Months ago, we reported the story of Sampson the cat from Scotland, who was found 500 miles south of his home. At the time, this was one of the most incredible feats of cat-travel we’d ever heard of, but today we heard about something even more astonishing.

Ravila Hairova and husband Lev Kondratyev left their cat, Karim, with neighbours when they decided to move 2,000 miles from Gulistan, Uzbekistan to Liska, Russia in 2008. Two days later, Karim disappeared; “we never heard another word about him” Hairova told the Sun. However, two years after moving house, Hairova spotted a cat waiting in the street outside their new home; “When I got closer I saw it was Karim; thin, and in very poor condition but it was him” she reported, to which Kondratyev added, “”There are certain marks on his body including a scar on his tail when it was caught in the door that show us he is 100% our Karim.”

To achieve this exceptional feat, Karim had to travel 2,000 miles across three state boarders to reach his owners, baffling experts across the world. At nine-years old, Karim is no whippersnapper either, making his journey even more amazing!

After her husband died from a heart attack before Christmas, Margaret Baker wanted some company – so she applied to adopt Lilly, a Bengal cat in a Feline Care animal shelter. However, when the charity discovered that Mrs. Baker lived on Abbey Estate in Thetford, Norfolk, they denied her application, on the grounds that she lived in too rough an area! Mrs. Baker explained, “They phoned and said due to my postcode I couldn’t have Lilly…I put the phone down and just burst into tears”.

Mrs. Baker’s daughter, Angela Rourke, calls it “discrimination”, but manager of the charity shelter, Molly Cutmore, feels otherwise; “We’ve heard reports of people training their dogs to attack cats and there have been cruelty cases on the estate…We don’t want to stop people who want one having a cat, but can’t re-home them if we think something will happen.”

Although we cat the Cat Health blog have great sympathy with Mrs. Baker, we’re on the side of the charity this time. As much as some people may want to own cats, it is the safety of the cat that is of paramount importance and cat welfare charities cannot be expected to give cats to people who live in areas that have been deemed unsafe. Owning a cat is not a right, it’s a privilege – some areas simply aren’t suitable and that’s too bad.

In my experience, cat owners are serial ‘Tweeters’ often don’t go together. It seems to me that people who consider their every mundane thought interesting enough to post on the internet just aren’t the kind of people who take to looking after and caring for a cat. Sony, however, think differently. Sony seem to believe that cats and Twitter got together so well that their Computer Science Laboratories have actually invented a life-logging tool designed for cats…

That’s correct; a collar is fitted with a camera, a GPS monitor and even an accelerometer, then attached to a cat and used to communicate with Twitter, to update the world about what the cat is doing. The collar can tell whether the cat is walking around, eating or resting and, let’s be honest, does anybody post anything more interesting than that on Twitter? Apparently the camera also recognises the faces of others cats, though I am dubious about how well this would work.

At the moment there are around a dozen phrases the collar can tweet, along the lines of “This is tasty” when the cat is eating. As if anybody could care! As a piece of social networking, this is nonsense. However, as a cat owner, I do see some advantages… I’m not always at home, for example, and it would be nice to check my cats’ tweets to make sure they are getting enough food, exercise and rest as they should be. It would also be very handy to know exactly where they are, on the countless occasions when they’ve gone AWOL! I wonder if it’ll bring the pet insurance down if I can prove I can trace my cat’s every movement…

In today’s society of designer pets, chickpea-based diets and rights for inanimate objects, it should come as no surprise to readers when I write than many pet owners are moving their pets onto vegetarian diets. Instead of tackling the issue of rights and the subject of ‘what people should do’, it is my job to give you the facts so you can make your own informed choices.

Cats are carnivores. From their bones, teeth and claws to their senses, stomach and bowels, cats are ‘designed’ to hunt, kill, eat and excrete meat. In the wild, almost 100% their nutrition comes from meat. However, let us bear in mind that, in the wild, meat is the only source of the nutrients that cats require to be healthy. This is no longer the case for a felis catus…

Although domesticated cats cannot get all their essential nutrients from a vegetarian diet alone, we humans have developed clever supplements which, when combined with a vegetarian diet, ensure cats get everything they need without having to eat meat. The same goes for our human diet as well – nobody ‘needs’ to eat meat. When combined with the fact that lots of companies conduct tests on animals, as well as the massive environmental damage that keeping livestock to slaughter for food does to the environment, it may be hard for cat owners to justify their pet’s meaty diet.

Image from adcnews.go.com

Another sad story today at the Cat Health Blog; we’re sorry to report that a man has pleaded guilty to charges of bludgeoning a cat to death in Canada. David Wayne Canaday was spending his Christmas holiday with a couple and their cat Groober in 2006. When the couple went out, Canaday attacked Groober with a broom, killed him and later claimed the cat had an accident.

The reason we’re bringing this to your attention is not, as you might think, to make you feel glum. Although this is a sad story, the most interesting part is that Canaday was sentenced to a mere 30 days in jail and pathetic $50 fine! When we wrote our recent report about David Tilley’s total neglect of 23 cats that landed him with a £5,000 fine and 100 hours of service, many people felt this wasn’t enough! I shudder to think how the British public would react if one of us beat a cat to death and got a month in prison and a fine you couldn’t buy your dinner for!

On the plus side Canady has been banned from keeping animals for 10 years (it should be for life) and order to attend counselling and psychiatric assessment. I don’t know what there is to assess – it’s obvious this man is insane!

55-year old David Tilley from Ashill, near Watton, has been charged with 21 offenses under the Animal Welfare Act 2006, after 23 cats were found living in “disgraceful and squalid environment” in his bungalow. An inspector on the case said
it would have been “totally avoidable if Tilley had asked for help. As it was, the cats undeniably suffered significantly throughout in the almost indescribable squalor.”

Chair of the bench, Elizabeth Hornegold, said the only mitigating factor in the case was that Mr. Tilley had not starved the cats. Otherwise, many of them had been soaked in urine and covered in faeces, carrying fleas and suffering with dermatisis. The hallway of the bungalow’s was covered in cans and rubbish, and “a black liquid underneath the debris [stank] of ammonia and decay.” Mr. Tilley was charged with failing to provide the cats with a hygienic environment, free from hazards, failing to protect them from injury, disease and pain and failing to ensure they could behave naturally. He was ordered to pay costs of £5,179 and do 100 hours of unpaid work, along with being banned from keeping cats for 3 years.

All the cats have now been rehomed, but it doesn’t seem right to us that, after all the suffering these animals went through, Mr. Tilley got a mere 3 years’ ban from keeping cats. The fines and work are acceptable punishments, but it’s unclear why this man deserves to ever keep cats again!

Image from edp24.co.uk

In recent news, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new talent show, Over the Rainbow, will be holding auditions for cast members for a West End musical version of the Wizard of Oz. Although we’re not normally very interested in shows like this at the Cat Blog, this one has caught our attention because Lord Llyod Webber has publically stated that he would prefer a cat to play the role of Toto, rather than a dog!

“I had to point out to [the BBC] that as a cat man, this was not something that I was very happy about at all” the composer stated. He went on to say “I might insist on having a cat on the programme, because I think the BBC as a public service broadcaster have got to give equal time in my view to cats”.

Here here Lord Lloyd Webber! It’s about time the cats got in on the action; too long they’ve been associated with bad luck and witches, it’s time they got a role with the good guys! After all, the rest of the musical is set push the boundaries, with new songs being composed and even the iconic role of Dorothy set for a change; Lloyd Webber has mentioned he wants Dorothy to be played as “a slightly rebellious girl who wants to get away from home”.

His preferance for a cat Toto is shared by judge Sheila Hancock, who said, “I absolutely loathe dogs…I think we should have a cat.” Sadly, as great an idea as it is, I fear tradition may win out this time. Still, it’s good for cats to get a mention!

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A man in Canada spends three hours a night making rounds of the city, looking after feral cats – and has done so for the last five years! He covers a 25-block area of Edmonton, stopping to feed up to 75 cats! Not only does this take up a large part of his day, it costs over $600 every month to buy supplies, which he finds himself when he hasn’t enough donors!

Of course, monthly supplies are only one of the expenditures for Dennis Benzer; since feral cats have no cat insurance, Benzer spends thousands looking after their wellbeing, including having them sprayed or neutered. When asked why he does it, Benzer explains “Nobody wants to take in a feral cat” and he’s right; the likely fate for most these cats is being put down at the city pound, if they don’t perish on the street.

“All the shelters are already overrun with cats” he claims; a sad but universal truth at the moment. Perhaps if there were more people like Dennis, our world would be a better place for cats… Of course, it might also cause a massive surge in the population of feral cats, which nobody really wants. Nevertheless, it’s an uplifting story!

The world’s most expensive cat, the Ashera has a price tag of £12,000. British businessman Simon Brodie breeds these cats from the wild African serval, the Asian leopard cat and a type of domestic cat. With striking leopard-like fur, these cats can grow up to 1 meter tall and weigh up to 30 pounds.

I wonder what the cat insurance would be on the Ashera??

Image: SWNS

With the Year of the Tiger just around the corner, this week China announced that it will be launching a multi-million dollar effort to save the world’s biggest cat, the Amur Tiger.

Image MJCdetroit

The Amur Tiger is also known as the Siberian Tiger, can be known to be up to 500 pounds in weight. With two of nine subspecies of tigers extinct in this world, this is definitely a welcome move. The Guardian reported that

Since the last tiger year, in 1998, the wild population of the animal worldwide has almost halved to about 3,200 due to habitat loss, economic development and poaching for hides and traditional medicine.

China will be working with various NGOs and the World Bank to ensure that not another tiger subspecies will be lost forever. We hope that the Amur Tiger will indeed survive several more generations and continue to enjoy the privilege of being the world’s largest cat.