A Michael Broad Blog
NEWS AND COMMENT: You may remember the story of Buddy. He’s a little black cat who was minding his own business on a porch in Philadelphia. He preferred to live outside but was cared for by his owner. A couple of guys walked by with their Pitbull-type dogs and set the dogs upon him. …
An organiser of the Offaly SPCA Facebook page lost their cool after nobody came forward in response to an urgent request for volunteers to help a colony of community cats. I have published screenshots of the Facebook post requesting help and after no one came forward the exasperated response. It is quite telling and …
This is the story of Bubby, a three legged, ginger tabby-and-white male cat with sad eyes and a charming character. He lives in Canada. Going back about eight years, he was a street cat enduring a difficult life. He showed up at the home of a man who had a cat named Seson and …
This is not hot off the press news (11th March 2020) but it is interesting and sad from a number of perspectives. The story comes from Singapore. In very general terms, a couple owned a ginger tabby cat1. It appears that the cat had been urinating in their apartment, probably out of anxiety. The …
We hear a lot about positive reinforcement in socialising feral and stray cats. Positive reinforcement is a way of training cats and it can be used to train a cat to trust a human and people in general at which point the cat is socialised and therefore domesticated. A cat called ‘Journey’ was a …
NOTIFICATIONS: (1) the cat is okay. I very reluctantly read this news item but fortunately discovered that the cat is okay and (2) the reporting is skimpy so I don’t have a lot of detail. Two teenagers in Dunkirk, France put a domestic cat in a microwave, turned it on and giggled. It was …
This cat, who has been appropriately named Journey by her carers, must have been completely feral when she tiptoed into a shipping container in Shenzhen China. She spent a least 3 weeks inside it. There was no food. There may have been some moisture on the insides of the container but I am speculating. …
This is unprecedented. I have never read about a cat breeder surrendering all of their cats. In this case Ragdoll cats, which are particularly popular at the moment, have been surrendered to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) because the breeder believed that their operation had grown beyond their …
