Today would be Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday. His love for cats was legendary—his home in Key West is now a museum and still hosts a large colony of around 60 cats, famous for their extra toes, known as Hemingway’s polydactyl cats.
Cats typically have five toes on their front paws and four on their back, but about half of the cats living on the museum grounds have extra toes. All of them are descendants of a cat named Snow White, given to Hemingway by a ship’s captain in the 1930s. Each cat carries the gene for polydactyly in its DNA, though the trait is only visibly expressed in about half of them. Key West is a small island, so many of the cats are likely closely related, but polydactyly is not the result of inbreeding. This trait appears easily in many species, including humans (for example, the Hungarian poet Endre Ady was born with six fingers).
Hemingway once said about cats: “A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”