A Michael Broad Blog
There is a brilliantly funny ad for Cravendale milk which was very successful, in which domestic cats rebelled against the human because he wouldn’t give them milk. All the rebellious cats had opposable thumbs and they behaved like humans. And that’s the point if you want to be serious about it. The cats became …
Ragdoll cats are one of the world’s most popular purebred cats today; well suited to a full-time indoor life, it is said. That doesn’t mean that their minds don’t need stimulating in an enriched environment. Kidney disease is prevalent among all domestic cats as an illness which not infrequently occurs in old age and …
The commonly held belief is that one cat year is the equivalent of seven human years. That’s not quite accurate as this simple formula has been refined over the years. The formula isn’t “linear” (click for a good discussion on this). But for the sake of this short discussion let’s assume that one cat …
Cats, just like humans and any other animal, can have cancer during their lifetime. Molecularly speaking, cancer in cats develops because something within a single cell of their body went wrong. This is often a change in the cell’s DNA, or a change that affects how well a cell can grow and divide. Once …
Anecdotally we hear quite a lot about the healing powers of the cat’s purr. I decided to dig around a bit to see if I could find some scientific studies to back up the anecdotal evidence. Here are some examples of sound healing both involving the cat’s purr and other resources. The dominant frequencies …
This is about the science – which is about the genetics of all the cat species – behind the failure of cats to detect sweetness in their food. We know that cats can’t detect the taste of sweetness in their food but what happened? It is a bit strange when you think about it …
This is my opinion. I form my opinion from many years of reading these reports. I have noticed a trend: Australian scientists looking for ways to criticise the domestic cat for carrying the zoonotic disease toxoplasmosis. From time to time, Australian scientists like to get together to hatch a plan to denigrate the domestic …
The Science Daily website has an article which infers that elderly people who have unknowingly been infected with the Toxoplasma gondii protozoan tend to be frailer in old age than those who haven’t. Essentially, the scientists found a connection with a higher level of antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii in a person and increased frailty. …
