More strange animal attachments

One day I will get Boris and Izzy together in a photo. In the meantime here is a cat with a strange affection for dolphins.

I'll be offline for a day or two now. Back Saturday or Sunday.

So that's not my diner then?

TC - another of my sister's cats

Mad mental moggies part 37 674

Err this is one psycho cat!

The cat’s lap – a thing of elegance (naturally!)

My thanks go to Claude who sent me a link to this article in the full knowledge that it would be of interest to me.

According to the Physorg website researchers at MIT, Virginia Tech and Princeton University have analyzed the way domestic and big cats lap and found that felines of all sizes take advantage of a perfect balance between two physical forces.

It was known that when they lap, cats extend their tongues straight down toward the bowl with the tip of the tongue curled backwards like a capital "J" to form a ladle, so that the top surface of the tongue actually touches the liquid first. This is known because of the work of Doc Edgerton, who used strobe lights in photography to stop action, filmed a domestic cat lapping milk in 1940.

Recent high-speed videos made by the team revealed that the top surface of the cat's tongue is the only surface to touch the liquid. Cats, unlike dogs, aren't dipping their tongues into the liquid like ladles after all. Instead, the cat's lapping mechanism is far more subtle and elegant (of course!!). The smooth tip of the tongue barely brushes the surface of the liquid before the cat rapidly draws its tongue back up. As it does so, a column of milk forms between the moving tongue and the liquid's surface. The cat then closes its mouth, pinching off the top of the column for a nice drink, while keeping its chin dry.

The liquid columnis created by a delicate balance between gravity, and inertia. The cat instinctively knows just how quickly to lap in order to balance these two forces, and just when to close its mouth

The domestic cat averages about four laps per second, with each lap bringing in about 0.1 milliliters of liquid, the big cats, such as tigers, know to slow down. They naturally lap more slowly to maintain the balance of gravity and inertia.

The work began three-and-a-half years ago when Stocker, who studies the fluid mechanics of the movements of ocean microbes, was watching his cat lap milk. That cat, eight-year-old Cutta Cutta, stars in the researchers' best videos and still pictures. And like all movie stars (Cutta Cutta means "stars stars" in an Australian aboriginal language), he likes being waited on. With their cameras trained on Cutta Cutta's bowl, Stocker and Reis said they spent hours at the Stocker home waiting on Cutta Cutta … to drink, that is. But the wait didn't dampen their enthusiasm for the project, which very appropriately originated from a sense of curiosity.

"Science allows us to look at natural processes with a different eye and to understand how things work, even if that's figuring out how my cat laps his breakfast," Stocker said. "It's a job, but also a passion, and this project for me was a high point in teamwork and creativity. We did it without any funding, without any graduate students, without much of the usual apparatus that science is done with nowadays."

"Our process in this work was typical, archetypal really, of any new scientific study of a natural phenomenon. You begin with an observation and a broad question, 'How does the cat drink?' and then try to answer it through careful experimentation and mathematical modeling," said Reis, a physicist who works on the mechanics of soft solids. "To us, this study provides further confirmation of how exciting it is to explore the scientific unknown, especially when this unknown is something that's part of our everyday experiences."

It comes as no surprise to this cat lover that mogs have an elegant solution to the problem of drinking. Dogs on the other hand take a hit and hope attitude to the problem.,, It’s a bit like the difference between drinking tea from a china cup (with little finger extended) and quaffing a mug of beer (and largely missing!).

Ach it probably won't be long until the Genus Felidae (and perhaps genus Pantera) develop the opposable thumb from their dew claws.... Then we are truly doomed!

Duchess of Cornwall unhurt by kitten

catsA few days ago the Telegraph ran a story with the headline Duchess of Cornwall Mauled by Kitten. Okay the mauled was in inverted commas but still I thought I would read of some hideous injury meted out by a spitting bundle of feline aggression

Sadly it appears that all that happened was Lucy, an eight-week-old tabby, dug its claws into Camilla's jacket and refused to let go.

The incident took place during a visit to the Battersea Dog’s Home.
When the royal walked into a socialising area for the cats and saw four kittens she said ''Ah sweet, is this the whole family here?'' and began mothering them and picked them up.

The playful kitten was held against the Duchess' chest then began disappearing behind her neck and as Camilla tried to prise Lucy free she dug her claws in prompting the royal to say ''I think she's attached to my collar''.

Gah! No screams and not a drop of blood to be had. Damn I feel cheated! Ah well If a cat can look at a king it can surely stick its claws into a duchess!

Photo Hunt - letters

The theme for the week's Photo Hunt is letters. There is just one letter that springs to mind and that is the rough M that appears on the forehead of all tabby cats, something that they share with several of their bigger cousins. Above are Robyn and Boris

The origin of the M is the subject of religious legends

One legend tells about Mary and the tabby cat in the manger. It seems that the baby Jesus was cold and fussing, and Mary asked the manger animals to move in closer to warm him. The manger was simply too small to accomplish that, but a little tabby cat came in and nestled next to the baby, and cosseted Him with purring and warmth. Mary was so grateful, she bestowed her own initial, "M" on the cat's forehead.

An Islamic legend states that Mohammed, a cat lover once cut off a sleeve of a garment when he had to leave to attend prayer, rather than to disturb his cat, Muezza, who was sleeping upon the sleeve. It is said that the reason he loved cats so much is that one once saved his life when a snake crawled into his sleeve. (This may be a variation of the well-known Muezza story.) Legend also claims that Mohammed bestowed on cats the ability to always land on their feet. These stories assumes that the "M" symbolizes the enormous esteem which Mohammed felt for cats and that the sight of the "M" on a cat's forehead invokes memories of Mohammed.

Make of these what you will. As far as I am concerned the M tops off the most beautiful creature on this planet.

UPDATE: Sparkle has a far more plausible theory as to why tabbies have an M on their foreheads:

"Actually the truth behind the "M" is that it stands for Master, so that humans will always know who is boss"

Sparkle is quite right of course!

Vengeance!

I don't think that was Sylvester. Ted vanished off somewhere yesterday and wouldn't say where he went....

Note to Mary Bale: when in a hole stop digging

There is no way that I would put Mary Bale on a par with the evil bastard James Chesney and there is no way I would condone death threats against the cat binner but it was a cruel and nasty act against an animal that clearly just wanted a bit of affection. I’m not sure that trying to justify or minimise the act is a sensible move though.

"I really don't see what everyone is getting so excited about. It's just a cat," Bale is reported to have said. "I was walking home from work and saw this cat wander out in front of me. I was playing with it, stroking it and listening to it purr as it stood on a garden wall. It was very friendly.

"I don't know what came over me, but I suddenly thought it would be funny to put it in the wheelie bin, which was right beside me. I did it as a joke because I thought it would be funny. I never thought it would be trapped. I expected it to wriggle out of the bin."

"To think this video is being seen around the world is unbelievable. I'm a very private person and don't want to upset any members of my family. I don't know what my relatives will think, but to be honest I think everyone's overreacting a bit.

"OK, I shouldn't have done it, but it's just a cat at the end of the day. I don't think I deserve to be hated by people all over the world, it was just a split second of madness."

Err this is a country with a lot of public and private CCTVs and a communications system that can transfer information across the world in moments. A bit of grovelling contrition and perhaps a big donation to the Cats Protection League would probably have been a far wiser course of action.

If it had been one of my cats that was dumped in a bin I would have been bloody furious ( a hell of a lot more pissed off than I was when my car was stolen a few months back). Still I would like to see Mary Bale try to put Ted into a wheelie bin and avoid a trip to casualty with some heavy duty clawing!

Boris on the fifth iteration

This is not a cat

As a holiday bonus here's some hot pussy action

Guaranteed no XXX free harccore porn, nude Britney Spears or naked Lindsey (Lindsay?) Lohan pics and Definitely no Jordan/Peter Andre sex tapes or any other worthless celebretries knocking boots. All you get here is some good clean pussy fun!

How cats control us

I knew I had to post this when I saw it. According to large swathes of the press , scientists have discovered the means by which cats control us.

Cats have learned that loud miaowing is not an effective strategy for waking us up for an early breakfast at 5am. Any cat trying that will probably find themselves extramuralised velocitatiously be it via the door or via the window.

Some cats (Robyn, Bebe and Ted included) disguise their cries for attention within an otherwise pleasant purr. The result, according to a study in the journal Current Biology, is a complex "solicitation" purr with a high-frequency element that triggers a sense of urgency in the human brain. Owners find it irritating, but not irritating enough to kick the cat out, and feel driven to respond. Which means that it pierces through the highest tog rated duvet and several pillows. It bores into your brain faster than that irritating advert jingle that kept playing in your brain until 4am

Dr Karen McComb, a specialist in mammal vocal communication at the University of Sussex, said that by employing an embedded cry, cats appear to be exploiting innate tendencies that humans have for nurturing offspring."The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response – and solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing," she said.

McComb began the research into domestic cats after noticing the "manipulative" purring of her own cat, Pepo. "I wondered why this purring sounded so annoying and was so difficult to ignore," she said. "Talking with other cat owners, I found that some of them also had cats which showed similar behaviour."

After testing human responses to different purring types, McComb and her team found that even those with no experience of cats judged the "solicitation" purr to be more urgent and less pleasant. On examining the frequency of the special purr, she found a peak similar to that of a baby's cry, which gave it a "noisy, slightly whiny quality".

Asked whether the cat's special purr is more effective than other demands for food, she said: "I think it might be more effective than a dog. If you ask people who own cats what they do when they get up they say they feed their cats. Even before they have a cup of coffee. Cats are very good at getting their own way."

That is so true!

The problem for Dr McComb is now she has revealed the cat’s secret solicitation I fear that she will receive a visit from the Feline mafia. The editor of Current Biology will almost certainly wake up and find a mouse head in their bed

So Cats really aren't as clever as dogs and psychologists?

Psychology lecturer Britta Osthaus has concluded that cats do not understand cause-and-effect connections between objects and is thus nit as bright as the average psychologist

She tested the thought processes of 15 of them by attaching fish and biscuit treats to one end of a piece of string, placing them under a plastic screen to make them unreachable and then seeing if the cats could work out that pulling on the other end of the string would pull the treat closer.

They were tested in three ways, using a single baited string, two parallel strings where only one was baited, and two crossed strings where only one was baited.
The single string test proved no problem, but unlike dogs no cat consistently chose correctly between two parallel strings. With two crossed strings, one cat always made the wrong choice and others succeeded no more than might be expected by chance.

Osthaus, of Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, said: "This finding is somehow surprising as cats regularly use their paws and claws to pull things towards them during play and hunting. They performed even worse than dogs, which can at least solve the parallel string task."

Quite clearly this experiment shows nothing of the sort. It fails to take account of the fact that cats know full well that nothing is worth doing that needs much effort. Ask any cat about the experiment and they will point out that that sooner or later they were going to get fed by the psychologist, so why waste important energy that could be better employed in a nice long rest.

I rest my case!

Obligatory crazy cat video compilation

Celebrating 9or otherwise) the first damned cold of the season....

Cats with Cerebellar Hypoplasia

There are a number of videos on Youtube that show the effect of Cerebellar Hypolpasia in cats. Mimi has this condition but has adapted (as they all do) and is a loving and active cat (although she can't jump and does have balance problems). Cats with CH will have a natural lifespan.



This is Charley. It could be Mimi - just imagine a little grey cat with amber eyes and a pot belly!

A further break with the Blair era

After an absence of nearly ten years a firm paw is once again residing in Downing Street. Sybil, a black and white cat owned by the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, and his wife, Margaret, will be the Government’s official mouser. The Darlings have brought Sybil, named after the character in Fawlty Towers, from their Edinburgh home to live in their flat above 10 Downing Street. Gordon Brown's spokesman explained: "It's quite difficult to confine cats. The Prime Minister doesn't have a problem with it. Sarah Brown doesn't have a problem with it."

Sibyl follows in the paw-steps of Wilberforce who served Edward Heath, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. He was succeeded by Humphrey, a long-haired black and white stray named after Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Mandarin in the sitcom, Yes, Minister. Humphrey served Margaret Thatcher and John Major before being mysteriously "retired" in 1997 amid rumours that Cherie Blair was allergic to cats.

When No 10 announced that Humphrey had gone into retirement, photographers had to be taken to picture him posing with that day's newspapers to scotch speculation that he had been put down. Whitehall files later disclosed he had been pensioned off – with his food and vet bills paid from a Cabinet Office stipend – because he was no longer up to the job of chasing mice.

Robyn and Ted are very happy

This week's entry for the Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats. Also this week's entry for PhotoHunt. The theme for this week is is Happy and what better than show our alpha cat Robyn having his chin rubbed?



Ted is also happy. Well you wouldn't want to see him angy!

Mimi has been a sick cat

This week's entry for the Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats. More cat photos at Plant pron and pussycats.

Also this week's entry for Photo Hunt. (the subject is funky). Why Funky? well Mimi has been a sick little cat - vomiting and severe diarrhoea. Being disabled, she has poor balance and has fallen over, well you can imagine what happened. As a result she has been a bit smelly, hence funky. Luckily she is on the mend.

That broom serves a purpose, human

Mimi, objects to the fact that the floor hasn't bween swept in a while. This week's entry for the Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats. More cat photos at Plant porn and pussycats

Angelic Bebe

Bebe looks like the angel she is. This week's entry for the Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats. More cat photos at Plant porn and pussycats and over at Yet to be named

Bebe

This week's entry For the Friday Ark and Carnival of the Cats. More cat photos as ever at Plant porn and pussycats and at Yet to be named.