Mr. Lee and the CatCam

Mr. Lee of Anderson, S.C., was a particularly busy cat, with many engagements and a free and easy (read: unneutered) lifestyle.
A few months ago, he wandered into Juergen Perthold's life. Mr. Perthold, an engineer from Germany, and his wife, Jenny, were happy to adopt the sturdy grey-and-white stray. However, the Pertholds and Mr. Lee had different opinions about curfew.
"We tried to keep him home at night, but sometimes he didn't return in the evening, sometimes for a couple of days," Mr. Perthold says. "We wondered, was he going to another family to get food, or does he still belong to another family?"
A few weeks later, Mr. Lee found himself encumbered with a small white plastic box affixed to his collar.
This device, known as the Mr. Lee CatCam, would eventually earn Mr. Lee and his owner a degree of Internet fame. Mr. Perthold, an engineer with an interest in photography, had rejigged a digital camera, altering its mechanism to make it take one photo a minute for 48 hours, then covered it in a shock-resistant, scratch-resistant, water-resistant casing.
"The reaction," Mr. Perthold writes on his website of Mr. Lee's test drive, "was not very happy but finally accepted."
The resulting photographs, which can be found at the website http://Mr-lee-catcam.de, are oddly poetic images of foliage, suburban homes, undersides of cars and fellow cats, who can be seen looking at Mr. Lee in a frank and interested way seldom seen when looking at people.
Mr. Perthold's photo commentary, in German-inflected English, ratchets up the charm quotient. "What the heck is it? UFO?" reads one caption.
Perhaps the winning combination of cat photos and ungrammatical English had something to do with the website's popularity: At its peak, it received 400,000 hits in 10 hours.
Despite the photos' novelty value and occasional beauty, Mr. Perthold, who admits he "would give a lot to one day be cat-sized," has no plans to sell them. Since Mr. Lee had no intention of taking the photos, Mr. Perthold says, "It's not art."
However, he advertises the CatCam on his website and has received about 1,000 e-mails from interested buyers. He is also now in contact with a camera manufacturer, so a mass-produced CatCam may be in the works.
But isn't it ironic that we've spent years trying to prove we're not "mere animals," developing ever more sophisticated technology, only to use it to find out what it must be like to be a mere animal?
"There are other species in our midst, and we are as curious about their lives as we are about the lives of our neighbours," says Rick Boychuk, editor of Canadian Geographic.
"We are searching for other means by which to understand their feelings and ... what their appetites are." Ours, it seems clear, is for knowledge.