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True News for the Feline Community
It's what cats crave!
Dec
26
CitiKitty - Toilet Train Your Cat!
Kit Includes:
1. CitiKitty Training Seat
Works with all size cats - Even cats over 25lbs
2. Quick Start Training Guide
3. CitiKitty Expert Training Tips & Tricks
The specially designed training seat securely fits on your toilet. Your cat naturally uses CitiKitty as its new litter box. Each of the four perforated rings are removed from the training seat thus reducing the amount of litter. Once all rings are removed your cat is toilet trained!
CitiKitty works with cats of all age, size & breed and multiple cats can be toilet trained at the same time.
Toilet Training Benefits
* Never scoop litter again
* Eliminate offensive odors
* Maintain a healthier home
* Save over $175 per year on litter
Dec
24
Violent cat leaves postmen running scared - Telegraph
A cat with a grudge against postmen left his owners fearing they were social lepers.
Sarah and Ben Goddard, of Derby, began to wonder why they had become so unpopular when their daily post dried up.
Mrs Goddard, 24, a nursery nurse, said she noticed a problem when she got only a few congratulation cards after her marriage.
“Every time someone asked me if their card had arrived I had to tell them no,” she said.
“From then on we would get just the very occasional piece of mail.”
All was explained when she chased after a postman who told them they would have to collect their mail from the sorting office.
“He said our dog was always attacking him and had even drawn blood,” she said.
“I told him we’ve only got a cat.”
The couple later received a note that deliveries could be suspended because staff feared being savaged by their cat.
They learned that 18-month-old Georgi had been attacking postmen for months.
One victim was left bleeding after the cat swiped his hand as he pushed envelopes through the door.
The problem was solved when Mr Goddard, 27, a land surveyor, put a postbox at the end of the driveway.
But Mrs Goddard is still confused by the furore created by their cat.
“I can’t understand how the postman would have scratches all over his arms. What was he doing putting his arm through the box?”
Dec
23
Cats enjoy Christmas trees, too | The Monitor
Grey Kitty was the first to climb up the tree. I took a few pictures because he looked so cute playing peek-a-boo. Then the adult cats started their annual posturing to claim the new territory. I let them have their fun for a few moments — well, actually, a few hours. Then I pulled out the anti-cat artillery. It’s the only way to train them to stay off the tree before we put on the ornaments.
We squirt the cats with water. What is it about cats and water? They react as if we had tossed acid in their faces. It’s not as if it’s the element of surprise, since they see us standing there with the spray bottle.
It’s kind of fun. It’s our own version of Whac-a-Mole, the carnival game where plastic moles pop out of a hole and get bonked on the head with a mallet.
Dec
23
cool
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Rescuers Use Pet Mask To Resuscitate Cat - Miami News Story - WPLG Miami
PLANTATION, Fla. — Rescuers had to use a pet oxygen mask to help resuscitate a cat found alone in an apartment during an early-morning fire, Plantation Fire Department Chief Robert Pudney said Tuesday.
The fire occurred in the Jacaranda Club apartments about 3:45 a.m. An upstairs neighbor called firefighters to report heavy smoke coming from the apartment below her.
When firefighters arrived, they didn’t find an occupant. Instead, they found a cat barely breathing and lethargic when paramedics used the specialized pet mask to supply the cat oxygen. After about five minutes, the cat began to breathe normally.
“This was our third successful use of the pet masks,” Pudney said in a statement. “They are proving to be an invaluable tool.”
Dec
18
How to get your cat to pee in your shoes
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Ways to take better care of your dog or cat in 2008 | Dallas Morning News | News for Dallas, Texas | Life/Travel
Get your cat moving and thinking, too. Playing with cats is an obvious way to get them to exercise. But you also can multitask by making feeding time more of a challenge.
“For reluctant cats, move the food bowl to the top of a cat tree or up the stairs. That way they must move to get fed,” Ms. Shojai says. You also can feed them in interactive treat balls that drop pieces of food when they’re pushed around, which encourages cats to “work a bit and think how to get their food.”
[more dubious suggestions at link]
Dec
17
must… buy… Fancy Feast…
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‘Cat Lady’ Conundrum, The - New York Times
Here’s a little-known and slightly terrifying fact: According to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 60 million people in the United States are infected with a parasite that may migrate into their brains and alter their behavior in a way that — among other things — may leave them more likely to be eaten by cats. New research into this common parasite — Toxoplasma gondii — may offer clues to the phenomenon known to the unscientifically-minded as “crazy cat lady” syndrome.
The basic facts: Toxo can infect many species, but it undergoes sexual reproduction only in cat digestive tracts. Once the parasite reproduces, the cat passes it in its feces, where the next unwitting host picks it up by digesting it (intentionally or unintentionally). Then the cycle starts again. In the long run, Toxo must find its way back to a cat’s stomach to survive. So the parasite has evolved a complicated system for taking over its hosts’ brains to increase the likelihood that they’ll be eaten by cats.
How? Scientists are still figuring that out. Research conducted this year by Toxo expert Robert Sapolsky of Stanford, and also by Joanne Webster, professor of parasite epidemiology at Imperial College London, has found that Toxo actually causes rats to become attracted to the smell of cat urine.
Might Toxo explain why some humans develop an unhealthful attraction to cats and apparently become immune to the smell of their urine? And might that explain the mystery of crazy cat ladies? “That idea doesn’t seem completely crazy,” Sapolsky says. “But there’s no data supporting it.”
Not yet. But Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in the Czech Republic, is looking into it. He has spent years studying Toxo’s impact on human behavior. (He found, for example, that people infected with Toxo have slower reflexes and are 2.5 times as likely to get into car accidents.) He won’t have results of his study for a while and refuses to speculate. But Joanne Webster says the connection isn’t much of a stretch: “In our evolutionary past, perhaps we were eaten by cats, too,” she says.