The six-toed cats who live at the late writer Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West, Florida, have won a bureaucratic battle with the federal government.
Key West City Commissioners voted to exempt the many unusual cats that inhabit the writer's historic home and museum from federal rules requiring that the animals be caged.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture claims that the Hemingway home and museum is an "exhibitor" of cats that requires a special permit.
The people who run Hemingway's house far off the southern U.S. coast disputed the claim. City officials backed them up and voted Tuesday to grant the house an exception from the federal requirement.
That means the unusual cats, which are descendants of the original six-toed cats given to Hemingway as a gift in 1935, can continue to roam freely around his old home.
Some information for this report provided by AP.