Farmhand delivers litter of kittens on his property. Then he sees something that makes his blood run cold

A farm worker in Brazil got a shocking surprise when his cat gave birth to four kittens. While three of them looked completely normal, the fourth one had something wrong that he had never seen before in his entire life.

According to the New York Post, Gilberto Almeida works as a farmhand in Vilhena, a city in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. At 32 years old, he has been around many animals and has seen his cat have babies several times. But when the last kitten came out during this birth, he could not believe what he was looking at. The tiny black kitten only had one eye, and it was right in the middle of its forehead.

“I’m 32 years old and I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” Almeida told the media about the kitten that people started calling “Cyclops Cat.” He added that his cat has had many litters before, but nothing like this had ever happened. The kitten looked so strange that some people thought it might be fake or made with computers.

This wasn’t just a strange looking kitten

What happened to this kitten was because of something called cyclopia. It is a very rare problem that happens when babies are still growing inside their mothers. The name comes from the Cyclops monsters in old Greek stories that had just one eye.

 A local vet named Janete Silva talked about why this happens. She said that when a baby animal is growing, the brain is supposed to split into two sides. But sometimes it stays as one piece instead, and then the eye ends up in the middle of the face because it follows how the brain grows.

This problem does not just affect the eyes. It also causes issues with the whole face and brain. Many animals with this condition do not have a normal nose. Some have a weird tube-like thing above their eye instead. The brain does not grow the right way either, which makes it very hard for the animal to stay alive.

Cyclopia is incredibly uncommon. In humans, it happens in less than 1 out of every 100,000 births. In animals, it shows up in about 1 out of every 16,000 live births. But many babies with this problem never make it to birth at all. While some famous people have kept unusual animals as pets, regular house cats can also have rare medical problems like this one.

The cyclops kitten did not live very long. It died on November 6, just under two days after being born. The kitten had trouble breathing because of the way its body was formed. This is what usually happens with animals that have cyclopia. 

Their brains and bodies are so badly formed that they cannot do the basic things needed to survive. Almost all of them die within a few hours or a couple of days after birth. Stories about strange things happening with animals often get a lot of attention because they are so unusual.

Other cats with this same problem have been born before. Back in 2005, a kitten called Cy was born in Oregon and only lived for one day. In 2012, a Bengal kitten named Cleyed also died soon after birth. These cases show that no matter how much people try to help, kittens with cyclopia just cannot survive because the problem is too serious.