Wednesday 24 January 2007

To Declaw or Not To Declaw - Is There Really A Question?

by Christopher Byrnes


Cats are born with claws, the same way that humans are born with fingernails and toe nails. Cats need claws in order to mark or scratch a specific place or territory that they have been in. Humans need finger nails to, scratch themselves or others, or for opening a letter envelope. Cats basically stretch their agile bodies in order to prepare their muscles when they dig their claws deeply into wood perhaps or a tree, and then they pull back from their hold. Scratching is a basic physiological need of cats.

So do cats need to be declawed? If cat owners truly care for the welfare of their cats, they would have to think twice on declawing their cats.

Declawing, what is it?

Declawing is done by taking away all the front claws of a cat. In a way this procedure is equal to the amputation of all the finger tips of a human being. For cats this surgery is painful and, for someone who is walking on all fours, terribly unnecessary.

Though the recovery of declawed cats may only take a few weeks or so, its physical and/or psychological effects could last a cat's lifetime.

The following are the possible results once a cat has been declawed.

Ouch, ouch and ouch

Immediately after surgery, declawed cats suffer severe pain, though it is quite impossible to gauge how much pain they are experiencing. Declawed cats could be considered as amputees. Cats usually try to go on with their cat lives even with pain unless the pain eventually becomes unbearable. Although they may look and act normal does not mean they are free from aches.

Complications after the surgery

After the surgery, declawed cats usually experience one of the following post-surgery effects: presence of abscess, feelings of lameness, claw re-growth. Based on studies performed on declawed cats, it has been found that twenty five percent of them develop various complications. The same result has been found on cats who went under tenectomy. This is also a form of surgery that is currently being offered as an alternative to declawing. It is called this because only the tendons extended on the toes are the ones amputated.

Stiffness of the joints

Cats that are declawed experience stiffness of the joints since the tendons that manipulate the toes retract because of the surgery. As time goes by, these same joints freeze and ultimately they will no longer be able to extend their toes.

It has been thought though that cats really do not miss their claws since they also 'scratch' continually even if they no longer have anything to scratch with. However, this act is really the cats' way to stretch those frozen joints.

Catarthritis

Believe it or not, research shows that declawed cats immediately shift the weight of their bodies to the back and onto the larger pad in the front of their feet, away from their toes. The result is still evident despite giving these cats strong anti-pain relievers. If such an effect continues after declawing, the cat will ultimately stress its own joints in the leg, its spine and eventually suffer from arthritis.

Cats who cannot claw, bite

Since the natural instinct of cats is to claw especially when threatened or scared, in the absence of claws cats are forced to resort to another form of defense, that is, their teeth. Declawed cats that are aggressive naturally are more prone to biting.

Declawed cats have no nine lives!

There is a serious risk of death for cats that are declawed. Death could be brought on by the anesthesia they received, or any complications in surgery or hemorrhage.

Declawed cats that resort to biting run the risk of being abandoned by their owners. These cats could then be put in a shelter, and since they turn to biting, the probability of being adopted becomes slim. Usually un-adoptable cats are put to sleep or they are used to train dogs to fight usually as bait.

In summary, cats are extremely and highly trainable to be taught to use a post for scratching instead of common household furniture, rugs or curtains. Though declawing cats is one of the options a cat owner can take, it is basically an unkind and a very animal-unfriendly thing to do. It all depends on the cat owner whether Kitty is more (or less than) valuable than that expensive Italian rug. The choice is theirs.

About the Author

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How To Clicker Train Cats The Easy Way

by Christopher Byrnes


Clicker training incorporates the use of a clicker as a reward or encouragement when training a cat.

Cats are able to relate with the clicker, displaying good actions and behavior. Clicker training is often linked with conventional condition, where cats associate sound with food and operational condition and where cats execute movements for food.

A clicker is found to be more effective than verbal command because cats can hear clicker sounds more clearly than a voice, as human voice tones change while the clicker sound is always steady or constant.

The click is brief and concise, whereas a voice, phrase or a word, is fairly long in cats' point of standing. To say 'good boy' will take time than a click.

With the use of a clicker, cats can be successfully trained in three simple steps: obtaining the cats behavior, marking its behavior, and reinforcing its behavior.

Guidelines when training with a clicker:

1. To make a sound, push the clicker's spring end and then release. Treat the cat.

2. When you notice a behavior that you want your cat to continue on doing, click during while the behavior is being performed, never after it.

3. Click only once, to express enthusiasm towards the act of your cat and add more treats.

4. Note that practice periods should be short. More can be learned in three brief five minute sessions per day than hours of boring and stressful repetition.

5. Correct bad acts by ignoring and clicking when good behavior is displayed. Click when your kitten uses the litter box or when it plays on the scratch post, not on the furniture.

6. Click for accidental and voluntary actions nearing your objective. You should entice the cat into a position, but never pull or push it or hold it.

7. Never wait until your cat performs the perfect act that you told it to do, instead click and reward for little actions towards the correct direction. When your cat is signaled to sit and it crouches in its back, click.

8. Carry the clicker at all times when you are with your cat, so you can catch good acts.

9. Make sure to put aside the clicker when you are scolding your cat.

The non-confrontational character of a clicker makes it an ideal tool for training your cat. You too, can be happy with the results, having achieved all positive behaviors that you worked for with your cat. With lots of understanding, love, and patience, cat clicker training will continue to give you wonderful results that you and your cat will benefit from for years to come.

About the Author

Join other cat lovers and get hundreds of cat training and health tips, with the Cat Lovers Ezine. Click here to join us now!

Friday 19 January 2007

http://www.tigerfdm.com/tigerworld

A world without wild tigers! It seems almost incomprehensible to imagine, and yet, without immediate help, within our lifetime wild tigers may disappear forever from the forests of Asia. Evidence continues to mount that their numbers are falling steadily. Many experts tell us that more than 500 are killed every year. Habitat loss and fragmentation, poaching of tigers and their prey, and the devastating long-term effects of wild population inbreeding and retaliatory killings are mostly to blame. Virtually everywhere tigers live, they face ruthless aggression and apathy that threatens their survival.

Visit http://www.tigerfdm.com/tigerworld

Big Brother!

This Big Brother thing isn’t it shocking. Some Indian actress is being paid mega bucks for volunteering to take part in a mindless TV show in the UK. The Indian Government think it’s a world issue because someone on the show is not treating this actress with the reverence she is accustomed to..!

O’ by the way. A rare leopard has a bounty on its head because it strayed into a residential area in the Indian city of Nashik! If caught it can expect to be treated with the same dignity shown to the other member of its family!

Over a period of some seven hours that leopard was chased by dozen’s of residents who beat it to death with sticks and iron bars. Unusual behavior? Not at all, a second leopard was similarly beaten to death in the area of Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday. Could have been worse I supposed! The cats could have been made to take part in a rubbish TV show?

Tuesday 16 January 2007

Not All Cats Are Cuddly.

A leopard in the Kashmir is believed to have killed three children aged between 8 and 10 in the past week. They were attacked near Chatergold, about 56 miles south of Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir. An exception to the law prohibiting the killing of leopards has been made and an reward of 10,000 rupees has been offered for information on the leopards whereabouts.

Monday 15 January 2007

A Bedtime Read

CHAPTER I

She was such a Pretty Lady, and gentle withal; so quiet and eminently ladylike in her behavior, and yet dignified and haughtily reserved as a duchess. Still it is better, under certain circumstances, to be a cat than to be a duchess. And no duchess of the realm ever had more faithful retainers or half so abject subjects. Do not tell me that cats never love people; that only places have real hold upon their affections. The Pretty Lady was contented wherever I, her most humble slave, went with her. She migrated with me from boarding-house to sea-shore cottage; then to regular housekeeping; up to the mountains for a summer, and back home, a long day's journey on the railway; and her attitude was always "Wheresoever thou goest I will go, and thy people shall be my people." I have known, and loved, and studied many cats, but my knowledge of her alone would convince me that cats love people--in their dignified, reserved way, and when they feel that their love is not wasted; that they reason, and that they seldom act from impulse. I do not remember that I was born with an inordinate fondness for cats; or that I cried for them as an infant. I do not know, even, that my childhood was marked by an overweening pride in them; this, perhaps, was because my cruel parents established a decree, rigid and unbending as the laws of the Medes and Persians, that we must never have more than one cat at a time. Although this very law may argue that predilection, at an early age, for harboring everything feline which came in my way, which has since become at once a source of comfort and distraction.

After a succession of feline dynasties, the kings and queens of which were handsome, ugly, sleek, forlorn, black, white, deaf, spotted, and otherwise marked, I remember fastening my affections securely upon one kitten who grew up to be the ugliest, gauntest, and dingiest specimen I ever have seen. In the days of his kittenhood I christened him "Tassie" after his mother; but as time sped on, and the name hardly comported with masculine dignity, this was changed to Tacitus, as more befitting his sex. He had a habit of dodging in and out of the front door, which was heavy, and which sometimes swung together before he was well out of it. As a consequence, a caudal appendage with two broken joints was one of his distinguishing features. Besides a broken tail, he had ears which bore the marks of many a hard-fought battle, and an expression which for general "lone and lorn"-ness would have discouraged even Mrs. Gummidge. But I loved him, and judging from the disconsolate and long-continued wailing with which he rilled the house whenever I was away, my affection was not unrequited. But my real thraldom did not begin until I took the Pretty Lady's mother. We had not been a week in our first house before a handsomely striped tabby, with eyes like beautiful emeralds, who had been the pet and pride of the next-door neighbor for five years, came over and (To Be Continued)

Friday 12 January 2007

Watch Your Cats Eating Habits

Blog 12th Jan 2007

UK.

Two brothers have been convicted of causing unnecessary suffering by allowed their pet Labrador dog's weight to rise by almost four stone in two years. They were given a three-year conditional discharge by the magistrate’s court.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), which brought the prosecution to court, said it was pleased with the guilty verdict but was very disappointed the brothers would be allowed to keep the dog.

This judgment could have implications for other pet owner. If your pet cat is getting a bit overweight what can you do about it. Yes, you could restrict its diet but unless you also confine it to the house how do you know if it simply dashes off to its ‘other’ home?

We all know just how ‘independent ‘ minded cats are and how persuasive they can be when they want something and particularly when the want food! Are you really sure you are the only one feeding it? Perhaps that nice old lady down the way leaves out the odd dish of goodies for her visitor? What do you do about it? Perhaps you should have a look at Dr Chris's Cat Behavior Training Book.

Monday 8 January 2007

Time Out!

On Taking A Break!

A Light Read By Way Of Light Entertainment!

Mr Sweeney's Cat.


Extract from On www.authorama.com

Robert Ormsby Sweeney is a druggist of St. Paul, and though a recent chronological record reveals the fact that he is a direct descendant of a sure-enough king, and though there is mighty good purple, royal blood in his veins that dates back where kings used to have something to do to earn their salary, he goes right on with his regular business, selling drugs at the great sacrifice which druggists will make sometimes in order to place their goods within the reach of all.

As soon as I learned that Mr. Sweeney had barely escaped being a crowned head, I got acquainted with him and tried to cheer him up, and I told him that people wouldn’t hold him in any way responsible, and that as it hadn’t shown itself in his family for years he might perhaps finally wear it out.

He is a mighty pleasant man to meet, anyhow, and you can have just as much fun with him as you could with a man who didn’t have any royal blood in his veins. You could be with him for days on a fishing trip and never notice it at all.

But I was going to speak more in particular about Mr. Sweeney’s cat. Mr. Sweeney had a large cat, named Dr. Mary Walker, of which he was very fond. Dr. Mary Walker remained at the drug store all the time, and was known all over St. Paul as a quiet and reserved cat. If Dr. Mary Walker took in the town after office hours, nobody seemed to know anything about it. She would be around bright and cheerful the next morning and attend to her duties at the store just as though nothing whatever had happened.

One day last summer Mr. Sweeney left a large plate of fly-paper with water on it in the window, hoping to gather in a few quarts of flies in a deceased state. Dr. Mary Walker used to go to this window during the afternoon and look out on the busy street while she called up pleasant memories of her past life. That afternoon she thought she would call up some more memories, so she went over on the counter and from there jumped down on the window-sill, landing with all four feet in the plate of fly-paper.

At first she regarded it as a joke, and treated the matter very lightly, but later on she observed that the fly-paper stuck to her feet with great tenacity of purpose. Those who have never seen the look of surprise and deep sorrow that a cat wears when she finds herself glued to a whole sheet of fly-paper, cannot fully appreciate the way Dr. Mary Walker felt. She did not dash wildly through a $150 plate-glass window, as some cats would have done. She controlled herself and acted in the coolest manner, though you could have seen that mentally she suffered intensely. She sat down a moment to more fully outline a plan for the future. In doing so, she made a great mistake. The gesture resulted in glueing the fly-paper to her person in such a way that the edge turned up behind in the most abrupt manner, and caused her great inconvenience.

Some one at that time laughed in a coarse and heartless way, and I wish you could have seen the look of pain that Dr. Mary Walker gave him.

Then she went away. She did not go around the prescription case as the rest of us did, but strolled through the middle of it, and so on out through the glass door at the rear of the store. We did not see her go through the glass door, but we found pieces of fly-paper and fur on the ragged edges of a large aperture in the glass, and we kind of jumped at the conclusion that Dr. Mary Walker had taken that direction in retiring from the room.

Dr. Mary Walker never returned to St. Paul, and her exact whereabouts are not known, though every effort was made to find her. Fragments of flypaper and brindle hair were found as far west as the Yellowstone National Park, and as far north as the British line, but the doctor herself was not found. My own theory is, that if she turned her bow to the west so as to catch the strong easterly gale on her quarter, with the sail she had set and her tail pointing directly toward the zenith, the chances for Dr. Mary Walker’s immediate return are extremely slim.

HOW WAS THAT FOR THE START OF A SHORT STORY?


Sunday 7 January 2007

Cats In General

Right, after weighting up the responsibilities you are taking on you have decided that the rewards you get from being part of a cat’s life, is well worth that effort.

Now you have chosen to take home a kitten!

You really have to consider things from the kitten’s point of view. Why? Because it will make the move for you, you’re family and the kitten a lot happier! For the kitten, moving into a new environment is a stressful event. It will take time for it to get used to its surroundings and the people or other animals it will meet.

You will need to give it time and reassurance to adjust to the new surroundings. If you have children they will naturally want to rush up and pick up the new kitten. If you have a dog or another cat please give the new kitten a chance to settle in before being introduced to them and let the kitten make the first move. The introduction should be done slowly and quietly. The children will need to be told that the new kitten is not a plaything and that they will have to take care with it. They should sit on the floor quietly and wait until the kitten chooses to come and investigate them. If the kitten decides to play with them the play must stop when the kitten chooses.

To this end you will need to have made provision for a safe refuge for the kitten to escape to where it will not be disturbed. The kitten will need its own bed and this will be its safe place to go when it wants to retreat from the fuss. Its bed needs to be warm, dry, comfortable and draught-free. You could buy a bed from a pet shop, or use a strong, dry, cardboard box with a hole cut in the side. The bed should contain soft bedding, and be placed in a warm, safe place. On the first few nights a warm water bottle (not hot) under a blanket may help compensate for the absence of the kitten’s mother or littermates. If you have very young children or a lively dog or cat then placing the kitten’s bed in a large secure pen would be ideal. The kitten could then get used to the other members of the family from the security of its pen and could retreat into its bed if it needed.

Will it? won't it?


No! we are not talking here about a cat, rather a particular news item which bears the same name as on of our domestic bread of cats.

Apophis, also known as 2004 MN4, stirred up a flurry of concern last December when the risk of collision was raised temporarily to as high as 1 out of 40 for the year 2029. With an estimated diameter of 1,300 feet (400 meters), the asteroid could destroy a city if it hit the wrong place on land, or raise a deadly tsunami if it plunged into the ocean.

Fortunately, more precise plotting ruled out a collision in 2029. However, Apophis will still make an extremely close pass missing Earth by mere tens of thousands of miles. At that distance, Earth's gravitational pull could perturb Apophis' orbit enough to put it on a track to hit during another pass in 2036. Experts say that could happen if, during the 2029 close encounter, the asteroid passes through an outer-space "keyhole" that measures about 2,000 feet (600 meters) across.

Cats Indoors!

Your cat and the American Bird Conservancy.

The American Bird Conservancy initiated an Internet based campaign in 1997 with the objective of protecting birds from predation by cats by insisting that all domestic cats should be kept safely enclosed.

Called ‘Cats Indoors’ this campaign had by 2003 demonstrated significant results by successfully influencing federal, state and local governments too their way of thinking.

However, there is no mention in this report of the number of birds and other small wildlife killed by rats and it was mainly for the control of rats and grain eating vermin that the ancient Egyptians are believed to have given the ‘cat’ top social status. (Killing a cat was punishable by death!)

And how long have the human race and the free roaming cat co-existed?

A grave that is estimated to be 9,500 years old was excavated in Cyprus in 2004. In that grave lay side by side two skeletons, one of a human, the other that of a cat. This finding pushes back the earliest known feline-human association significantly. It is believed that for humans who had adopted a farming economy the benefit of removing rats and mice from humans' food stores outweighed the trouble of awarding the protection of a human settlement to a formerly wild animal.