Ariel

When people first see Frank and Louie they “paws” and do a double take.



He is one cat with two faces — and two names. The soft, fluffy feline belongs to a Millbury woman named Marty, who has asked us not to use her last name because she fears a crush of publicity, like that which surrounded the recent birth of a kitten with two faces in Ohio.



Cats with two faces are extremely rare, veterinarians say. Most die within days of being born.



“All of the other cases I looked up on the Web were autopsy cases,” Marty said. Her cat is an exception. He is six years old.



The cat has two mouths, two noses and two working eyes. A third eye in the middle is not functional. Marty named her cat “Frank and Louie” so each face would have a name. Only one mouth, the one on the cat’s right side — or Frank’s side — is connected to an esophagus, so Frank gets all the food.



If you look at the cat from the left he looks normal. Look at him from the right and he does, too. It is only when you look straight on that you can see what a special kitty he is.



It is not a look that appeals to everyone at first.



“Some people say ‘That’s horrible. It’s just not right,’ ” Marty said. Frank and Louie quickly wins them over with his gentle, friendly personality. He rubs up against your legs and sometimes licks your hand.



“Those same people are the ones who end up going ‘Oh, I love him. He’s so sweet,’ ” said Marty, who described the cat as having a temperament more like that of a dog than a cat.



Marty has owned the cat since he was a day old. She used to work at a local veterinary hospital as a nurse in the operating room. One day someone brought the deformed kitten in to be euthanized.



“I said, ‘Don’t do it,’ ” Marty said. “ ‘I want to take him home.’ ”



The tiny kitten, no bigger than a hamster, had to be fed every two hours, so Marty brought him with her everywhere she went.



“He grew up in a shoebox,” she said. “He went to work with me every day for the first three months of his life.”



Marty fed him with special kitten formula that you can buy in little cans.



“I put a tube down into his stomach and injected the formula with a syringe,” she said. “That’s another reason I think he lived, because the anatomy is usually so messed up in these cases, and this way he didn’t choke or anything.”



On the advice of veterinarians, she tried not to get her hopes up too high.



“They told me ‘Don’t get too attached. You can try, but they die in a few days,’ ” she said. But slowly, day by day, Frank and Louie got stronger instead of weaker.



“He was gaining weight, and I started to get excited,” she said. “I thought, maybe he’s going to live.”



He did better than that. He thrived.



Frank and Louie is as easygoing as he is outgoing, perhaps because in his first month of life he was around so many different people — in work environments, the homes of relatives and friends, everywhere Marty went.



He regularly frolics with Marty’s other cats, and her 65 pound dog, who developed a bond with Frank and Louie from the moment Marty brought the kitten home. Frank and Louie also likes to go for rides in the car and walks in the park.



“He walks on a leash,” Marty said. “I bring him to PETCO and I could just leave him in the carriage and I can walk him up and down the aisles and he just lays there. But he does cause quite a commotion when I take him there.”



Meanwhile, the Ohio two-faced kitten has disappeared. It had a scheduled appointment with a veterinarian on July 15, but the family could not find the kitten that morning. A house door was found open, leading to speculation that it had been stolen or died in the night and was removed by its mother.