A Michael Broad Blog
There is a very straightforward reason why the American Veterinary Medical Association’s (AVMA) policy on declawing is a complete and utter failure. It is also immoral and stupid. It is a failure in protecting the welfare and health of domestic cats. The AVMA’s revised declawing policy is published on their website (see base of …
There is a guy in Dublin who’s lived there for 15 years and who currently lives in a tiny bedsit in which there are two beds, masses of junk and two cats. For international readers, in case you are unsure, a “bedsit” in the UK means essentially a single room in which to live …
Technically yes, all domestic cats are hunters but it is quite clear that many domestic cats really don’t have an urge to hunt as one might expect although they might be curious about the presence of a mouse in the home. I, myself, have lived with a female cat who only caught one mouse …
It might interest some people to compare the birth weights of some cat breeds. These are the mean birth weights and they come from a study recently published from France. It is published on the Science Direct website. The scientists submitted a questionnaire to French purebred cat breeders from 2016 to 2020. The full …
Domestic cats (and all wild cats bar the cheetah, flat-headed cat and serval – but see last paragraph) are known for their ‘retractable’ claws. All the experts say it online but I disagree with them. To describe the claws as retractile or retractable misleads the way the tendons and muscles work. The default position …
The colourpoint (pointed) pattern of the Siamese cat is a form of albinism. It is called the ‘Siamese pattern’ but I think technically it is better described as the “Himalayan pattern” or “Himalayan albinism”. We see this in a number of different species of animals including rabbits and goats from the Himalayan region which …
Extreme flat-face Persian cats are, according to a research paper carried out in 2017 by German scientists, equivalent to children suffering from a condition called coronal craniosynostosis. This is a rare condition where a baby’s skull does not grow properly causing an irregular head shape. I would suggest in fact that the abnormality of …
People and animals need working memory in order to function properly. This is the part of short-term memory concerned with immediate conscious perceptual processing. Another definition is: a limited capacity store for retaining information for a brief period while performing mental operations on that information. It allows us to interact with the world as …
