St. Petersburg to unveil monument to a cat

Northwest correspondent Anna Novak/ -- On Thursday, St. Petersburg will witness the unveiling of a monument to a cat in the yard of the State University. The monument symbolises a man's gratitude to the cat as a laboratory animal. "The humankind ought to be endlessly grateful to the cat, an animal that presented the world with a great many paramount discoveries in the sphere of physiology" - engraved on the pedestal, these words illustrate the idea of the sculptural composition. The Cat Monument will rank beside France's monument to a frog and Russia's monument to a dog - two other animals that sacrificed themselves to science.

The idea of the monument belongs to Alexander Nozdrachev of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Authored by St. Petersburg's sculptor Anatoly Dyoma and architect Sergei Mikhailov, the monument is a meter-tall figure of a cat made of gabbro-diabase resting on a two-meter-high granite pedestal. The pedestal is covered with inscriptions with cat-related remarks by Konrad Lorenz, Bernard Shaw and other scientific and cultural figures.