Artnet News has a story online entitled Meow No! 7 Paintings by Artists Who Have Probably Never Seen a Cat: Our feline friends may now be the toast of the internet and social media, but they have also long served as subjects and inspirations to artists all the way back to the Middle Ages. Renoir…
Cats
Cats, Science/Nature, Technology
Friday Catblogging: Space-Transmission Cat
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
??Justine McDaniel reports Taters the cat stars in NASA’s first video streamed from deep space: On the path to Mars, nearly 19 million miles from Earth, Taters the cat got his big break. The orange tabby starred in the first video streamed from deep space, a successful NASA experiment that marked a milestone for advancing…
Cats, Daily Bread, Science/Nature
Daily Bread for 12.16.23: Fetching
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 44. Sunrise is 7:19 and sunset 4:22 for 9h 02m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians hold a Boston Tea Party when they dump hundreds of crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.
Leo Sands reports Cats can play fetch, too, study finds:
according to a new study, many cats share a trait more frequently associated with pet dogs: They play fetch.
The peer-reviewed study, published Thursday, dispels any lingering myth that cats do not know how to retrieve objects for their owners, said its authors, who based their findings on a survey of the owners of 1,154 cats that played fetch on every continent except Antarctica. Some cats can and do play fetch, they found, although it depended on the feline’s individual traits and the bond shared with its owner.
“It was more common than people were probably expecting, and even I was expecting,” Jemma Forman, an animal psychologist at the University of Sussex and an author of the study, said in an interview. The authors of the study, published in the Scientific Reports journal, said they believe it is the most extensive conducted to date on this specific behavior among cats.
….
The study, limited to cats whose owners already reported fetching, did not assess how prevalent the behavior was among the general cat population. While many cats do fetch, Forman suggested that more research was needed to determine how common it was more generally. A cat’s breed was not a barrier to its ability to fetch, the study found, although Siamese cats were particularly well represented in the sample.
See Forman, J., Renner, E. & Leavens, D.A. Fetching felines: a survey of cat owners on the diversity of cat (Felis catus) fetching behaviour. Sci Rep 13, 20456 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-47409-w
Fetching? Well, yes, of course they are.
How to Give Dead Batteries New Life:
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: They Have Their Reasons
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Embed from Getty Images In Scientific American, Jack Tamisiea writes that Cats Kill a Staggering Number of Species across the World (‘Domestic cats are cherished human companions, but a new study shows the enormous breadth of species the felines prey on when they are left to roam freely’): Despite their small stature and memeable mugs,…
America, Cats, Conservation, Nature
Friday Catblogging: The Return of Ocelots?
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Embed from Getty Images Christine Dell’Amore writes Ocelots once roamed the U.S. Can we bring them back? (‘Ocelots are a quintessentially American cat—yet a single tropical storm could wipe them off the U.S. map. Will a pioneering new partnership make a difference?’): Only a few centuries years ago, the northern ocelot was a quintessential American…
Cats
Friday Cat Blogging: Blessing
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Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Nearly 300 Different Facial Expressions
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
See Think cats are aloof? They make nearly 300 facial expressions, study says: Brittany Florkiewicz has always been a dog person, but she was surprised by what she discovered when reviewing more than 100 hours of cat videos. Florkiewicz, a psychology professor at an Arkansas college, spent her childhood running around her yard with her…
Cats
Friday Catblogging: Direct Registering
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Cats
Friday Catblogging: The Cornish Rex Who Looks Like an Extraterrestrial
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Cats
Friday Catblogging: Physics Be Damned
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Cats
Friday Catblogging: Sometimes Ya Gotta Do It Yourself
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Cats, Good Ideas, Medicine
Friday Catblogging: Doctor Prescribes a Cat
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Embed from Getty Images Cathy Free reports A Virginia woman was feeling sad. Her doctor prescribed her a cat (‘Her doctor, Earl D. King, said he wrote it down ‘because people sometimes don’t follow your instructions’): Robin Sipe’s eyes filled with tears as soon as her doctor entered the examining room. “My cat had recently…