Two-faced kitten

Two-faced kitten  -  It’s oddly adorable!

Radio Patriot:  A rare, two-faced kitten was born in Amity, Ore., on Tuesday. Stephanie Durkee, the owner of both the female kitten and its mother, took the two-faced cat to a vet, who say she’s in good health. (She meows "loudly from both mouths," according to the Guardian.)

Durkee told Portland’s KGW-TV the kitten — named "Deucy" — has been rejected by her mother, so she’s been feeding her warmed kitten formula from a syringe.

"The kids … came in and said, ‘Mom there’s a kitty with two heads,’" Durkee told Portland’s NBC affiliate. "And I said, ‘I think you guys are just tired, you’re crazy, that doesn’t happen.’"

Durkee, who plans to keep Deucy, says the kitten was born at "6:11 a.m. on 6/11 under the ‘Gemini’ astrological sign." Durkee said she "can’t help but wonder at the ‘double’ coincidences surrounding Deucy’s birth."”

Two-faced cats — known as Janus cats, for the two-faced Roman god who also gave us the word "January" — are unusual but not unprecedented.

In 2012, a Port Charlotte, Fla., couple’s cat gave birth to a two-faced male kitten. (They named him Harvey Dent, after the two-face "Batman" character.)

Sadly Harvey died after two days.

Examiner:

Deucy is just the latest of animals born with two faces or heads, a condition known as polycephaly, or having more than one head. Specifically, having two heads is called bicephaly or dicephaly. It is a product of the same genetic malfunction that causes conjoining, or, as in some cases, a parasitic twin.

The condition can also be a product of diprosopus, or craniofacial duplication, where, as the latter name suggests, a genetic disorder causes the parts or all of an animal’s face to be duplicated on the head.

In April a pig was born in China with two two faces, complete with two snouts, the heads meeting at a single eye (giving the pig an odd three-eyed visage).

A two-headed blue shark fetus was discovered in a pregnant shark caught in the Indian Ocean earlier this year, and, in 2011, the first ever two-headed bull shark was pulled out of the Atlantic just off the Florida Keys.

But of all animals, snakes are the most common to produce polycephalic offspring.

It is unclear if there have been any astrological significance placed on the births or their timings, but it is not unusual for people to attach supernatural or superstitious portentous import to such occurrences.

But one has to wonder, if such births are in any way significant as "signs," why there aren’t hundreds of such two-faced animals born in Washington, D. C.

Frank and Louie, the two-faced cat who was born 13 years ago, like the two-faced kitten born in Oregon, has made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest recorded Janus or two-faced cat.

“Janus cats appear to be conjoined twins, but their condition is actually not the result of incomplete separation of two embryos in the womb. It’s triggered by a protein called sonic hedgehog homolog (SHH). Yes, there’s a protein called the sonic hedgehog protein,” reported BuzzFeed in February of 2013 in an article about 13-year-old two-faced cat Frank and Louie.

Like two-faced kitten Deucy, two-faced Frank and Louie was brought into a pet hospital when he was a just one day old. Today, two-faced Frank and Louie is 13 years old and therefore has a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest living two-faced cat. Maybe eventually two-faced kitten Deucy will join Frank and Louie in the Guinness Book of Records — the world is rooting for the little two-faced kitten.

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