Arkansas Democrat’s Cat Gets Murdered Because He Is ‘LIBERAL’
From RawStory:
An Arkansas Democrat has a message for whomever killed his kids’ cat: “I’ve got a gun and I know how to use it.”
According to the Blue Arkansas blog, the campaign manager to Ken Aden, who’s running for the state’s third congressional district, came home last night to discover the family pet had been murdered and left on their front porch, as if the attacker wanted it to be discovered.
The feline’s skull was bashed in, and an ominous message was carved into its side: “LIBERAL.”
“If I have to protect my kids, I’ll do it without hesitation,” Aden campaign manager Jake Burris told Blue Arkansas.
The killing comes after a weekend of positive press for Aden, a former soldier running for Congress as a Democrat in one of the most conservative areas of Arkansas…
[continues at RawStory]
This #OccupyWallStreet Dog Hates Banksters!
You know your movement is rockin’ the interwebs when you have a Tumblr blog for animals supporting it.
See more conscientious animal objecters to the current state of capitalism at: Awwccupy Wall Street …
Longest-Living Two-Headed Janus Cat Turns Twelve
A household pet that deserves to be worshiped as a god. Via the Worcester Telegram & Gazette:
He has earned a spot as the longest lived Janus cat in the new edition of the Guinness World Records. The cat’s owner is a Worcester woman named Marty Stevens who has owned Frank and Louie since a local breeder brought him into Tufts Veterinary Clinic to be euthanized when he was a day old.
Janus cats, named after the Roman god with two faces, are extremely rare and seldom live more than a few days after being born. Often they die within hours. But under Marty’s dedicated care Frank and Louie flourished. He turned 12 years old on Sept. 8.
Frank and Louie has two mouths, two noses and two normal eyes with one larger non-functioning eye in the center. The cat has two faces, but only one head and brain, so the faces react…
Parasite Tricks Male Rats Into Becoming Cat Food
Via ScienceDaily:
When a male rat senses the presence of a fetching female rat, a certain region of his brain lights up with neural activity, in anticipation of romance. Now Stanford University researchers have discovered that in male rats infected with the parasite Toxoplasma, the same region responds just as strongly to the odor of cat urine. Is it time to dim the lights and cue the Rachmaninoff for some cross-species canoodling?
“Well, we see activity in the pathway that normally controls how male rats respond to female rats, so it’s possible the behavior we are seeing in response to cat urine is sexual attraction behavior, but we don’t know that,” said Patrick House, a PhD candidate in neuroscience in the School of Medicine. “I would not say that they are definitively attracted, but they are certainly less afraid. Regardless, seeing activity in the attraction pathway is bizarre.”
For a rat, fear of…
San Francisco To Outlaw Pet Stores
Kudos to San Francisco for its decision to crack down on an industry based on animal misery. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
San Francisco’s ever-active Animal Control and Welfare Commission has renewed its push for a pet sale ban in the city – only this time, it even covers goldfish. The idea is to put the squeeze on puppy and kitten mills that supply pet stores, and to discourage “impulse buys” of hamsters and other small pets that often wind up being dumped at shelters.
“Most fish in aquariums are either mass bred” under inhumane conditions “or taken from the wild,” commission member Philip Gerrie said. That leads to “devastation of tropical fish from places like Southeast Asia,” he said.
The proposed ban, which the commission just adopted after a year of study, was expanded to cover animal breeders as well as pet stores.
As you might expect, it has local merchants like Ocean Aquarium…
First Cloned Cat Turns Ten Years Old
It feels like just yesterday that the first generation of cloned animals captured the headlines — now they are passing comfortably into old age (without any bizarre mutations, eyeballs spontaneously falling out, et cetera). Cloned pets turning ten is our generation’s Bob Dylan turning seventy. Via the Houston Chronicle:
Almost 10 years later CC, aka Copy Cat, is still in the College Station area. She has a mate, Smokey, and they live with their three offspring in a cat mansion built by Dr. Duane C. Kraemer, an A&M researcher who helped bring CC into the world.
CC and her family seem like perfectly normal cats, which disappoints many guests hoping to see something more exotic, said Kraemer’s wife, Shirley, the head cat wrangler.
A&M’s cat-cloning operation was an offshoot of the Missyplicity Project to clone a dog named Missy with funding help from a company that wanted to market pet cloning. When the…
Man Cuts Off Cat’s Head With Machete And Brags About It on Facebook
Curtis Cartier writes in Seattle Weekly:
In what’s sure to be yet another blow to anyone with the name “Dameon,” Dameon Parker, a 30-year-old Olympia man has been charged with animal cruelty for allegedly luring his neighbor’s cat into his house, then cutting off its head with a machete.
The News Tribune reports Tuesday evening that a woman saw Parker carrying the kitty by the nape of its neck out to his backyard, then emerging later with a massive machete that was covered in blood and cat fur.
She apparently found the headless feline buried in the yard. But it wasn’t until Parker took to Facebook to claim victory over the helpless beast that investigators were informed of the act.
Parker’s Facebook page is still up, though it appears some of the more incriminating posts are down. The only remaining post is a plea for friends to leave one “Mary” out of the matter, followed by a…
God Has Poor Penmanship: ‘CAT’ Written in This Cat’s Fur
I guess God/Jesus was getting tired of throwing all the Jesus images all over the place. I like this, it means the Almighty has a sense of humor, but he really does have terrible penmanship. Via the Daily Mail:
All the clues are there: the whiskers, the purring, the miaowing and even the toy mouse under her front paws.
But just in case you were in any doubt as to what sort of animal Polly is, the ten-week-old tabby is happy to help out, thanks to her unusual markings, which spell out the word ‘cat’ on her left flank.
Garry Marsh and wife Joan, both 57, adopted Polly from a local cat rescue centre last weekend. But it was only as they admired their new pet’s colouring three days later that they noticed the marks.
Mr Marsh, a teacher, said: ‘We were commenting on how symmetrical her tabby patterns seemed when Joan suddenly…
“Marinated” Cat Rescued
Would a cat taste better with red or white wine? This story is all sorts of strange. Buffalo News reports:
Buffalo police rescued a cat from a Cheektowaga man who apparently was planning to make a meal out of his pet because he thought it was ill-tempered, authorities said Monday.
When Ferry-Fillmore District officers pulled over a car driven by Gary L. Korkuc on Sunday night during a traffic stop, they said they heard a cat crying from inside the trunk and investigated.
What they found has left animal lovers at the SPCA Serving Erie County in shock.
The cat, according to police, was in a cage “marinating” in a mixture of crushed red peppers, chili pepper, salt and oil.
“It’s disgusting. It surprises me every day what people are capable of when it comes to violence, whether it is animals or people,” said Gina M. Browning, the SPCA’s director of public relations. “I’ve never heard…
World’s First Bionic Cat (Video)
One of our cats recently fell from our 4th floor NYC apartment and sad to say, the ASPCA told us it should not be saved, even though the local animal hospital wanted $14,000 to try. But they didn’t say they could give it bionic limbs … maybe if we lived in the UK, per this story from ABC News:
Italian TV Chef Recommends ‘Cat Stew’
John Hooper writes in the Guardian:
Among other things, Giuseppe “Beppe” Bigazzi is known for his prize-winning cookbook La cucina semplice dei sapori d’Italia (”The simple cuisine of the flavours of Italy”). But as of this week, the flavour with which the TV gastronome is likely to be most closely associated is that of stewed cat.
Bigazzi is familiar to millions of viewers of the publicly-owned RAI network as the white-haired co-presenter of a popular pre-lunchtime programme, La prova del cuoco (”The proof of the cook”). But today he was experiencing his first day without television commitments in 10 years after being axed for expressing his enthusiasm for the flesh of felines.
His remarks came after mentioning how, in the desperate conditions of post-war Italy, some people had taken to boiling stray mogs.
The Cat Who Could Predict Death
David Dosa, MD, a geriatrician since 2003 in Barrington, Rhode Island, has made the news recently with revelations of a cat that uncannily predicts death. His book Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat is excerpted in Readers Digest:
My faith in science and my own intellectual vanity led me to reject the notion that some four-legged feline possessed special powers. As a researcher, I’d been taught to consider facts dispassionately—to analyze them, form theories, and poke holes in them until new theories arose that were closer to the truth. From a scientific point of view, it seemed ludicrous that a cat could predict human death. It was much easier to say that Oscar was drawn to warm, quiet beds—cats sleep two thirds of the time anyway, right?
Still, there was a plausible biological explanation for the “sweet smell of death,” which was perhaps what Oscar had sensed. As cells die, carbohydrates are degraded into many different oxygenated compounds, including various types of ketones—chemical mixtures known for their fragrant aroma…
Oscar the ‘Death Cat’ Predicts 50 Deaths in Rhode Island Nursing Home
Tom Leonard writes in the Telegraph:
A cat with an uncanny ability to detect when nursing home patients are about to die has proven itself in around 50 cases by curling up with them in their final hours, according to a new book.
Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the New England nursing home wrong in their predictions over which patients were close to death.
The cat, now five and generally unsociable, was adopted as a kitten at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Providence, Rhode Island, which specialises in caring for people with severe dementia.
Dr Dosa first publicised Oscar’s gift in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007. Since then, the cat has gone on to double the number of imminent deaths it has sensed and convinced…
Egypt Announces Find of Ancient Cat Goddess Temple
HAMZA HENDAWI writes in the AP via Yahoo News:
CAIRO — Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,000-year-old temple that may have been dedicated to the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, Bastet, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said Tuesday. The ruins of the Ptolemaic-era temple were discovered by Egyptian archaeologists in the heart of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C.
The city was the seat of the Greek-speaking Ptolemaic Dynasty, which ruled over Egypt for 300 years until the suicide of Queen Cleopatra. The statement said the temple was thought to belong to Queen Berenice, wife of King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the 3rd century B.C.
Mohammed Abdel-Maqsood, the Egyptian archaeologist who led the excavation team, said the discovery may be the first trace of the long-sought location of Alexandria’s royal quarter. The large number of statues depicting Bastet found in the ruins, he said,…
Six Adorable Cat Behaviors With Shockingly Evil Explanations
This is why some people think that cats are snakes with fur. Perhaps your grandmother from the old country wasn’t that crazy. Matthew Hayden writes on Cracked.com:
There seem to be two kinds of people in the world: those who don’t understand cats, and those who think cats are kind of douchebags.
Unfortunately for cat lovers, science has kind of come down on the side of that second group. Research has revealed that a lot of the quirky and even cute things your kitty does are actually signs that your cat is kind of a dick.
Rubbing Against You to Declare Ownership: By nature cats are hard to read. They’re not like dogs, hopping around with joy when you walk in the door, or slinking away with shame when caught eating the garbage. No, cats have mastered an expression of almost disdainful indifference that they seem to wear regardless of their mood.
However, as any spinster will tell you, a cat’s affection is obvious when its purring and rubbing its face and body against your leg. It’s like the animal is giving you a little kitty hug the only way it knows how!
The problem with that, though, is when cats rub up against their owners, it has nothing to do with affection at all, but instead is kitty’s way of claiming you as its property.
