It is very rare to come across a cat who has two faces.
Janus cat is a term for a feline that has two faces and Dr. Ralph Tran met a tiny kitten who was born with a congenital defect called diprosopus and has two operational faces.
Three months ago, Tran got a flat tire in the middle of a cross-country move from New York City to San Diego. He was waiting for help and suddenly received a text message from his friend which says the latter’s cat had just given birth to a Janus kitten.
”We were stranded just half an hour away from where [my friend] lived,” Tran told PEOPLE.
Tran has worked at the ASPCA kitten nursery in Manhattan and he had several experiences of caring for neonatal kittens. The woman’s cat was not ready to keep the kitten because of the little one’s health condition.
Tran brought the kitten home and the little one was named Duo. ”I really didn’t know much about what condition she had,” he said. ”I assumed she was a typical Siamese twin, but she’s not.”
The kitten has one body and one head, but two faces, both of which are “fully operational,” due to a very rare congenital defect called diprosopus, or craniofacial duplication.
Tran said: ”Both her mouths meow separately, and both noses are fully functional.”
Tran fed Duo every few hours after reaching his California home. The kitten was “snotty and sneezy,” so he had to tube-fed her. Duo will have to go undergo eye enucleation surgery when she will grow up because one of Duo’s eyes isn’t viable.
”It was roughly around eight weeks of age, maybe nine weeks, when she started recognizing the other cats, toys, and me,” Tran said. ”Now she runs [over] when she sees me.”
”She gets into conflicts about which mouth gets to eat, because both mouths want to eat,”
”She plays with toys now, and she likes to follow the other cats. One cat will play with her; the other cats just look at her funny.”
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