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True News for the Feline Community
It's what cats crave!
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.
Dec
17
inevitable
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The Jingle Cats - White Christmas
Dec
16
Just wait ’til O’Reilly hears about this
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Readers share their Christmas creations | TheNewsTribune.com | Tacoma, WA
Jill and John Siu of Puyallup were afraid their two kittens would wreak havoc on the lower branches of a full Christmas tree, so they ordered this palm tree. The Sius “decided to have a Hawaiian Christmas, which fit our living room décor anyway,” Jill said. With no lower branches, there were no shiny ornaments within the kittens’ reach. Plus, it leaves more room for presents!