One surprisingly practical use I found for things like this; when internal tools throw up a 404 or a 503 with the usual default status page, people assume "oh it's not working, I'll try again later".<p>When they get an unexpected cat (or dog, in this case) they tend to go and ask their tech team, "what's with the cat?" It's not a substitute for good logging and alerting in any way, and is totally unsuitable for environments where internal tools need to appear professional and sensible, but as a way to get people to pay attention when something goes wrong then a cute animal can work a lot better than a "normal" notification.