Crunch that cockroach? Swallow that fly...

Tommy hunting flies

 Crunch, crunch.... there is nothing so satisfying for me than hunting down cockroaches.

The crunch is a bit like the noise my human makes when she is eating crisps. And the flavour is just as good. Very moreish. 

And if I can't find a cockroach, then a bluebottle will do. My hunting technique is to use my paws to smash them against the window pane. Then I pick them up with my mouth when they have fallen down and are wiggling. 

Spiders? Well, the outdoor ones with long skinny legs are more difficult, because the legs come off and the spiders whizz away. Besides, if I am outside, I have better things to hunt.

Indoors, the spiders that are stuck in the bath are more worth my attention. Not really crunchy but often much bigger than a mere bluebottle.

Researchers have just discovered that cats catch a lot of insects!* Boy, these humans are dumb. We have been eating them for at least 1.6 million years when our ancestors emerged on this planet.

We are pest exterminators for cockroaches. And bluebottles. And spiders. 

Your pest is our fun food!

 

•  "Social media highlights the overlooked impact of cats on arthropods," Insect Conservation and Diversity, DOI: 10.1111/icad.70038

World Diabetes day - am I a fat cat?

Boomer before his diet. He lost a sixth of body weight (6 kilos before the diet).  

My human pet, Celia, has just been diagnosed with diabetes. Hardly surprising due to the fact that she has been eating too much cake and biscuits lately.

I have put her on a diet. No sugar, no cake, no biscuits, but as much fruit and vegetables as she wants. She has already given up alcohol and now she has stopped drinking fruit juice too. 

She is not very happy.

Today, Friday November 14, is World Diabetes Day, so I started worrying about my own weight. Did my tum look too fat in my fur? Was I developing love handles?

Perhaps I should give up Dreamies. I only eat about five a day. But is this too much? 

Should I stop eating so much cat food? Change from the most expensive and delicious envelopes to some horrible dried food which isn't so tasty? 

Reading up about feline diabetes here made me almost as depressed as Celia.

It says the symptoms are drinking too much water and urinating too much. I don't think I do that. 

Purrhaps I am just being a hypochondriac.

 

Cats in High Places. Royalty?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kattenstoet#/media/File:Kattenstoet.jpg

 Some good news, for a change, on the human front. We cats are slowly but surely changing human nature for the best.

I have just heard of Kattenstoet in Belgium, a cat festival. Humans dress up as giant cats, showing that they aspire to be as beautiful and as wise as we are.

Admittedly, these giant cats are wearing clothes not fur, but this is probably just due to the slow intellect of the organisers. Humans hoping (rather pathetically) to be like cats is nevertheless a step forward.

Why do I say this? Because the festival originally focused on throwing living cats from the church tower. An act of cruelty committed yearly by lowlife humans against their superiors, us. 

So fellow felines, our efforts to purrsuade humans to behave better, to accept our superiority, to act better towards us, have not been wasted. We are making progress little by little.

Indeed, this made me think further. I have been wondering whether we should not take over from the British Royal family. We would do a better job than the current Royals.

It is true that we slaughter wildlife. But so do the Royal family. They shoot and they used to hunt. The number of birds shot by a prince is far greater than the number of mice killed by a cat during the same period of time.  

We are far better looking than most of them. We are not money obsessed and do not take payments from spies. We do not have sex with kittens, and we know how to purr politely in difficult circumstances.  

King George V11 sounds rather good to me. 

Exciting news...my book may be chosen by a book club!

 

Yay, fellow cats... I have just had an email suggesting my book, A Cat's Guide to Humans, may be chosen by a Washington DC book club. At last, at long last, my effort at understanding humans may be taking off. 

As we cats know, humans are a strange species, misleadingly known as Homo sapiens. "Sapiens" is Latin for "wise." 

Which they are not.

Just to run through a few examples. Humans use alcohol and drugs and get hopelessly drunk and high. We use
catnip and after a little high of ten minutes get sensible again.

Humans don't have any fur. They have to cover their nakedness with artificial substitutes for fur. Our fur is one of the glories of being feline. We wear it all the time: we don't have to take it off or put it on.

Humans have kittens that are so slow to learn that they cannot walk for months and months. Our kittens are walking well after about four weeks.

Humans cannot purr. We can.

However humans, when they are properly trained, are very useful round the house. They make excellent servants - they feed us, provide laps, and warm radiators.

They are not bad: just very limited and of low IQ.