Hermitage Museum Cats
So the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has cats to protect the collection--I found the link to the Wikipedia article by accident, and then found the website where you (if you live in Russia, and preferably close to the Hermitage) can adopt one of their cats. Here is the website . Since I can only read Russian if I sit and laboriously translate over letter by letter from the cyrillic, I opted for Google to (hilariously) translate the little article there: -------- Meow for special purposes They are an invisible guard guarding our cultural heritage. Supernumerary employees of the State Hermitage, vigilantly watching the fact that the Winter Palace is not occupied by hordes of rats. According to legend, the first cat here brought himself Peter I, and later Elizaveta Petrovna even issued a "decree of expulsion to the court of cats" from Kazan. The status of the "guards of art galleries" was granted to them by Catherine II. The years of the blockade ...