The game of Cat Herding is played on a graph between two players, the cat and the herder. The game setup consists of the cat choosing a starting vertex for their cat token. Then, both players alternate turns, beginning with the herder: they delete (any) one edge, called a cut, and the cat moves along a path to a new vertex. While this game has been studied on finite graph arenas regarding how optimally herder wins, we shift our attention to an infinite version of the game where the cat may now survive indefinitely. We show that cat winning positions in an infinite tree can be characterized by a second-order monadic statement, also amounting to having a complete infinite binary tree minor, or having uncountably many distinct rays. We take advantage of the logical characterization of cat winning positions to generalize a measure known as the cat number, to ordinals.

We introduce the game of Cat Herding, where an omnipresent herder slowly cuts down a graph until an evasive cat player has nowhere to go. The number of cuts made is the score of a game, and we study the score under optimal play. In this paper, we begin by deriving some general results, and then we determine the precise cat number for paths, cycles, stars, and wheels. Finally, we identify an optimal Cat and Herder strategy on complete graphs, while providing both a recurrence and closed form for cat ( K n ) .