In a famous Indian fable in the Panchatantra, an ancient collection of animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose from 200 BCE-300CE, the domestic cat is portrayed as sly, underhand and hypocritical. The fable which I describe below is immortalised in a famous bas relief at Mahabalipuram in southeastern India, on the coast. The …
Another way of asking this question is: can a person who is allergic to domestic cats reduce his or her sensitivity through exposure to them? The answer would seem to be that for many people it is possible to desensitize themselves to the allergen in domestic cat saliva which causes the allergic reaction, the …
I think it useful to remind ourselves of the sort of human behaviour that is beneficial to our cat. Perhaps it is common sense but even commonsense thoughts need to be reinforced. Generally aversive human behaviors With respect to livestock, research has identified that the most aversive human behaviours towards domestic animals includes: hits, …
Bingus is a Sphynx or a Don Sphynx, both hairless cats which went viral back in March of 2020, thanks to an Instagram video. Bingus is far more likely to be a Sphynx, a breed with its origin in Canada. The Don Sphynx comes from Russia. That answers the question and I could stop …
The stomach of cats is designed to accept hair. It has to be as a lot of hair is ingested during grooming. Sometimes too much for longhaired cats. Medical – mainly a longhaired cat problem Longhaired cats accumulate hair in the stomach as hairballs. They can be regurgitated rather than passing through the digestive …
When people move home, they take their cat companion. This has been going on for thousands of years. It is how the domestic cat has spread throughout the world. For example, the Romans did quite a bit of empire building and moving which meant exporting the domestic cat far and wide. The first domestic …
This is a topic that interests me: how artists of the mediaeval era depicted domestic cats in their paintings. And I’m sure that they felt that they were painting an accurate representation of the domestic cat before them. But by today’s standards they are quite poor for one reason: they humanised them. They painted …
In cats, solar dermatitis is a recurrent skin disease caused by exposure to sunlight leading to sunburn. It is most often seen in white cats or cats with white noses and white ears. It is a recurrent inflammation which may ultimately predispose the cat to squamous cell carcinoma in those areas. My reference work …
