CAT STUFF
18 April 2011
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Feline tales and furry facts
from the catty crew at Kitten Action
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IN THIS ISSUE :
** Update …
** Beware of cruel scamsters
** Translating the purr-meow
** He loves the dog, she loves the cat …. which pet has the edge?
** Cat-astrophe!
** Memo to the cats
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** UPDATE
Kitten rescues continue unabated, and the wet weather we’ve had in Durban hasn’t helped as stray and feral cats are forced to find somewhere safe to move their babies.
Sometimes during wet weather, or other changing conditions, the ‘safe’ place becomes extremely unsafe and the mom cat is forced to move her kittens to somewhere safer. It is often during this moving process that very small kittens are found. Obviously it is best for the kittens’ welfare for them to stay with their mom, but if this isn’t possible, kittens can be raised on the bottle by caring foster parents.
Another dangerous time for stray and feral kittens is when they are about 5 weeks old as the weaning process begins and kittens suddenly appear, looking for food. This is often when kittens are discovered – in factories, warehouses and supermarkets, under buildings and swimming pool motors, in school yards, garden sheds and car parks, behind restaurants, hotels and apartment blocks. These kittens are very vulnerable to uncaring humans and other predators.
Many of the kittens in need of rescue have been placed in danger by uncaring people – to put it politely.
For example, one day in October last year, I received a call from Andrew who was driving to Durban from Pinetown and had seen a kitten on the side of the highway near Paradise Valley. In this area, there is no emergency lane or even a verge! Andrew only realized the speck on the roadside was a kitten when he had already driven past and hoped that it would still be there by the time I arrived.
I grabbed a cat basket and jumped into my car – no matter how quickly I responded, it would take me about 15 minutes to get to the spot where the kitten was seen. I was half-way to Pinetown when Andrew called again to say he had the kitten with him! He couldn’t bear to leave the kitten to its fate and realized that it would be incredibly hard for me to find the right place on the highway, and even if I did, there was no guarantee the kitten would live that long.
After speaking to me, he had taken the next off-ramp and doubled back to where he had seen the kitten. Miraculously, it was still there! So Andrew stopped his car in the slow lane with the hazard lights flashing, took off his shirt and crept towards the kitten, pounced on it, wrapped it in his shirt and, as he had nothing to put it in, placed it carefully in the boot of his car. Goodness knows what passing road-users thought at the sight of a half-dressed man creeping along the side of the highway!!
Andrew and I met in Westville and I cautiously extracted the kitten from his boot and popped it in a basket. Black with a cute moustache, the kitten’s mood was anything but cute as you can see from this picture!! As is often the case, outward ferocity disguised the terror the kitten was feeling and clearly it was this ferocious attitude that had kept it alive on the side of the highway, as trucks and cars roared past less than a meter away. It was obvious that someone had dumped the kitten on the side of the highway – there was no way it could have got itself to that location as it was only 5 weeks old. We had no idea, nor will we ever know, whether other kittens or even a mom cat had also been dumped on the roadside.
Within 48 hours of being in the care of foster parents, the kitten’s ferocious attitude had started to change and within 72 hours, it was a purring furball 
) It turned out that the kitten was a female and after a few weeks of loving care, she was adopted by a new family and is now ruling the roost in her forever home. Bless you, Andrew, for your courage and compassion that gave this brave fur-baby a chance to live a long and happy life.
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** BEWARE CRUEL SCAMSTERS
When long-standing colleague and friend, Barbara lost one of her precious cats, she did everything she could to locate her lost cat, including placing an advert in the newspaper. She was over the moon when she received a phone call from someone claiming to have found her cat – he told her a long story about how he had found the cat and asked for a cell phone recharge voucher, promising to meet her to hand the cat over.
Barbara was so desperate to find her cat that she didn’t realize she had been scammed until she arrived at the designated meeting place and found no-one there, and more tragically, no sign of her cat. We have since learned that other people who have advertised their lost pets in the press have also been caught by this scam.
People who place ads for lost pets (or anything else, for that matter) must be made aware of low-life individuals like this who prey on the desperation of distraught pet owners. Be warned that someone who responds to your advert for a lost pet and asks for payment of any kind, could be one of these cruel scamsters.
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** TRANSLATING THE PURR-MEOW
It seems researchers just can’t get enough of cats! A group of researchers at the University of Sussex in England found that some cats develop a special meow that is more likely to get their owners’ attention than an ordinary meow. The researchers dubbed this sound the ‘purr-meow’.
While people usually think of the purr as a sign of happiness, the purr-meow – translated as “feed me now” – is a high-pitched cry mixed with a purr that humans find hard to ignore.
“The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response,” said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. “Solicitation purring is probably more likely to get a positive response than overt meowing, which could just get the cat ejected from the room.” Clearly cats know us only too well!!
McComb got the idea for the study from her experiences with her own cat, who would consistently wake her up in the morning with a very insistent purr. After speaking with other cat owners, she learned that some of their cats made the same type of call. As a scientist who studies vocal communication in mammals, she decided to investigate the manipulative meow.
Setting up the experiment wasn’t easy. While the felines regularly used purr-meows around their owners, they were not eager to make the same cries in front of strangers. So McComb and her team trained cat owners to record their pets’ cries, capturing the sounds made by cats when they were seeking food and when they were not. In all, the team collected recordings from 10 cats.
The researchers then played the cries back to 50 human participants, not all of whom owned cats. They found that humans, even if they had never owned a cat, judged the purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food – the purrs with an embedded, high-pitched cry – as more urgent and harder to ignore than those made in other contexts. When the team re-synthesized the recorded purrs to remove the embedded cry, leaving all else unchanged, the human subjects’ urgency rating for those calls decreased significantly.
McComb thinks that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate normal purring when it proves effective in generating a response from their humans. Not all cats use this form of purring, she said, noting that it seems to develop mostly in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in multi-cat households where their purr-meow might be overlooked, or wrongly interpreted by the other cats.
It’s probably just as well cats don’t publish their research on humans – that could be really embarrassing!!
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** HE LOVES THE DOG, SHE LOVES THE CAT … WHICH PET HAS THE EDGE?
A study by so-called experts at the New Scientist magazine into character, intelligence and usefulness of cats and dogs claims that dogs are better pets than cats. Cats fared best in intelligence – cats’ brains are bigger and contain more cells, plus they have better memories and attention spans than dogs. Cats are also more popular – 204 million cats live in the top 10 cat-owning nations compared with 173 million dogs in the 10 countries where canines are most in vogue.
Cats get more attention from humans, and they also out-scored dogs on vocal range. Dogs can vary the length, range, pitch and frequency of their bark but when compared with cats, it’s a no-contest … ever heard a dog purr?
Of course, in the category of ‘usefulness’ dogs definitely have the edge. Dogs have a longer shared history with humans and may have been domesticated as long as 135 000 years ago. Cats took much longer to share their lives with humans! Also, claimed the ‘experts’, dogs can hunt, herd and guard; they can sniff out drugs and bombs, guide deaf and blind people, race for sport, pull sledges, find someone buried in the snow, help children learn and possibly even predict earthquakes.
What these so-called experts don’t realize, of course, is that cats could also do all these useful things – they just don’t want to J
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** CAT-ASTROPHE
One unspayed cat + her mate + their offspring can produce over 370,000 kittens in 7 years.
That is a CAT-ASTROPHE. SPAY / NEUTER YOUR CAT TODAY and be a part of the solution NOT a part of the problem.
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| ** MEMO TO THE CATS Dear Cats,You know I love and adore you beyond words. However, there are a few minor points that I would like to raise that will go a long way towards improving our relationship:-When I say ‘move’, it means to go someplace else, not switch positions with each other so there are still two of you on my chair.The dishes with the paw prints are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food. Please note that placing your paw print in the middle of my food does not make it yours, nor do I find it aesthetically pleasing.The hallway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Beating me to the end of the passage is not the object. Tripping me doesn’t help either, as I will fall faster than you can run.
I cannot buy anything bigger than a king size bed. I am very sorry about this. However, do not for one moment think I will resort to sleeping on the sofa to ensure your comfort. You might notice that other cats actually curl up into a ball when they are sleeping. It is not necessary to sleep at right angles to each other, stretched out to the fullest extent possible. Sticking tails and tongues out to maximize space usage is nothing but sarcasm. My CD’s are not miniature Frisbees. For the last time, there is no secret exit from the bathroom. If by some miracle I get into the bathroom first and manage to get the door shut, it is not necessary to claw, meeow, jump up to paw the handle, or get your paw under the door and try to pull it open. When I exit this room, I will come out of the same door I entered. In addition, please note that I have been using the bathroom by myself for many years. Feline attendance has never been necessary. The proper order is kiss me, then go smell the other cat’s butt. I cannot stress this enough. It would be such a simple change for you. In return for following these simple rules, I have posted this message on our front door … Rules for Non-Pet Owners Who Visit and Complain About My Cats: 1. They live here. You don’t. 2. If you don’t want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture. 3. I like my cats a lot better than I like most people. 4. To you, it’s an animal. To me, s/he is an adopted child who is short, hairy, walks on all fours and speaks a foreign language. 5. Cats are better than kids. They eat less, don’t ask for money, are easier to train, sometimes come when called, never want to drive your car, don’t smoke or drink, don’t worry about buying the latest fashions, don’t borrow your clothes, don’t need a gazillion Rands for college, and you can prevent them from getting pregnant by having them sterilized. *** *** *** *** |
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That’s all for now. Thanks for your company and we’d love to hear from you info@kittenaction.org.za
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Until next time,
Ciao for meow
=^..^=
Mandy
