Pet owners rejoice! Never wonder where your cat (or similar creature) is again, thanks to this cat-elongation technology.

Background:

Some types of pets (notably, cats) are fond of both 1) hiding and 2) napping. 

The Issue:

This can make it difficult for the pet owner to know if their treasured beast is inside the house. Did it come back in the house from the patio? Or is it sleeping in a tree outside? Maybe it’s under the sofa. Who knows!

In an ideal world, it would be easier to determine the whereabouts of your cat.

Proposal:

We can take advantage of the fact that many animals have variable-length bodies and tails to selectively engineer an extra-long cat variant.

There’s already precedent for this in dogs (the dachshund, or “sausage dog” comes to mind) and in snakes (these seem to be available in really excessive lengths).

Thus, we know that (biologically speaking) this is an achievable goal.

It would probably be easiest to just figure out which genes control cat tail length, and set them to tail_length=100x (this is definitely how genetics works), which would result in the cat in Figure 1.

Fig. 1: Left: a regular “legacy” cat (left) can easily get lost: did you remember to let the cat inside? Is the cat hiding in the dryer? Who knows. But the new “snake cat” (right) is easy to locate anywhere.

One objection might be: is it ethical to create a horrifying nightmare creature to solve a minor inconvenience?

Well, to answer that question, let us consult https://www.google.com/search?q=unhealthy+dog+breeds . (You might still decide that the answer is “no,” but as you can see, there is at least a precedent. Plus, most of those weirdly-messed-up dogs don’t even have a functional purpose—they were made into twisted mockeries purely for aesthetic purposes.)

Conclusion:

Keep an eye out in the future for the “snake cat”: it’s guaranteed to be the preferred cat form factor once either cat-genetic-engineering or cat-extrusion technology is perfected.

PROS: You’ll no longer need to wonder “hmm, did the cat run out the door?” thanks to this new cat technology, or “catnology” as it is called in the industry.

CONS: This cat might occupy the same ecological niche as the snake, causing the two species to battle to the death for supremacy.