What affects us affects cats
Here are 20 facts about the spread of the domestic cat around the world during the first era of the domestication of the cat. Introduction: it is generally agreed nowadays that the first ‘domestic cats’ appeared in the Middle East around 10k years ago and from there they spread out to other parts of …
“Pet banks” does NOT refer to pet food banks which are gaining in popularity in the UK due to the cost-of-living crisis! Both pet banks and wildcat banking now have an historical interest and no more it seems to me. As I understand it, both pet banks and wildcat banking emerged out of an …
There are a couple of well-known photographs of Charles Lindbergh with a kitten. He was the famous American aviator, who at the age of 25 made the first non-stop flight from New York City to Paris on May 20-21, 1927. Did Charles Lindbergh have a kitten? Was he a cat lover? Did he have …
The jaguarete is better spelled with an accent acute over the last ‘e’ like this: jaguareté. This means it should be pronounced: jaguareteh as in saying ‘eh you’ or ‘Eh? What’s this?’. I don’t believe that it should be capitalised because it is not a proper noun. Although early naturalists referred to the jaguarete …
The Javan tiger is extinct but its close neighbour the Sumatran tiger is not (estimated 441 to 679 individuals as at 2008). The Javan tiger’s scientific name is Panthera tigris ssp. sondaica. The islands of Java and Sumatra are separated by 15 miles of water. The Sumatran tiger, though, is heading towards extinction if …
Henry Bergh is known as the person who perhaps did more than any other in America to improve animal welfare as he founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in April 1866. It was three days after the first effective legislation against animal cruelty in the USA which had …
The illustration comes from The History of Reynard the Fox. In this 15th century woodcut, we see Tybert the Cat castrating a village priest. Incidentally, “Tybert” is spelled in two other ways, namely ‘Tibert’ and ‘Tybalt’. Unusually, there is absolutely nothing on the Internet which would explain why Tybert the Cat castrated a village …
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 …
