Oscar the Bionic Cat

Oscar was an ordinary black cat from Jersey in the Channel Islands until a single accident made him a landmark in veterinary medicine. In October 2009, while dozing in a field, he was struck by a combine harvester and lost both of his hind paws. Faced with injuries that would once have meant euthanasia, his owners were referred to Noel Fitzpatrick, a pioneering veterinary surgeon, who proposed something that had never been done for a cat: a pair of prosthetic hind legs fused directly to the bone. The technique, called intraosseous transcutaneous amputation prosthetics, was modelled on the way a deer's antler skin seals around bone, allowing metal pegs to be implanted into Oscar's leg bones with the skin growing tightly around them to keep out infection. Custom artificial feet were then attached. After surgery and a long rehabilitation, Oscar learned to walk, run and jump on his bionic legs, becoming the first cat in the world to be given two such implanted prosthetic limbs. His case was documented by the media and in veterinary literature, and it helped advance a field of work with implications for human amputees as well as animals. Oscar's story endures as a striking example of how far veterinary medicine has come — and of what a determined owner and an inventive surgeon can do for a single cat.