Mau Mew

You tell me. In the video below we see a woman "strongly cuddling" as I would describe it her cat and she kisses him on top of the head. She thinks that her cat did not enjoy it. It is possible that he did, however. Is the sound that he makes one of complaint or enjoyment?  Complaining cat. She is handling him like a toddler. Image: Screenshot. Or perhaps it is somewhere in between the two. I do think, however, that she is cuddling him too strongly. I don't think he enjoys being confined and 'compressed' slightly in this way.  Most cats enjoy being kissed on the top of the head. If they don't, they get used to it and then they enjoy it! My gut feeling is that this cat is complaining not because of the kiss but by the way that he is being held which is slightly too forceful for him.  And the reason why she is cuddling him like this is because she loves him. But she is cuddling him as if she would cuddle a toddler; a human being. Entirely understandable.  Not a

A lot of people are very pleased about the untimely death of a big game hunter when an elephant fell on top of him and crushed him to death. The back story is interesting. There was a group of individuals on a hunting safari in Africa. This happens a lot and far too often. They wandered into a breeding herd of elephants according to The Telegraph newspaper. Three elephant cows charged the hunters. The man in the photograph below (who was killed), Theunis Botha, was leading the group. He tried to shoot the elephants. To try and stop him a fourth elephant cow charged at him from the side. This elephant lifted Botha with their trunk. One of the other trophy hunters then shot this elephant with Botha held up in their trunk. This caused the elephant to drop Botha. The elephant then collapsed from the gunshot and rolled on top of him, killing him. Both the elephant and the trophy hunter were killed in this incident. It is an example of karma however. In fact, Botha runs a big-game safari bus

I feel that I need to address this recurring problem which is to put domestic cats into outfits so that they look like little humans. You can buy them on Amazon. The picture below shows you an example. The title describes it. I don't want to be a killjoy because I understand that it can be fun to put domestic cats into mini-human outfits. However, I don't think that it is a good idea because, ultimately, it disrespects the domestic cat. And I think it probably undermines the human-to-cat relationship which should be one of human recognising the fact that they live with a domesticated wildcat at heart. It's all very well to treat a domestic cat as a human in terms of animal rights. This elevates their rights to that of a human which helps to protect them and which helps to foster respect for them. But to treat them as little humans including babies leads humans down the path of interacting with their cat in a less than optimal way. It can alter the caregiver's expectatio

NEWS AND COMMENT: This is a BBC story published eight hours ago. The headline is "Cost of living: pet owner would rather starve to feed cats". Under the headline is a picture (see below) of the woman, Miari Workman, holding her two cats. She has a double chin and she's clearly carrying too much weight. Starving? Not eating enough? Nah! Ms Workman has made a bold statement which has caught the attention of the news media but she's clearly not carrying through on that statement. She has no need to starve herself because she is finding a way not to and that, by the way, is to go down to a local pet food bank. Free cat food. I wonder sometimes whether people use pet food banks who should be using them. Do people who operate pet food banks actually check with care the credentials of their customers? Do they check whether they really are out-of-pocket completely to the point where they have to starve themselves as Ms Workman indicates? I don't think so. In fact, I'

I will answer the second question first. Feral cats have the physical ability and anatomy to meow just like domestic and stray cats. The point is that they don't normally meow because the meow vocalisation is a learned one between domestic cat and human caregiver. It is normally a demand for food or attention. The answer is not quite as clean as that because the meow sound is very variable. People should not think that every meow made by every cat is exactly the same. There is a great spectrum of meow sounds.  The word 'meow' is an onomatopoeia meaning that it reflects the sound . But as the meow sound varies a lot it does not reflect the meow sound sometimes! The meow sound has been learned by the domestic cat to make a demand on their human caregiver. Image: MikeB As to the first part of the title, as mentioned, this is a learned vocalisation by domestic cats over about 10,000 years of domestication. It is a sound developed between cat and human.  As feral cats nearly al

This is unusual. Perhaps very unusual. A user on the Reddit.com website has posted a video which you can see below of a domestic cat that they thought had a strange appearance.  They said that the cat was very big with strange ears. I immediately, identified the cat as an American Curl which is a fairly rare purebred cat and certainly very rare if he or she behaves as a stray cat which appears to be the case in this instance.  They're not normally large cat but standard-sized domestic cats with one exception to their regular appearance namely the ears that curl back due to a genetic mutation. Here is an example of an American Curl show cat photographed by Helmi Flick years ago. Photo: copyright Helmi Flick. Note: the video below may eventually stop working. Sorry but I can't control its existence. CLICK ON THE EXPAND ICON BOTTOM-RIGHT TO SEE THE VIDEO FULL SCREEN. What kind of cat is this? Stray cat moved into my back yard. Has huge paws/weird ears. by u/ReindeerNo1

NEWS AND COMMENT: As reported in The State, a cat was abandoned with other cats by their owner when they moved away. And this particular cat was very ill. She was brought to an animal shelter run by the Charleston Animal Society. It is located about 9 miles north-west of Charleston and is a No-kill shelter with a hospital which cares for around 20,000 animals annually. Sick cat after operation to remove 38 hair ties from her stomach. Image: Charleston Animal Society from video (screenshot). This cat was therefore fortunate to end up at this shelter where she stopped eating. They x-rayed her and found a massive blockage in her stomach. Her stomach was completely full of ties. A domestic cat's stomach is quite small at about the size of a ping pong ball I am told . How do you get 38 hair ties inside a stomach that size!? It must stretch a lot. The blockage constituted 38 hair ties which she had obviously eaten as if they were edible foods when in the ownership of the people who aband

A woman at a school meeting makes a point about gender self-identification while wearing a cat costume. She wore the cat costume to make the point that nobody would say that she is a cat just because she wears a cat costume. There is a video of her at the end of the article. She was criticising a member of the school board who self identifies as a woman despite being a biological man. The man wears his deceased wife's clothes and lipstick and grows his hair a little bit longer than normal. I don't think she's criticising the fact he wears his ex-wife's clothes as you can't criticise it but she's criticising the fact that he is on the school board and making decisions about the children while believing that people can self-identify on their gender. Woman wears a cat costume to make her point about gender self-identification. Screenshot. This is an enormously polarising topic. It is a very current topic. In the UK, it brings to mind Nicola Sturgeon, the first Mini