Towser

The Crieff distillery cat

Towser was a long-haired tortoiseshell female cat born on 21 April 1963 at the Glenturret Distillery on the River Turret in Crieff, Perthshire, the oldest working distillery in Scotland. She lived her entire life in the still-house and warehouses, employed in the unwritten role of working mouser by successive distillery managers, and died on 20 March 1987 aged twenty-three years and ten months. The Glenturret manager Peter Fairlie ordered a formal count of her kills against the distillery's rodent-control records on her retirement in 1983; the figure of 28,899 mice was extrapolated by Guinness World Records adjudicators from a representative sample period and certified in the 1984 edition.

The whisky-in-the-milk legend

The distillery's tour guides since the 1970s have repeated a story that Towser's longevity was attributable to a daily teaspoon of the distillery's single-malt added to her bowl of milk; the claim is part of the visitor-centre script, although Glenturret has never published veterinary documentation of the practice and the trace alcohol involved would have been clinically negligible. Guinness adjudicators recorded the dietary detail in the original 1984 verification as colour rather than as supporting evidence. The cat is commemorated in a bronze statue by sculptor Bill Wallace, unveiled outside the visitor centre in 1988 a year after her death, showing her in a seated posture with one paw raised.

A record that has not been beaten

Towser's mouse-killing tally of 28,899 remains the certified Guinness World Record for a single cat, despite occasional subsequent claims. The closest documented contender was Mickey, a cat at a Lancashire factory who killed an estimated 22,000 mice over twenty-three years from 1945 to 1968 but was not formally certified by Guinness during his lifetime. The Glenturret distillery, now owned by the Lalique Group since 2019, has retained the Wallace statue at its visitor entrance and continues to keep a working successor cat — Amber, then Glen — in the same role, though without making any record claim. Towser's pawprint is also reproduced on the label of Glenturret's Fairlie's Last Edition expression.