Lincoln’s love of felines, however, was legendary. “There were probably cats on the grounds beforehand because that’s how people took care of rodent problems in food storage areas in the mid-19th century,” says Hager, who also authored All-American Dogs, a history of White House canines. Though Abraham Lincoln was the first president to keep cats as pets-Secretary of State William Seward gifted him two kittens he named Tabby and Dixie-Andrew Hager, historian-in-residence at the Presidential Pet Museum, believes that the first cats to pad through the White House were likely nameless. The Bidens announced Willow's arrival on January 28. (Willow left the Telesz farm in February of 2021, but as Jill told the New York Times, she lived with a foster family while the Bidens tackled Major the German Shepherd’s biting issues.) Willow Biden (née Telesz) moved into the White House last week, and Joe Biden became the 11th president to share 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with a cat. “ was speaking and she stopped acknowledged the cat, but the cat continued to walk down and jumped and sat on a chair in the front row, right in front of her,” Telesz said. The evening before the 2020 election, at a campaign rally on Rick Telesz’s Pennsylvania farm, a grey and white short-haired tabby leapt onto the stage and “pranced in front of ,” Telesz told the Erie News-Times. In Christopher Smart’s “ Jubilate Agno”-literature’s most famous paean to a cat written by a man confined in an asylum with said cat-the poet wrote of his feline friend that “every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.” (Cats are boon companions in periods of extended isolation, as nearly 32 million households across the United States discovered in the pandemic era.) When Jill Biden told a reporter in September 2020 that she’d “ love to get a cat” if her husband won the presidential election, Americans related the soon-to-be first lady consigned Biden spokespeople to more than a year of cat enthusiasts’ laser-pointer focus.
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