The cat flea is part of the tapeworm life-cycle. When a cat ingests a flea while grooming, he might also ingest a tapeworm egg which is inside the flea. The egg got inside the flea because larval fleas hatching in the area consume tapeworm eggs. These eggs have been deposited on the ground from a segment of tapeworm which has exited a host such as a cat via the anus. And so you can see how the lives of the two organisms are connected to each other. It probably pays to both de-worm a cat and use a spot-on treatment to de-flea the cat at the same time.

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This is not live, current news, not at all as it harks back to November 2016. And I am not even sure whether Julian Assange still has a domestic cat at the Ecuadorian embassy. I think he has. He was gifted him/her by a friend as a companion and I believe that his Internet access has been denied him. If this is true it would be a great loss to him. In any case, the photograph caught my eye. Either he or somebody else at the embassy is dressing up his cat companion in collar and tie. All cat lovers won't like that. It's not a good idea. It is also slightly sad, perhaps hugely sad, that his cat is confined to a very small space at the embassy because Julian Assange occupies quite a small part of it. I don't think this is right either. I know cats sometimes live in apartments but as I understand it Julian is living in an area not much larger than the size of a bedsit or studio flat (in UK parlance) which I think is too small for any domestic cat. It really must be. I

In a world where there are too many unwanted cats at rescue centres, the FIV positive cat has less value than other adult cats. In just the same way that black cats have less value than a calico cat, for instance, and kittens have more value than adult cats. Decisions about life and death at shelters are made upon these issues. The reason why I have mention this is because I have just written a story about a rescue cat in Britain who fell into a canal in Blackburn. He was stuck on a log in the canal for two days before firefighters turned up. They did a great job. It was quite an effort to rescue him. They handed the cat over to the RSPCA who evaluated the cat. They decided he was FIV positive. It should be said that the test to decide whether a cat is FIV positive can be inaccurate and misleading. Nonetheless, because of this test they decided that he had to be killed. An RSPCA spokesman said that he was unable to live outside amongst feral cats because he might infect othe

The simple answer to the question in the title is that the people of Israel in general accept and don't mind the presence of community cats in their country. They are part of the fabric of life in the country I think it is fair to say. They are there because of the usual reasons which is some cat owners not spaying or neutering their cats and some of these cats become stray and feral cats and they procreate and so on. Unless steps are taken the numbers continue to grow. I have been to Jerusalem. There are lots of feral cats. The crucial point is to prevent the creation of stray cats in the first instance. There comes a time when it is harder and more expensive to resolve a 'feral cat problem'. Jerusalem. Woman feeds community cats. Photo: EPA/ABIR SULTAN There are apparently 2 million of them in Israel and the numbers are of course increasing because not enough of them are spayed and neutered under TNR programs. Despite the fact that there is no real commitm

My first cousin is Billy Idol. He was having an argument with his then girlfriend and this is back in the 1980s as I understand it, and I suppose in order to get at his girlfriend he allegedly threw his girlfriend's kitten against the wall of the room and killed the kitten. That's about it. It's in complete contrast to me because I am an animal advocate. I hate animal cruelty. It is obviously entirely unnecessary. It is objectionable. It is horrible. It is criminal behaviour but there is little chance that he will be prosecuted because it happened such a long time ago. The information comes from a memoir by a guy called Adam Bomb. He refers to Billy Idol's then girlfriend Claire O'Connor. It was Claire O'Connor who owned the kitten as I understand it. She disclosed the information to Adam Bomb. She said that Billy could be nasty sometimes. This was an example of that behaviour. But this is an allegation let's not forget. We don't know whether

Cats do not have a collarbone. This anatomical peculiarity allows a cat to fit through any opening which is the size of his/her head. A cat's forelimbs are attached to the shoulder by free-floating clavicle bones.

In ancient Egypt's the penalty for killing a cat was death. However, I have decided that the ancient Egyptians were not really cat lovers because they killed hundreds of thousands of cats, perhaps kittens, in sacrifices to their gods . This seems to have been a trade, a business involved in breeding cats and then killing them to appease the gods. Any nation who loves cats and who worships them would not do that. Although the penalty was death for killing a cat, I wonder how efficient enforcement was! You can imagine how bad it was. There was no police force in ancient Egypt as far as I'm aware. You can kill cats surreptitiously without anybody seeing. And there would have been no animal welfare laws. So saying that the penalty was death is missing the point somewhat.

The answer to the question, "can a cat see in pitch black?" must be NO because you need some light to impinge upon the retina for the retina to then send a signal to the brain. Pitch black means absolutely no light. Despite the fact that the cat's eyes are more sensitive to ours and their vision at night is excellent, they cannot see in total darkness. No animal can. Light reflected from the cat's retina. A typical nighttime scene. Hence the phrase "cat's eyes" to mean the center line road markings by reflective glass marbles invented in Yorkshire, UK.

When I read the headline of an online newspaper, Winston-Salem Journal, "N.C. town stinks so badly of "cat pee" that there is an official state memo about it" , I felt that this was another attempt to denigrate feral cats and to find a reason to kill them. It seemed as if the article was about a town being overrun by feral cats. However, that positively is not the case. These cats did not cause the smell! The picture is for illustrative purposes only. Wilmington has been suffering from a intermittent and faint cat pee odor for many years apparently. The NC Division of Air Quality has received several complaints about a cat urine-like odor. It is investigating but is yet to pin down the cause. Some residents believe that it's caused by illegal manufacturing which takes place at night and others believe the cause is a naturally occurring swamp gas and/or decaying vegetation. One resident, Sue Newell, said that she has smelled the odor since the late 19

This morning I am pessimistic about the domestication of the cat. I am in a negative mood. However, I think it is justified. The more you read about the domestic cat, the more you understand the history of domestication of the wild cat, the more you see that it has gone wrong or at least not as intended. It has not gone entirely wrong but there are sufficient fault lines to see that it has turned out rather badly. One of the problems is that most cat owners don't know about the problems. I am not criticizing them but many are ignorant of the large numbers of cats which are unwanted, euthanized at shelters. Think of the millions upon millions of feral cats in America. Feral cats should not exist. Every feral cat is a symptom of our failure of the domestication of the cat. And there are an estimated 80 million of them in America. They cause untold numbers of arguments between cat lovers and cat haters. Untold numbers of feral cats are shot or abused by cat haters. Millions are

By Cindy Grant Our four-legged doggie friends are often more than eager to respond to our commands such as “Up,” “Sit” or “Stay,” yet, the same can not be said of Kitsy. She often bares her nails when the kids want to pick her up, refuses to be picked up or cuddled, or, by accident bites you when you rub him to long. THE MYSTERY OF CATS – NOT SOLVED YET While many cats love to be touched as much as dogs do, just as many are not that keen about about it. To date, the reason to why this is, is still a mystery and very much misunderstood. Yet, many animal behaviorists believe that similarly to as many humans there are on the planet with their own unique personality traits and preferences, there are cats with the same. Recent studies have although observed that a friendly cat mom, tend to have friendly kittens. This might indicate that cats learn their behavior through modeling (nurture), very much the same way toddlers observe and then do what their parents does. Another rea