Cat Drone: The Drone That Shook The World

In 2012, a stuffed tabby cat with propellers bolted to its paws lifted a few feet off the ground in a Dutch garden, and the internet split down the middle within hours. More than a decade later, people are still searching for it, still arguing about it, and still asking the same first question: was that thing real?

It was. This guide covers what the Orvillecopter actually is, how it was engineered, why the reaction was so violent, what came after it, and the genuinely strange thing it accidentally predicted — a university lab now building serious research drones out of taxidermy animals.

What Is the Cat Drone, and Who Actually Built It?

The “cat drone” is the Orvillecopter, made by Dutch visual artist Bart Jansen together with radio-control helicopter pilot and engineer Arjen Beltman. Jansen has been consistent about the credit split over the years: he supplies the idea and the animal, Beltman makes it fly.

Orville was a brown tabby. Jansen had bought him and his brother as kittens to deal with a mouse problem in his home, and named the pair after aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright. In 2012, Orville was hit by a car outside the house. Rather than bury him, Jansen had him preserved by a taxidermist and gave the cat what he described as a second, electronic life — a nod to the fact that Orville had spent his own life leaping at birds and missing them.

Jansen called the finished piece “half cat, half machine”. It went on public display at the KunstRAI art fair in Amsterdam, and from there the footage escaped onto the internet and never came back.

How Bart Jansen Turned Orville the Cat Into a Working Quadcopter

The build is less mysterious than it looks in photos. Strip away the fur and it is a conventional quadcopter — the animal is the shell, not the machine.

Step 1: Taxidermy as the airframe skin

Taxidermy is the practice of preserving and mounting an animal’s body for display. The critical decision here was the pose. Orville was mounted flat and splayed, with all four limbs held at roughly the same angles as the arms of a quadcopter frame. That is not a natural cat posture, which is exactly why the finished drone looks so unsettling — the pose is dictated by the airframe, not by the animal.

The abdomen was opened and left serviceable so the body could be taken apart and reassembled. That cavity is where the electronics live: battery, speed controllers and flight controller all sit inside the cat.

Step 2: Hiding the arms inside the legs

Each of the four quadcopter arms runs down the inside of a limb, so nothing structural is visible from outside. The only hardware that breaks the surface is the motor and propeller at each paw, plus the landing gear underneath. Like any quadcopter, two of the props spin clockwise and two counter-clockwise, so the yaw torques cancel out.

Step 3: Getting it to stop hopping and start flying

The first attempts, in early 2012, were not really flights. The Orvillecopter hopped: it left the ground, wobbled, and came back down. The reasons are ordinary aerodynamics rather than anything supernatural.

A preserved cat is heavy for its size, its mass is unevenly distributed, its centre of gravity sits high relative to the propeller disc, and fur adds drag while contributing nothing to lift. That combination is difficult for any flight controller to stabilise. Jansen’s fix was the obvious one: more powerful motors and larger propellers, which he announced publicly as a birthday present for the cat. With more thrust margin and better trimming, the hopping turned into controlled flight, and later videos show it circling in the open with far more authority.

How Did the Public React to the Dead Cat Drone?

Very few objects manage to be genuinely divisive. The Orvillecopter is one of them, and the reaction sorted itself into three camps almost immediately.

The first camp read it as a memorial. Taxidermy of a beloved pet is an old and reasonably common practice; adding propellers only changes the form of the tribute, not the intent behind it. Jansen has always argued from this position — that a cat who spent his life chasing birds ended up flying with them.

The second camp read it as desecration, and they were loud about it. Some Dutch animal lovers reportedly labelled Jansen the worst person in the country, and coverage at the time described the reaction as global outrage. The objection is not really about safety or legality, since no animal was harmed to make the piece. It is about the idea that a body deserves a certain kind of stillness.

The third camp was simply curious, and that camp turned out to be the largest. It is also worth noting how little money the fame produced. A reported six-figure euro offer for the piece never actually materialised, and Jansen kept working a day job while building the follow-ups in his own time.

What Other Animal Drones Followed the Orvillecopter?

The cat was not a one-off. Jansen and Beltman went on to found Copter Company and built a whole catalogue of machines, each one harder than the last.

The pattern across the catalogue is consistent: the animal supplies the shape and the shock value, and conventional multirotor engineering supplies the flight. The cow remains the great unfinished project, which tells you something about how quickly the difficulty curve steepens once you want to carry a person.

Is It Legal or Ethical to Turn a Dead Animal Into a Drone?

On sourcing, Copter Company has been clear from the start: the animals come from roadkill, farms, natural deaths and donations. Nothing is killed for a project. The rat was donated by its 13-year-old owner after it died of cancer. The ostrich died of disease on a farm.

On legality, three separate sets of rules apply and people usually only think about the first one:

• Taxidermy law. Preserving your own pet is legal in most countries. Protected and wild species are a different matter entirely, and in many places handling them without a permit is an offence.
• Aviation law. The finished object is a drone, full stop. Registration thresholds, weight classes, no-fly zones and rules about flying over people all apply exactly as they would to any other aircraft of that mass.
• Public display. Art fairs, festivals and public spaces have their own permissions, and a flying taxidermy animal draws attention from people who will make a complaint.

The ethical question is separate and does not have a technical answer. Is it a memorial or is it a spectacle? Jansen would say it can be both. Plenty of people disagree, and both positions are defensible.

How the Cat Drone Predicted Serious Bio-Drone Research

Here is the part almost nobody covering the Orvillecopter in 2012 saw coming. A decade later, the same basic idea is being pursued as legitimate aerospace research.

At the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, a team led by mechanical engineering professor Dr. Mostafa Hassanalian builds flapping-wing drones out of taxidermy birds. The reasoning is engineering rather than art: artificial wings are extremely hard to model and manufacture correctly, and a real bird’s wing is already an optimised solution. Reusing it is reverse engineering with the hardest step already done.

The applications the team cites are quiet and non-invasive:

• Wildlife monitoring. Conventional quadcopters are loud and disruptive to the animals being studied. A bird-shaped, bird-sounding drone is far less intrusive.
• Flock formation research. Understanding how birds share energy in V-formation could feed directly into fuel savings in commercial aviation.
• Colour and flight efficiency. A separate strand of the work examines how wing colouration affects aerodynamic efficiency, on both birds and fixed-wing aircraft.

By 2024 the group had flapping duck prototypes, a turkey built as a Thanksgiving demonstration, and a perching prototype designed to sit stationary in a tree and stream video. Reported endurance is up to around 20 minutes. The obvious dual-use concern has been raised at counter-drone conferences, since a drone that blends into a migrating flock is a detection problem; the researchers have repeatedly stated their focus is civil rather than military.

The insight Jansen stumbled into as a joke and the insight Hassanalian’s lab pursues as science are the same one: biology already solved the airframe problem, and sometimes the cheapest way to get a good shape is to borrow one.

Can You Build or Commission a Taxidermy Drone Yourself?

Copter Company has taken commissions from people who wanted a deceased pet turned into a flying machine, so the answer is technically yes. If you are considering the build side, the failure points are predictable.

Why the Orvillecopter Still Matters More Than a Decade Later

The Orvillecopter has outlived the news cycle that made it famous, and the reason is not shock value. Shock value expires. What has not expired is the question it forces: what is a drone allowed to be made of, and who decides?

In 2012 the answer felt obvious to most people, and the answer was “not that”. In 2026, taxidermy birds are flying in a university test cage in New Mexico for reasons involving fuel efficiency and conservation, and the same technique reads as innovation rather than desecration. Very little changed about the object. What changed was the framing around it.

That is the real legacy of a dead cat with propellers. Jansen was ahead of the argument, not the technology — and taking the argument first is usually the more uncomfortable job.