Our students and employees keep seeing two gray tabby tomcats on campus, which seem to have divided up the territory of the Hof universities: One particularly likes to seek out petting and sleeping places at the Bavarian Civil Service University (HföD) and the other at Hof University of Applied Sciences. You can tell them apart by their paws: “Gizmo,” the tomcat of one of the employees, has white paws and a two-tone nose. “Happy,” a family cat from the neighborhood, has dark paws.
Happy ran to a family in the neighborhood just last year – and since he joined the family just on a double birthday, he was christened “Happy.” He is two years old and a quiet cat who has already learned how sliding doors open and where the most interesting people are – either because they have catering with them, or because they like to cuddle him!
Gizmo has been at Hof for almost a decade. He likes to sleep in the office wing of the College of Administration and get petting sessions in the offices. Corona hit him hard, too, and he’s glad to have more company in the hallways now.
By the way, the history of campus cats goes back to 1996, when one of the first resident cats discovered the campus. So there was the “three-legged Pino”, who regularly went to the refectory to eat and who was carried around a lot by the students and taken to lectures. The cat Trixi found out very quickly how to stand in line at the bratwurst grill on Fridays. And today, in addition to Happy and Gizmo, we have Gizmo’s sister Polly, who, unlike Gizmo himself, has a solid-colored nose and is much shyer.
We hope we can now tell the cats apart and name them correctly, and thank the cats’ families for their input!
