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By David Emery, About.com Guide to Urban Legends since 1997

Vet Confirms One-Eyed Kitten Was Real

Tuesday February 7, 2006
Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher reports that a veterinarian examined the frozen corpse of Cy, the one-eyed kitten last month and determined it was not a hoax. A photo of the infant feline, which died of birth defects the day after it was born, was greeted with skepticism when first published by the Associated Press. An AP photographer was duly dispatched on a fact-checking mission to Redmond, Oregon, where he took additional pictures and delivered the corpse to local veterinarian Karen Laidley for authentication. She confirmed in a signed letter that the body had not been tampered with and was "in its natural newborn state." Full story.

Comments

December 23, 2006 at 7:01 pm
(1) debi lovell says:

i have worked at a vet for years and seen this condition..the picture is a fake tho. first kittens do not open thier eyes in 2 days, second the eye in the picture is not even a cat’s eye i.e. with a distinctive cats iris..it looks like someone has put a horses eyeball in a socket. third when the condition presents it is not HUGE ( the eye is way out of proportion) it is usually in the correct place or a lttle over and there is a dent or an actual eye socket where the other eye should be.
so yes this is a real condition..but this pix is fake.
if a REAL vet had looked at this he would have instucted her NOT to keep it in her freezer as freezing breaks down cells. he would have put in in a jar of formaldahyde to preserve it.
deformed annimals present daily in a vet. especially when the litter is large. the runt usually gets all the bad genes..or problems.
your picture is a fake

April 5, 2007 at 6:35 pm
(2) Abby says:

I think Cy is beautiful. And for those who are throwing out the “Kittens aren’t born with their eyes open” card obviously haven’t read up on Cy. Cy was born without an eyelid.

June 11, 2007 at 10:37 am
(3) Laura says:

Debi, you are correct in that kittens eyes normally are sealed the first few days after birth, but what is “normal” about Cy? My son raised gerbils for a while until one was born with its’ large eyes wide open and the mother gerbil ate it, which is normal for a gerbil born defective. I promptly demanded that the gerbils go. I still remember the screams of the baby gerbil as the mother “disposed” of it. Also, the distinctive cat iris does not show when a kitten is very young.

July 18, 2007 at 12:02 pm
(4) Dana says:

I have a kitten about 30 minutes old. It has its eyes open….

September 8, 2007 at 11:53 am
(5) marie says:

my cat had a litter of kittens 2 days ago and yes she had a deformed kitten this baby as born with one eye and no nose or mouth it simply could,t survive

September 16, 2007 at 1:34 pm
(6) Tina says:

I had a Siamese kitten born yesterday that had 2 big red eyes open just like the Cyclops kitten. It had a membrane over them. It also had its intestines outside of his body. It was really shocking and almost like out of a horror movie.. In the end though it is a birth defect.. abnormatlity..etc.. It was alive.for almost a day. Its very sad to see .. my stomach is still churning. She did have two other kittens that seem normal so far.. One is quite big and healthy looking but the other is about half the size..so I am keeping my fingers crossed with that one.. I don’t know what happened with this litter but I definetley will not be breeding her again.

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