Wenxin, a senior student and a blogger at Soochow University, included her kitten, Mosaic, in the acknowledgment of her graduate dissertation, saying "without him pacing around my computer and napping, I would have finished my paper more efficiently. But he calmed my anxiety and reassured me with his incongruous snores and fluffy, round head."

Wenxin's tutor promised to send the students a picture of calligraphy, saying "the young knight who fight the evil dragon will never become the dragon" to encourage the class to have courage and stay true to their original intention.

The day before taking graduation photos, the tutor messaged Wenxin with parting words for her cat, Mosaic, "the kitty will never turn into a vicious tiger".

Hetherington wrote that after giving the issue "an evening's thought," he decided the paper was so good that it required rapid publishing. Unwilling to go back and replace the plural voice in the document, he did the next best thing and just added a second author: his Siamese cat, Chester. Of course just listing "Chester" as a co-author probably wouldn't fly, so he invented the name F.D.C. Willard. The "F.D.C." stood for "Felix Domesticus, Chester." Willard had been the name of Chester's father.

After the paper was published, it didn't take long for Willard's true identity to come to light. The first time anyone outside of Hetherington's close colleagues learned of the cat scientist was when a visitor to the college came looking for the authors. Hetherington was away. Hetherington said, "Everyone laughed and soon the cat was out of the bag."

let the cat out of the bag: 泄露秘密