Rice Thresher’s Yilian Jiang<\/a>\u00a0described her as “a picnic table loafer by day and a huntress by night.”<\/p>\nOver the years, Mama’s campus lore has only grown. According to the Thresher, her adventures have included “numerous disappearing acts,” an “ominous dead-rat-gifting phase,” and a brief romance with a gray tabby named\u00a0Yung Grayby.<\/p>\n
So when posts began circulating online that someone had taken her from campus, students quickly sounded the alarm.<\/p>\n
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“She means a lot to the Rice community,” one\u00a0Reddit commenter wrote, linking to the student newspaper’s profile on Mama\u2019s “reign” over Lovett College.<\/p>\n
According to the\u00a0Reddit thread, the visitor who picked her up noticed the cat was wearing a collar and tags, but didn’t realize she was a known campus cat. Some users defended the decision, noting the collar appeared to include an AirTag holder that was missing its tracker, making the situation look suspicious to anyone unfamiliar with Rice traditions.<\/p>\n
“If someone saw my cat outside, I’d want them to do exactly what OP did,” one commenter wrote.<\/p>\n
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Others argued the confusion was inevitable.<\/p>\n
“Not every outside cat is a stray,” another user responded, while several suggested adding an “I’m not lost” tag to Mama’s collar to prevent future misunderstandings.<\/p>\n
The reaction underscored just how attached Rice students have become to the once-feral cat, who first appeared around\u00a0Lovett College in late 2022.<\/p>\n
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Former Resident Associates Stephanie Parker and Matthew Wells originally planned to trap, neuter and release Mama after noticing her wandering campus.<\/p>\n
Then she surprised everyone by giving birth to six kittens.<\/p>\n
“We did end up naming them all different kinds of rice because they’re the Rice litter,” Parker told the Thresher in February. “There was Sushi Rice, Wild Rice and Basmati.”<\/p>\n
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Eventually, all of the kittens were adopted, but Mama stayed behind\u2014slowly transforming from a skittish stray into a full-fledged campus icon.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Rice University did not immediately respond to Chron’s request for comment by the time of publication.<\/p>\n
The incident quickly exploded into a broader debate online about outdoor cats, with\u00a0commenters arguing over everything from feral cat management to bird populations to the dangers of Houston traffic. But underneath the internet discourse was a surprisingly heartfelt reality: a lot of people genuinely care about this cat.<\/p>\n
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One\u00a0Reddit user joked that with Rice’s enrollment hovering near 10,000 students, “1\/10 of the student body just witnessed their cat get abducted by a random Redditor.”<\/p>\n
Fortunately for Rice students\u2014and likely for the accidental cat kidnapper’s inbox\u2014Mama Cat was safely returned to campus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Students at Rice University were stunned after beloved campus feline Mama Cat briefly disappeared in a viral “cat-napping”…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":298276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[103082,1836,1704,56,58,57],"class_list":["post-298275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-chroneducation","tag-chronnews","tag-chronstaff","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/298276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}