Prime ministerial cats rule!

Dear George,
We’d like to congratulate the Prime Minister of Canada for the latest addition to his family. He and his wife adopted a kitten from Ottawa Humane Society.
Mrs. Harper is well known as an animal lover and she always adopted cats from shelters.
We don’t know how many cats they have but probably more then one.
A poll through Mr. Harper’s Facebook page was created so Canadians could vote for a name. The winning name was Stanley (like in the Stanley Cup).
This is another victory for feline’s world. First Larry in UK and now Stanley in Canada!
He is a sweet, cute grey kitten who made it to the top and this is just wonderful news! Congratulations Stanley!
Fluffy & Cayenne

Dear Fluffy and Cayenne,
This is wonderful news. At last we felines are finding our way up to top rank of political power. We have always known that we were worth it but our humans have had an unfortunate tendency to think of us as second to dogs. At last this outdated idea is being shown up for what it is - nonsense. Cats rule!
However old habits die hard. There was an unfortunate incident last week in Downing St, when the policeman at the door of Number Ten, booted Larry into the house. Larry was merely doing what all we cats enjoy - dithering on the doorstep, while the door was held over for him, deciding whether to go inside or outside. He has already trained the police to open the door for him: now he merely needs to train a "stay" so that they hold the door open long enough. How long is long enough? As long as it takes for him to make up his mind. This will be particularly important when the bad weather comes and Larry wishes to hover in the doorway out of the rain and sleet.
Proper police training will be particularly important when he comes home with a mouse. Will they let him in so that he can give to our David Cameron? Or will they try to take it off him first? What about a rat? Similar dilemmas will face Stanley in his new home.
I tried to offer Larry some advice via a popular newspaper, but they had no space for my words of wisdom. Such are the problems for cats wishing to publish. My book on human behaviour is also stuck in the doldrums, despite it being a ground-breaking volume on coping with and training this popular pet species, Homo sapiens (don't laugh at that last word).
We cats face an uphill task but now we have paws in high places it may become easier.
George
Nice photo of Stanley on the left.

Human harassment - is the answer exercising your human more?

Dear George,

As you already know, I celebrate my birthday on Victoria Day here in Canada because that was the day I showed up from nowhere in my human pet's garden.

This year they threw me a surprise birthday party; totally unexpected since the day started a bit rainy and grey, but by the afternoon it was sunny and nice! They invited some of my buddies but they invited some of their friends too.

George, how can I avoid unwanted attention? All their friends wanted to hold me, kiss, etc. And they all brought me colorful, little balls (as you can see in the picture).

That much for human imagination! What can I do with a dozen balls?

Do you think I should use them training the humans? Should I train them to fetch the balls?

CAT Victoria

Dear Victoria,

Your problem is a common one. Humans will harass cats. Picking us up, cuddling us, kissing us. It's good for them but some of us find it demeaning and many of us just downright hate it. What can we do about it? Well, we can wriggle. When we cats wriggle, we wriggle good. A powerful wriggle will simply extract us from this unwanted human behaviour. I called these unwanted human advances affectional harasssment.

Will giving them more to do help? Well sometimes it does. A bored human is a badly behaving human. They are terrible couch potatoes and giving them a good exercise regime will always help. Probably the best way to do this is to get their attention to a ball. They like playing games with toys. Walk up to them and look as if you are going to play fetch. When they throw the ball, you run after it but you don't pick it up. Then they will have to run after it to in order to pick it up and throw it again for you. They think they are giving you exercise but in reality you are giving them exercise. Sometimes humans are pretty dumb animals.

Training them to fetch small pieces of meat, prawns, and dried cat food is also a good idea! You are probably, without realising it, already doing this. I get their attention by rubbing round their legs,and putting on a particularly loving and expectant look on my face. I don't feel particularly loving: I often feel very impatient at their slowness to catch on to what I want. But it works

Keep up the good work. A trained human is a happier human.

George

I am a feline love rat trying to protect my love kittens...

Dear George,
I have taken out a superinjunction (a legal system of getting absolute privacy from tabloid and red top newspapers) to protect my love kittens... There are scores of them all around Sussex, an English county. I have caterwauled on roof tops, fought in the streets, and mated with numerous females. So many, that I fear I cannot even remember their names. But they all probably had kittens - four or five at a time. Not that I had anything to do with my love kittens. I was, I admit, a love rat. I loved them and left them taking no responsibility for the little ones for five glorious years. If I try to remember, I reckon there must be more than 900 kittens that looked like me. But now I am a reformed (and snipped) character, I don't want anybody to know about my disgraceful past.
Will a superinjunction protect me?
No-Name Tom.

Dear No-Name Tom,
The new English legal system of protecting love rats, whether footballers or TV presenters, is working well for these human males. It's the males wot get the pleasure: it's the females wot get the blame. Our judges are nothing if not traditional.
But it won't work for cats. Your identity has already been revealed on Twitter. Just sending me a silhouette of yourself wasn't a sensible idea. A copy of your true photo came into my paws and I can reveal you are known in Sussex as Randy Victor, cat about town and love rat (your phrase not mine). You are a tabby and white who has the treatment of choice for sex addiction - castration.
It was Cats Protection who spilled the beans on you after they'd given you treatment. They rescue 5,700 unwanted kittens every years and the centre in Sussex reckons you could have contributed scores to this number. These moralistic humans take the view that unneutered toms like you (and me once) should be stopped.
Why? Well not just because we could go on fathering hundreds more unwanted kittens. It's for our own sake. The rooftop caterwauling life is pretty dangerous for us toms before the snip. We fight each other and risk catching dangerous blood born disease like FIV. We spray urine all over the place so humans don't want us in their homes. We roam for miles, taking our lives in our paws each time we cross roads. You, yourself, were picked up as a stray.
So, thank your lucky stars, Victor, that you were given a chance of a new life. As a female human once sighed; "Ah the deep peace of the double bed after the hurly burly of the chaise longue."
Personally, as I was given the snip early in life, I reckon I am happier this way. In this, I count myself both superior to humans who have a disgusting habit of doing it in and out of season for most of their adult life. Would you consider setting upa charity for pets with me? We could call it Human Protection and run a campaign to neuter and spay them? They'd be so much happier.
George

Whiskers....our pride, glory, and a sign of intelligence?

Dear George,

Is there any connection between the number of whiskers one has and one’s intelligence?

My brother is trying to convince me that more whiskers one has ….more intelligent one is! He’s telling me that “tomcats” have more whiskers… generally speaking!

George, is this true? Or is my brother a misogynist? If this theory is true….does it applies to humans too? I can see that our “daddy” has more whiskers than “mommy” but why is he shaving every night then? Is he afraid that his intelligence will overgrow while he’s sleeping? And…what purpose will have shaving legs? I don’t get it!

George, what is the difference between our whiskers and human whiskers?

All confused

Minnie

Dear Minnie,

Your brother George is right that proper functioning whiskers are a sign of intelligence. They tell us if we can pass through tight places, they send sensitive messages back to the whisker pad and the brain, and when we catch a mouse, they move forward to touch it so we can tell if it is struggling while in our mouth (as our eyes couldn't swivel enough to see). Brilliant, brilliant things. Our Pride and Our Glory.

They are a sign of superiority over humans and our greater intelligence (more information reaches the feline brain from our whiskers). Many humans, including many females, don't have any whiskers at all. Those that do either shave them off, pluck them out (ouch), or have electric shock treatment to get rid of them. Why? Because their whiskers are non-functional bits of hair that aren't worth the face they are growing on. Human whiskers, even the thick long ones grown by the males in a beard, do nothing. They can't move. They just catch bits of old food. Horrible things.

However, where George has gone wrong is thinking that male toms have more whiskers than females. If toms are bigger than females, as they often are, then the whiskers will be longer so as to embody the right proportions with the bigger body. But they will be the same number. Incidentally blind cats grow super-normal growth whiskers to hellp them "see" with them. We also have whiskers above the eyes and on the forefeet, where they can feel a mouse if we jump on it and hold it down with our front claws.

Male humans have more whiskers than females but I do not think it is a sign of intellectual superiority. As females seem to be more addicted to cats, I consider the reverse may be true. Or may be there is no connection.

That, dear Minnie, is the glory and the beauty of our whiskers. Poor human pets are deprived of these wonderful organs.

Love George

PS. You both have lovely whiskers... purrrrfect

Campaign for cats on Facebook

Dear George,
For the past few weeks, our human has been chattering away about how much fun she's been having on The Cat's Whiskas Facebook page. She shows us all the lovely photos and stories shared by other humans about their clever cats. And recently we've caught her meowing at her computer on more than one occasion!
We were originally concerned because she usually saves her meows for communicating with us, bless. But she explained that she's actually recording her meows for our benefit! The Cat's Whiskas are campaigning to have cats officially listed on Facebook profiles. Did you know that even though our human shares every other part of her life with us, she still can't list us as part of her family on her profile? Indeed, that is just not good enough.
And so we write to tell you about the campaign, and to invite you and all of your readers to encourage their humans to join The Cat's Whiskas page and record meows for cat equality!
Strength in numbers,

Bonnie & Buttons
The Cat's Whiskas
http://www.facebook.com/WhiskasUK

Dear Bonnie and Buttons,

I know you work for Whiskas, so I need to say that your letter has gone on this blog because I think it is fun to make Facebook into a more catty zone. Why not? My secretary, Celia, already runs a Cats Behaving Badly page (http://www.facebook.com/CatsBehavingBadly ) of which I disapprove heartily as it is a space for humans to post funny photos of cats. I would like a page where I could post funny photos of humans. Here's what I find funny about humans - their odd way of washing with water not saliva, their inability to move their whiskers (if they have any at all), the way the males lose their hair on their head, their nakedness - skin without fur, etc etc.

Of course, there are areas like the cat blogosphere which is devoted to cats who blog. But a feline Facebook membership would be another area where we could express our feelings about the idiotic species, Homo sapiens (I don’t think), which we keep as pets. There’s too much on the web from a human point of view. Lets get our felinity out there as a corrective to anthrocentric thinking (ie: human-centred thinking).

Think Cat, say I. So, Bonnie and Buttons, get typing. Make your secretary work for you. We could also use your page as a place to post photos of cats that need homes – there are plenty of those in my area (http://www.westoxfordshirecats.org.uk).

Purrs and rubs

George