Maru is a very clever cat. Maru not only remembers where the toy is, but is able to open the door to get it. It looks like Maru found a really good toy to play with. Take a look:
A cat from New Mexico travel 1,300 miles to Chicago. Charles went missing from his Albuquerque home eight months ago. Charles was picked up by Chicago Animal Care and Control, where a microchip spared Charles from being euthanised. Take a look:
Debbye Turner Bell shared some tips for decoding a cat's behavior on the CBS Early Show. She says they can be as active and expressive as dogs. Most cat owners would not disagree. Ears and tail straight up usually indicate a happy cat. A new study found that cats have different types of purrs. Take a look:
Video: Cat Enjoys Being Wrapped Like Christmas Present
Flippy cat is one of the world's most patient cats. Flippy doesn't mind being slowly wrapped up. It looks like this special cat even enjoys it. Take a look:
Thousands of mummies of animals have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs. Unfortunately, the value of many of these pet mummies was not respected early on and many were lost. The ones that remain have become very popular tourist attractions. There were mummies of cats, dogs, birds, fish and even crocodiles. You can read the article here on National Geographic. A photo gallery can be found here.
Backpackers traveled with a kitten on a 9,000 mile journey from Miami to Argentina. The kitten seems to enjoy the backpacking experience. You can see more here from the backpackers' French website.
A cat was found in a Pennsylvania neighborhood covered in duct tape. It is unclear how the poor cat ended up being covered in duct tape. There is a $1,000 reward is being offered for information leading to the conviction of whoever was cruel enough to wrap duct tape around the poor cat and then abandon it. The cat named "Sticky" by staff at the Pennsylvania SPCA. They believe the cat is 1 to 2 years old and once had a home. A local CBS news station reports that police are also looking for whoever was cruel enough to do this.
Update 9-28-09: A 19-year-old was arrested for the cruel duct taping incident.
This cute version of the Whack-a-Mole game involves kitten. In the game the kittens are not really being whacked, they are being gently pushed. Eventually all the kittens escape from the silly game. A statement on the website says they had a lot of fun making the video and so did the kittens. Update: CNN says PETA has said the video is cute and harmless.
A cat named Kit-kat has adopted some baby squirrels after they fell out of a tree. The baby squirrels and the kittens seem to be getting a long so far.
Beloved White House pet cat India has passed away at age 18 reports the AP. India spent a good portion of his life at the White House.
"The president, Mrs. Bush, Barbara, and Jenna are deeply saddened by the passing of their cat India ("Willie")," press secretary Sally McDonough said in a statement.
"India was a beloved member of the Bush family for almost two decades. She will be greatly missed," she said.
The black American Shorthair, which lived with President George W. Bush and his wife at the White House, died Sunday.
India is pictured looking grumpy wearing a party hat while celebrating a birthday. India is said to have preferred being indoors and loved the White House library.
Lost Cat Survives Three Months in Yellowstone Park
A cat lost in Yellowstone National Park over three months ago has been returned to its family. Fluffy some survived all the predators in West Yellowstone by hiding out in a garage. She was eventually coaxed from the garage and trapped.
Fluffy somehow survived for about three months despite the coyotes, foxes, owls, hawks, eagles and grizzly bears that frequent the West Yellowstone area.
"It's pretty amazing," said Rick Armstrong, a West Yellowstone school guidance counselor, whose family lives north of town. "There's plenty of predators that would want to eat a little cat."
Residents in the Horse Butte area, about a mile from the campground, noticed the stray cat and started leaving food out for her. She had a harness and tag, but wouldn't let anyone get close enough to her to read it, Armstrong said.
Fluffy was apparently finding shelter in a garage.
Fluffy is lucky to have been rescued before the winter hit. The campground sure doesn't sound like the place to bring a cat but at least the story has a happy ending. It sounds like one of the children was missing little Fluffy something terrible.
A pet dog nearly died trying to protect four kittens trapped in a house fire in Melbourne, Australia. Those are some tiny kittens brave Leo the dog saved. Leo was unconcious by the time fire-fighters got to him but he's okay now.
Remember Powder, the 44lb cat that lost his home when his owner foreclosed? Well, there's good news to report. 400 people applied to adopt Powder (aka Prince Chunk) and a family in south Jersey was selected to be Powder's new humans. You can watch the happy news in the video below or read it in this CBS News story.
It's already been reported that the housing slowdown has been impacting the livelihood of pets. Some people facing foreclosure turn in their pets to shelters. One of these stranded cats is a 10-year-old cat named Powder. WNBC reports that Powder, a large 44-pound cat, was found wandering around a New Jersey suburb. His owner was an older woman who lost her home.
Shelter director Jennifer Anderch said the older woman recently lost her home and could not keep the 10-year-old cat, whom she called "Powder."
The shelter has been caring for the cat -- who became a local media sensation this week and was dubbed "Princess Chunk" -- since it was found on Saturday wandering the southern New Jersey suburb of Voorhees.
It also turns out that the princess is a prince. A veterinarian who checked the cat Thursday on "Live with Regis and Kelly" determined it's a "he."
In a week with headlines about presidential politics, suicide bombings in Iraq and big baseball trades, the cat has also captured the nation's attention.
In fact, Anderch has changed her voicemail greeting to identify herself as "Chunk's publicist."
Powder is likely getting headlines because of his large size but it is an important story because it calls attention to growing problem of pets being left homeless due to the housing crisis. Other articles have said that Powder eats normally so his weight is probably not from overeating. Powder's owner did call into the Camden County Animal Shelter but said she was very sad and could not afford to take care of Powder anymore. Powder even made it on to the Live With Regis and Kelly show as you can see here in the Dallas News story. You can read still more stories about Powder here.
Here's an earlier video about Powder from CBS before much was known about her.
A company called iCat hosts Cat Agility Tournaments. In the tournaments cat owners try to guide their cat around a series of obstacles including steps, tunnels and hurdles. This is much easier said than done and often the cat isn't interested in cooperating. The CBS video below shows how many of the cats are reluctant to participate. However, CBS reveals that part of the goal of the tournaments is actually to give the cat owners more exercise.
A cute kitten was born with the markings "I Love Dot." The cat's fur has the letter "I" followed by a heart symbol and a dot on its fur. This will instantly get you hordes of appreciative people thanks to the Internet and people's natural affinity for kittens and cuteness. The fact that the kitten's mother is named "Dottie" makes the story that much better. News 10 has the adorable story.
Four-year-old Michael Ramirez's cat Dottie had a litter of six kittens on Easter. Two of the kittens were born on Saturday night, and the final four were born early Sunday morning.
So far, not so unusual. But one of the black and white kitties does have "unusual" markings - a message of love for its mother Dottie, says Michael's stepmom Teauri Ramirez.
According to Ramirez, the kitten's side reads, "I Love Dot."
"We waited for the fur to dry and we saw it and it surely said, 'I love Dot,'" said Ramirez.
ABC News is reporting on an interesting study that found cat owners have a lower stroke and heart disease risk than non-cat owners.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota's Stroke Research Center looked at 4,435 people, aged 30 to 75 years, who were participating in ongoing national government health research from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study.
They found that over a 20-year period, those who had never owned a cat had a 40 percent greater risk of death due to heart attack and a 30 percent higher risk of death due to any sort of cardiovascular disease than previous or current cat owners. Researchers found no such protective effects for dog owners.
There are going to be many cat owners who believe this study is true because lap cats do provide a very calming influence. People will often fall asleep with a cat in their lap. There very well may be something to the research but studies aren't perfect and there are many factors that simply cannot be tested. For example, it is possible that the heart benefits have more to do with the kind of people that become "cat people" than it does with the stress reduction benefit that cats provide directly. Lead study investigator Dr. Adnan Qureshi said this could be a possibility.
"Maybe cat owners tend not to have high-stress personalities, or they are just the type of people that are not highly affected by anxiety or high-stress situations," Qureshi said.
There is also the possiblity that owning a cat gives a person responsibility and a "reason to live." A person might try to take better care of themselves and live longer so they are there for their beloved pet.
"I have heard an owner with a chronic, debilitating illness say that her cat gives her a reason to get up each day," said Marla McGeorge, veterinarian at The Cat Doctor in Portland, Ore.
It is also possible that the researchers are really on to something here and the stress release and anxiety reduction that cats provide does give cat owners a hearty healthy boost.
A little ten-month old kitten named Gracie Mae snuck into her owner's bag and ended up in a stranger's house in another state after there was a bag mixup.
The Fort Worth, Texas, man told TODAY's Al Roker on Friday about how he learned the hard way last week when he mistakenly picked up the wrong suitcase at the airport. Inside was 10-month-old Gracie Mae, who had curled up in her owner's suitcase in Florida and ended up going on the ride of her life.
After being tossed in the car, dumped on a baggage belt, X-rayed by the TSA, piled in a cargo hold, flown 1,300 miles from her home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., dumped on a conveyor belt, taken for a ride on a carousel, and tossed into another car, Gracie Mae wasn't in the best frame of mind when Carter opened the suitcase at his home.
"She looks cute now, but she was all teeth and fangs at that point," said Carter, who admitted, "I screamed like a little girl" when Gracie Mae erupted from the suitcase.
Here's a video from MSNBC about lucky Gracie Mae. Makes you wonder about airport security if a kitty can make it through without being discovered. Always check your luggage for pets before you close it up - kittens love to find new hiding places.
There are more dog owning households than cat owning households but there are more cats than dogs. According to the 2007 U.S. Pet Ownership and Demographic Sourcebook published by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) there are 43 million dog owning households compared with 37.5 million cat owning households, but 81.7 million cats compared to 72 million dogs.
Women were the primary caregivers to pets according to the study. The study also found that about 64% of all pet-owning households owned more than one pet, and those pet owners spent a total of $24.5 billion on veterinary care in 2006.
The average veterinary expenditure per household for all pets was $366 in 2006.
These are just a few of the many facts offered up about owners, pets, and veterinary medicine in the latest edition of the Sourcebook, which is published every five years.
Scientists at the Gyeongsang National University in South Korea have cloned cats and added a fluorescent protein gene. When these cats are exposed to an ultraviolet light source they glow eerily red and green. Cosmic Log explains how the process works.
Here's what the researchers say they did: They took skin cells from Turkish Angora female cats and used a virus to insert the genetic instructions for making red fluorescent protein. Then they put the gene-altered nuclei into eggs for cloning. The cloned embryos were implanted back into the donor cats, which effectively became the surrogate mothers for their own clones.
Four kittens were born by Caesarian section, but one of them died during the procedure, according to the Korea Times. The fact that the kittens' skin cells glowed under ultraviolet light served as evidence that they were really gene-altered clones.
Assuming that the results are confirmed, Kong's cats would join mice and pigs in the glow-in-the-dark clone menagerie. The implication is that if you can pass along the easy-to-recognize coding for fluorescent markers through cloning, you could eventually pass along more complex genetic coding.
Theoretically, you could add in the coding for an endangered species, producing cloned hybrids to boost the gene pool for Sumatran tigers, Iberian lynxes and the like. You might even stick in the coding to give other creatures human diseases, so that they can be studied without raising the level of ethical concern that comes with human experimentation. (I realize that there's a different set of ethical concerns about such trangenic experiments, however.)
You can see a video of the cats here. You have to wonder about the safety of adding this fluorescenct protein gene to the kittens. We hope the cats are not harmed in any manner. Just because you can make an animal glow doesn't mean you should.
The two cats in this video named Stina and Mossy usually fight instead of talk. However, here they appear to be having a conversation. The video says this "talking" continued for about 1 hour, constantly. Wonder what they could be talking about?
Reuters reports that there is an unusual new book out about Pope Benedict XVI that tells his life story. What's unusual about the book is that it is narrated by a cat named Chico. Chico is a real cat who knew the Pope when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The book is called Chico and Joseph -- A Cat Recounts the Life of Pope Benedict XVI.
"Dear Children, here you will find a biography that is different to others because it is told by a cat and it is not every day a cat can consider the Holy Father his friend and sit down to write his life story," the Pope's personal secretary, Monsignor Georg Ganswein, says in the foreword.
"Chico and Joseph -- A Cat Recounts the Life of Pope Benedict XVI" is narrated by Chico who took up with the Pope in his native Germany when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
The illustrated 44-page book is written by Italian author Jeanne Perego and set mostly in Germany in the years before Benedict was elected in April 2005.
Chico is a real cat who belongs to a German couple in the German city of Pentling, where the Pope lived until he moved to Rome in 1981. The couple are caretakers of the house where Ratzinger had hoped to retire had he not been elected Pope.
Chico tells the story of the life of "my best friend" from his birth in Germany in 1927, through his days as a young man, priest, bishop and cardinal. It ends with his election as Pope on April 19, 2005.
A Telegrapharticle says the Pope is a friend of cats and he used to "feed hordes of strays that congregated outside his apartment" when he was a Cardinal. The news articles suggest the book is out now but we couldn't find any results when we searched for the title on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. It will probably show up there in a week or two - unless it is going to be sold elsewhere.
Millions of younger students have headed back to grade school and high school while millions of older kids have headed off to college. Parents are often relieved when school begins again but the loss of their friends and the schedule disruption often leaves pets depressed. MSNBC has a great article about this subject written by Kim Campbell Thornton. Thornton says it isn't unusual for pets to "go into a funk" when kids return to school.
It's not unusual for dogs - and sometimes cats - to go into a funk when the kids go back to school in the fall or off to college for the first time. They may even mope around when your work schedule changes.
Cats can also get depressed when kids go back to school. Cats really aren't big fans of altered schedules to being with.
"Part of that emotional attachment is a behavioral expectation that the two are going to do something predictable," says John C. Wright, an animal behaviorist and professor of psychology at Mercer University in Macon, Ga. "It's important to the cat on a daily basis. So you have a disruption in daily routine when someone leaves for school, a disruption in the emotional security the cat has, and that can result in both emotional and behavioral depression."
With emotional depression, the cat appears to be distraught and may vocalize more than usual, Wright says. Signs of behavioral depression range from lethargy - the cat tends to sleep longer, especially during those times when it's used to interacting with the person who's gone - to hyperactivity.
Cats need stability - don't we all. Kids going off to college is probably the hardest on pets. When a child goes to grade school or high school at least are they are back the same day and the pet can adjust to the new schedule. But a college student may be gone for months at a time. One good remedy suggested in the article for a dog who is missing a friend is exercise.
"For many people, when a kid goes off to college, the whole household is kind of depressed," Nitschke says. "It's a change in status in people's lives, and everybody reacts to that at some level."
Getting out and walking your lonesome dog is good therapy for both of you. If you face the prospect of a child going off to college or camp or basic training, start preparing your dog sooner rather than later, especially if your child and dog share a particularly close bond.
"If the kid going off to school was the major source of the dog's playtime, then when you take that out of the environment, there's going to be what seems like a deficit to the dog," Nitschke says. "I would increase the physically active interactions with the dog. It's not a bad idea to get the dog used to being walked or played with by other members of the household before the child goes off to college or back to school."
The article also includes some tips for preventing separation anxiety by training your pets to spend time alone.
An article in the Daily Record says microchips have helped a lot of pets reunite with their owners. The article says the procedure is easier for cats than dogs - dogs may neeed to be sedated.
Microchips are responsible for thousands of happy reunions between owners and pets every year. With the large amount of lost pets taken to shelters, microchips could also keep your pet from being euthanized or sold to a new owner.
"Microchips are only about the size of a grain of rice," said Patty Hug, a veterinary technician at the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences at Texas A & M University. "They are made to last the entire life of the pet, so once it's inserted, no upkeep or replacements are necessary."
Microchips are injected through a fairly large needle. Cats tend to cope with the injection easily, but dogs often need sedation during the procedure, says Hug. She says the best time to install the microchip is while the pet is being spayed or neutered. The pet is already under anesthesia, so it won't feel any pain.
The article says other pets besides cats and dogs also get chipped including birds, large fish and farm animals. Veterinarians and animal shelters have microchip scanners they can use to read the code on a pet's microchip. The chip's manufacturer is then called to obtain the pet owner's information. Note: the article points out that microchips are not a replacement for a collar.
Suite 101 has a helpful article about pet microchips here. The article says there are two costs involved - one to have the chip implanted (about $30 to $40 according to the article) and another $15 to $20 fee to register your pet with the the microchip company. The article also states that the two largest pet microchip companies are AVID and HomeAgain.
It all sounds very easy and uncomplicated right? Unfortunately, that isn't the case. Competition among the microchip companies has created big problems. The biggest problem with pets and microchips is that there is not a universal scanner. This means that a vet or an animal shelter could scan your pet with a scanner that doesn't recognize your pet's brand of microchip. For more about this problem read here and here.
A more recent series on Dolittler - Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 (hat tip Pet Connection) takes a longer look at the pet microchip wars.
Update: There are reports of a studies linking microchips to cancer in lab mice and rats.
Oscar the Cat is an unusual cat who was recently written about in the New England Journal of Medicine. Oscar lives at a nursing home and can predict when patients at the nursing home are about to die. According to an Associated Press news story Oscar frequently climbs in bed with patients who are just hours away from death.
"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.
The 2-year-old feline was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses.
After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.
Oscar also likes to make the rounds at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center and check on patients. The article says he was adopted by the Center when he was just two years old.
The BBC also ran a story about Oscar. They cite an expert who says it isn't unusual for cats to sense when people are ill.
Thomas Graves, a feline expert from the University of Illinois, told the BBC: "Cats often can sense when their owners are sick or when another animal is sick.
"They can sense when the weather will change, they're famous for being sensitive to premonitions of earthquakes."
It is clear from this story that Oscar has the ability to sense when patients are about to die. What's extra unusual about Oscar is that he makes rounds like a doctor and he feels the need to be with the patients when they are near death's door. The news stories have sparked much interest and discussion about Oscar. He is a hit in the blogosphere with thousands of posts about him including Wired Science, WSJ Health, Itchmo and Animal Hubbub.
Beloved White House pet cat India has passed away at age 18 
It's already been 
A cute kitten was born with the markings "I Love Dot." The cat's fur has the letter "I" followed by a heart symbol and a dot on its fur. This will instantly get you hordes of appreciative people thanks to the Internet and people's natural affinity for kittens and cuteness. The fact that the kitten's mother is named "Dottie" makes the story that much better. News 10 has the adorable 
Scientists at the Gyeongsang National University in South Korea have cloned cats and added a fluorescent protein gene. When these cats are exposed to an ultraviolet light source they glow eerily red and green. Cosmic Log 
Oscar the Cat is an unusual cat who was recently written about in the New England Journal of Medicine. Oscar lives at a nursing home and can predict when patients at the nursing home are about to die. According to an Associated Press 