlebots” with them.

Yet.

Question of the night: what do you think your pet would tell you they wanted to do, if they could only talk?

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About AlienMotives 1991 Articles
Ex-Navy Reactor Operator turned bookseller. Father of an amazing girl and husband to an amazing wife. Tired of willful political blindness, but never tired of politics. Hopeful for the future.

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