A Michael Broad Blog
You shouldn’t avoid adopting a traumatised cat and the question in the title begs many more questions such as: Those are just some of the questions I would ask. There will be more. Sometimes shelter cats can be labelled traumatised not because they are traumatised but because they are currently living in a shelter …
A cursory investigation will tell you that dogs are taken to the vets much more than cats and cats are not taken to the vets enough. Cat owners resist taking their cat to the vet. I am one of those cat owners. It is not about money for me but the hassle. But vets …
I am not sure if writers about cats refer to ‘feline agoraphobia’. I have just thought about when writing about a beautiful, ginger Maine Coon (MC) who was let out into the garden (backyard) for the first time after a lifetime ‘locked up’ as a full-time indoor cat as they must be. MC can …
There is a woman on the mumsnet.com website who is completely at the end of her tether. She hates the cat that she adopted. She had waited all her life to adopt a cat of her own. When she finally bought her own one-bedroomed flat on the second floo she adopted an older male …
Can domestic cats suffer from bipolar disorder? A lot of websites answer the question. They seem to be saying, anecdotally, that domestic cats can suffer from this condition. But I seriously doubt that they are correct. What is bipolar disorder? It’s a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings. The episodes of extreme …
Here’s the deal: you can’t answer the question in the title in an article on the Internet. The problem is too deep and too complicated to do that. The answer depends upon observing the cat and looking at the conditions under which they behave and the circumstances of their self-mutilation plus medical diagnosis. And …
It can difficult to tell if your cat has mental health problems. The subject of mental health in domestic cats is a very difficult one even for the experts, including veterinarians because we don’t know enough about it. And we don’t know enough about it because we can’t talk to our cats. We therefore …
I think you could extend the word ‘autistic’ to describe the behaviour of unsocialised cats. I explain why. A couple of years ago I wrote about pet vaccinations and the belief by some cat owners that they can cause autism in pets because of the claimed link to autism in people by former doctor …
