Feline zoom etiquette for lockdown

Good overall position with body placed between human and screen. But there is a failure to block use of the keyboard and a further failure to block screen.

Well thought out body position blocking both screen and keyboard but a failure to take full advantage of the Zoom possibilities, which include the butt photo and grooming intimate body parts.

What is the best way to deal with a human on Zoom during so called lockdown? These photos show two unsatisfactory methods. 

The most effective way is to place the backside facing the computer screen, with tail up in a friendly greeting....  

There is no photo for this, due to human refusal to take a screenshot.

Our teeth are rapiers - sharp and dangerous.

More about biting. How, not why, we bite.

Our teeth are made like slender rapiers that are deep into flesh and stay there for the death bite.They slice into the skin leaving only a small puncture mark but bringing with them infection from the bacteria in our mouth. Dogs teeth are there to slash and tear the flesh and weaken the prey with loss of blood. 

So that is why humans often think that cat bites don't matter.

Far fewer feline bites than canine ones are seen at human hospitals but they are far more likely to be infected. Add to that the chance we will scratch as well as bite, and some humans (not many) will get infections from a mere scratch. This is  call cat scratch disease.

In both cases the skin near small puncture or the small scratch will feel hot and swollen. The lymph glands near to the injury may swell up too. And if nothing is done about it, servere illness can set in. So, humans, take cat bites seriously.

Get medical help. Respect our desire for space. Do not interfere. Stay away or you will regret it!

Why we bite humans who pet

Humans are dumb animals. They cannot read our body language. I tell them I want them to stop petting me. I am purrfectly clear about it.

I start swiveling back my ears. It is obvious what I mean. I mean "Stop." They just don't see it. Are they choosing to be blind. Or are they just so stupid they don't notice.

So I "shout" louder by lashing my tail. Look, dummy. See? It's my tail. It is lashing side to side. You don't notice my ears but surely you can notice my tail.

They don't. Or they won't. So then I do what I have to do to get their attention. I give them a little nip. It's only a nip. I don't bite down on them. My teeth don't even break the skin.

Then they stop. At last.

Obviously, in order to get their attention I have to use my teeth. Nothing else gets through to them. Of course, they don't like it but at least they withdraw their hand and the petting stops.

They call it the petting and biting syndrome. I call it commonsense communication. 

• In the video my friend Marnie shows a typical moment of feline exasperation. 
  

If they really want to know what a cat bite is like, they should interfere in the cat fight. Then they will get a real bite, not a nip. Believe me, if I bite you and give you a deep puncture wound, you WILL understand the difference between a bite and nip. 

Weird cat pictures and Victorian remedies

I never thought I would say this but thank goodness for vets. I have been reading an old book about cats, and I am horrified at the medical suggestions. It is Cats: their Points and Characteristics with Curiosities of Cat Life and A Chapter on Feline Ailments, 1876, by W. Gordon Stables, a retired sea doctor who also wrote Medical Life in the Navy.

The illustrations are weird. Did you ever see cats like these? The anecdotes are odd - one about a tom cat on board a ship threatened with being shot by the captain. And there is even an ad for a cat medicine chest (see last illustration). His remedy for diarrhoea is this:

"Begin the treatment by giving the little patient half a small teaspoonful of castor-oil. Give a still smaller dose about six hours after, to which two drops of laudanum or solution of muriate of morphiæ has been added. Afterwards give, three times a day, either a little chalk mixture, with half a drop of laudanum in each dose."

It's castor oil again for bronchitis and a diet of beef tea (sounds good to me) and bread (less good!). For fits, the good doctor suggests holding smelling salts to the feline nose (ugghhhh) and bleeding (uggghhh).. Then there is a disease he calls The Yellows, and suggests a horrible amount of remedies such as glauber salts, bismuth, creasote, aromatic powder and laudanum, which is a mixture of alcohol and morphine, quinine and cod liver oil.

I don't think many cats could have survived this cure, let alone the disease!

So though I hate vets, I think Dr Stables would have been even worse. He had great whiskers, though. Almost as good as mine!

 

Black Cats Need Human Love.

Black cats feature in Halloween decorations - more is the pity. Because it feeds into the idea that black cats are somehow wild or frightening. And they just don't get adopted as quickly as cats of different colours.

In some US shelters, that kill unwanted cats, a lot of black cats get put to sleep. They are handed in on Halloween to keep them safe and die later.

I'm celebrating the beauty of black cats today with lots of lovely photos, some of them of my Uncle and namesake George who used to this blog. He stood up for the rights of black cats and, as you can see from the photo at the top was a keen newspaper reader.

Even little black kittens take longer to be adopted. So there are often lots of them waiting to find their forever home.

So tell your human to stop being colour prejudiced and to start helping black cats. 

• My book will help you understand why humans are the way they are.
  

The watchers -- look upwards

 

The immense superiority of cats over mere humans is at its most powerful when we get high up. The higher we go, the more we can look down on them.

And the less likely they are to find us. It's a strange thing but humans often forget to look upwards, when they are trying to discover where we have got to.

Trees, houses, walls, the top of cars, roofs, sheds, straw bales - anywhere that it a bit higher is where we like to sit. We feel safe high up.Nobody can get us. 

And we can sneer at the dogs and the humans below.... if they even notice us.

Look upwards, humans. We are watching your every move. You don't see us: but we see you from a great height.

Ouch. It hurts when my human picks me up

Are you finding that you don't want to jump up on the bed any more? Or feeling that the litter tray is difficult to climb into? Or even beginning to think that going out through the cat flap is just too uncomfortable for you to bother? And when your human picks you up, it hurts, so you nip her.

It's probably arthritis. It begins to hurt when you do anything much, so you spend more time sleeping. Maybe you no longer want to have to tackle the stairs, so instead of walking downstairs to use the litter tray you do it behind the chest of drawers. As any sensible elderly cat would.

Your human doesn't understand. She gets angry. This is the moment to make sure she reads up on the problem here.  It is Arthritis Week for cats. 

Last century even vets didn't know that cats got arthritis. We conceal our pain - unlike those despicable whining dogs. We rarely limp and we never whine. We suffer in silence.

Yet there is so much our owners could do. They could make sure that there was a litter tray upstairs as well as downstairs. And they could cut down the front of the litter tray so it is easier to climb in.

There are little ramps that they could buy to help us get on and off the sofa or the bed. A heated bed would be cosy too. They could make sure we had regular painkillers.

Humans complain about aches and pains as they age.  Why don't they think of feline aches and pains?

 

Ophan kittens - not just milk but mothering.

Mouse and Moley

Orphan kittens are sometimes handed into rescue and people try to bring them up on the bottle. The milk is the easy part: but the mothering is the difficult part. How will they learn to be a cat without having a mother to teach them? We cats need to grow up to be cats, not furry humans. (And who'd want to be a human anyway....)

Special milk

Mother cats teach their babies what to eat, help them to pee and poo, teach them to hunt, and give them the careful mothering they need. They groom the babies until the babies are ready to groom themselves in a way they learn from mother. They give them milk then when it is time to stop, they begin to close the milk bar. This teaches kittens to eat solid food but it also teaches that they don't always get what they want. That way they learn to tolerate frustration.

The best way to bring up orphan kittens is to put them on a lactating female that already has kittens or to keep them with their mother but bottle feed them. If humans can't do this, then they must keep the babies together or even (if they can) find an adult cat who will "mother" them without milk. 

Can't do that? Well make sure that these kittens go to a home where there are no other cats. Bottle fed cats may be more likely to be loners.

•  If you are feeding orphan kittens read this article -
  *Little, S., (2013), “Playing mum: Successful management of orphaned kittens,” Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, 15, 201-210.

Kittens... who's the Daddy?

 

Yes, it is what you think in the picture..... more than one father! We, cats, are sensible enough to hedge our bets.

We don't fight over who mates with whom. True, there is a lot of noise and caterwauling and usually the biggest tom cat goes first.... if the female allows. But others have their turn too.

Why is this a good thing? Well who knows what will happen to the kittens? Will they go to a good home and be neutered pets? Or a bad home that doesn't neuter them so they end up as strays? Or will they have to live in the wild and find their own food?

Two fathers means that if the little black kittens don't thrive in the world then purrhaps the little grey one will. Or visa versa. so it is a way of making sure one or more of the kittens will have the right genes to survive. 

Humans are sometimes sniffy about our sex lives, but it is the pot calling the kettle black. We only mate when our hormones tell us to. They have sex all the time, any night of the week.

Purrsonally I find that kind of sex drive disgustingly licentious.

• 
  For more information about humans get this book here.
  
  

Whoohoo. The precision strike.

I can jump nine times my own height from a standing start. Beat that, humans! You never will. Even at Olympic games, humans can do nothing as strong and powerful as this.

Why do it?

For hunting in the long grass, of course. If we just pushed through the grass, the mouse would get away. So we leap up and over, with our front paws tucked in to help the jump, then pushed forward at the last minute to grab the mouse. It's called the fore foot strike.

We also use the high jump up, to help us escape on to high places away from dogs and other dangers. 

These photos are blurry because my human was caught by surprise and failed to change her camera settings. But there is a longer video showing my friend Toby on her Youtube channel here.

You will see how carefully we have to shift our weight, poise, and sometimes give a little wiggle just before we launch ourselves into the air. Front legs tucked in on launching, back legs then tuck in, and front push forward just before landing to grab the prey.

It's a precision strike - anything less would lose our prey. 

This is just another example of cats' superiority to humans. Powerful muscles, amazing control, precision and power..... ours, not theirs.

• More examples of feline superiority here.
  
  

 

Stand up for rescue kittens - in the home.

 These are rescue kittens in a rescue pen. Not an ideal start in life, if you want a cat that is confident around human beings. I am sad that so many rescues are still keeping kittens (with or without a mother) in a pen.

Kittens need human contact - a minimum 20 minutes daily preferably from a series of different humans. Not just women, but also men and sensible children. But that is the minimum.

I was lucky I was brought up in a home, with all the noises and smells of a human home, with people coming and going, and with a friendly dog. The ideal education for a pet cat.

I was used to all these things before I went to my new home, so I settled in quickly. Kittens that are in a pen miss out on the smells and noises of a human home, and some of them don't get enough human contact.

Purrlease tell you human to get their rescue kittens fostered in a home, not a pen. 

Stand up for rescue cats - feigned sleep stress

This cat is not asleep. Rescue cats that pretend to sleep like this one are highly stressed. But humans often do not recognise this. They describe the cat as "quiet" or "shy."

If you look carefully at this video you will see that the cat has its ears lowered, a sign of fear. Its back is humped not relaxed. And it turns its head away from the human videoing it - another sign of fear. It also blinks rapidly.

Feigned sleep is found in rescue catteries and among wild animals in zoos. Humans do not recognise it. It is a sign of chronic stress and unhappiness.

This cat needs help. It needs a box to hide in and if it has one it will be more likely to come out and look around, knowing that it can retreat if need be. No rescue cat should be without a privacy area.

If a privacy area doesn't help enough, then it needs fostering in a home.

Stand up for rescue cats. Pass this information on.