Halle Berry is a certified cat lady! Catwoman changed her.

The Internet is pleased to announce that Halle Berry is a "certified cat lady". And she became a certified cat lady because of the film Catwoman (2004) saying that the "experience changed me". She added that she "became a cat lover because of it" and she has been described in the past as a "self-proclaimed, lifelong dog person". I think we can describe her as an animal person actually which I love. The more celebrities who are animal people the better animal welfare will be.

And a beautiful aspect of Halle Barry's love of animals is that she rescues cats. She added that she had "just rescued four kitties I found in my yard three weeks ago".

Halle Berry is a certified cat lady by Michael Broad

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"I am a cat woman through and through, because of that experience and those relationships. That experience changed me."

She has an Instagram account and last month she shared a post on that social media platform showing us that she had adopted kittens from a family of stray cats that she discovered in her yard.

She introduced us to a couple of cats named Boots and Coco. She said that: "I found these two little fur babies in my yard along with their two siblings and their mom".

She ensured that the mother was spayed so that she could no longer procreate and create more homeless kittens and released her back into her yard where she is now an outdoor cat. She found forever homes for two of the babies and the remaining two "are our new lovies". She now has a "full house". Meaning of animals and I presume cats.

Halle Berry did exactly the right thing. She is a good woman beyond the world of cat rescue and animals in general. There is on doubt in my mind.

When she prepared for her role as Catwoman she was given a cat early on during the production as she didn't have one. His name was 'Playdough'. She said that she didn't have the responsibility of children and had plenty of time "to focus on this".

During the filming, apparently, she said that she was a "full-on cat, all the time. I'd crawl around my house, trying to jump on my counters, thinking 'If I were a cat, how what I get up there? I was in a 24/7.'"

Catwoman

Halle Berry played Patience Phillips, who becomes Catwoman, in the 2004 film "Catwoman." The movie itself wasn't a commercial success (I believe), but it did mark a milestone for superhero films as one of the first to be led by a woman of colour.

Here's a quick rundown:Movie Title: Catwoman

• Year Released: 2004
• Halle Berry's Character: Patience Phillips / Catwoman
• Genre: Superhero (loosely based on DC Comics character)
• Reception: Negative reviews, but notable for casting

While the film didn't win over critics, Halle Berry's performance was recognized with a few award nominations, including a BET Award for Best Actress.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

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I have taken it that the photos in the montage are in the public domain. Wrong? Please leave a comment and I'll respond promplty.

Men are much more likely to adopt cats than women in the UK, study finds

A story in the Daily Mail reports on a study that challenges the ‘crazy cat lady’ stereotype, revealing that men in the UK are more likely to adopt cats than women. According to a survey conducted by UK Pet Food, over the last four years, 27% of men have adopted an adult cat compared to 18% of women. This translates to approximately 1.5 million new male cat-owning households, versus around one million female households.

The report also highlights that many pet owners, particularly those over the age of 45, find their pets to be a significant source of companionship, with some even expressing a preference for spending time with their pets over family members. Additionally, there’s a suggestion that pets could be beneficial for mental health, with one-fifth of respondents supporting the idea of pets being available on prescription.

This study underscores the changing dynamics in pet adoption and the important role pets play in providing emotional support and combating loneliness.

Comment: this trend, if indeed it is a trend, is probably due to cats being considered better pets when the caregiver is working away from home all the time. Unfortunately both cats and dogs suffer from separation anxiety when their caregiver is not around for long periods. If the reason is as I believe, it is a poor reason.

An added problem is that absent caregivers tend to put down dry cat food for day-long grazing which is bad for the cat under these circumstances as the cat becomes slightly dehydrated which combined with the stress of separation anxiety can lead to cystitis, an inflammation of the bladder due to a bacterial infection and/or for the reason stated below.

Separation anxiety in cats can lead to cystitis. Stress is considered a significant cause of Feline Idiopathic Cystitis (FIC), a common type of cystitis in cats. Anxiety can cause the protective layer of the bladder to become patchy, exposing the bladder tissue to harsh chemicals in urine, which can result in inflammation. It’s important to manage a cat’s stress levels to prevent such health issues, and if you notice symptoms of cystitis, consulting a vet is crucial.

I have personal experience of causing my cat to develop cystitis for the above reason, sadly. It was years ago but I still feel bad about it. I have not missed one day of being with my current cat who I have lived with for around 8 years.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Love completely healed this shy, 18-year-old, polydactyl, deaf, tortoiseshell, hoarded cat

What can you say except love conquers all. People ask what should a new comer to cat caretaking do when they adopt a cat? Love her completely and all the knowledge you need will flow from that starting point because you'll be eager to learn and communicate with your cat. With cats love is always reciprocated. The more the better.

The caregiver in the video had lots of experience and she poured it out all over her unadoptable shelter cat. Poly the cat had all the wrong attributes for being adopted at a shelter. Sometimes you'll meet people who go against the grain and adopt the least popular cat at a shelter.

Every time it works out great. It is thanks to the person. They have a brilliant attitude. They are special people. Like Poly in the video the cats adore these adopters. Listen to Poly purr. It is intense. The purr speaks volumes about the closeness of the relationship. 

If only all human-to-cat relationships were like this. There'd be not feral cats, no 'bad cat behaviour', no cats abandoned to shelters or besides the road. Just great relationships all the way to the end of the cat's life.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Children waiting for an inheritance from their rich mom should support her if her cats and dogs do!

Children who are waiting for a large inheritance from their rich mother who loves her cats and dogs should be cautious. They should read this story and learn a lesson.

In this instance, an elderly woman in China with the surname Liu has left $2.8 million fortune to her cats and dogs in her will because she felt that they have supported her in her old age whereas her children have not.

She said that her children have never visited her. She is still alive but the change in her will has been reported in online news media including the Independent newspaper.

She is taking it out on her kids. She feels neglected. The problem is that in China, I'm told, you can't bequeath money to animals in your will. 😢

If that is correct, Liu's will, as it is currently drafted, will be ineffective. I suspect she's been told about that now.

She appointed a veterinary clinic to be the administrators of her will.

What she should do now if she wants to stick with the terms of her will is to appoint a person who she can entirely trust and bequeath the money to him or her on the instructions that they hold the money in trust for her pets to take care of them for the remainder of their lives and of any money left over to be given to her children.

That would probably be a fairer and more workable way to do this.

She has clearly made her point anyway and I suspect that her children, who are not named, will have picked up on this story and decided to try and convince their mother to change her mind.

I don't know whether in China beneficiaries under a will can challenge it. In the West they certainly can and it happens quite often. It happens, for instance, when the deceased makes a will when they did not have the mental capacity to do it. They didn't understand what they were doing and therefore it can be overturned on an application to court.

And therefore, a will which is unusual and which cuts out close family members especially the kids, might be overturned by the kids in court which should be considered carefully by Liu. There is no guarantee that a judge would overturn a will but it is a possibility and in any case you don't want litigation over a will. That said I don't know how things operate in China in this respect.

There's an argument that children should look after their parents but not to the point where it looks as if they are maximising their chances to get some money off their mother when she dies! That can lead to arguments between siblings if the sibling who cares for their mother gets the lion's share of the estate!

RELATED: Lagerfeld’s pampered cat Choupette to get paws on £150 million fortune.

It is not that unusual for wealthy single people to give a lot of money to pets. The most famous recent case concerns Choupette the Birman cat whose caregiver was the German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. He was besotted with Choupette and left her millions!

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Can cats tell if someone is bad, good or in-between?

A user of quora.com asked the question whether cats can tell if someone is bad, good or neutral? The person cited the example of a person who came around to their home to adopt a kitten. The person thought that the man might be a bit dodgy and therefore told him that they would have to check out his references. The man went away. He thinks that his cat "gave me a very disgusted look and took the kitten [the kitten that was going to be adopted] and laid with her all night. Luckily the man and his kids never returned."

He thinks that his cat recognised the potential adopter as a bad person. Is he right? I think we have to take a commonsense, more scientific approach.

I don't think cats can read the minds of unknown people with whom they have had no previous experiences if the person is doing nothing. I don't think cats have a telepathic ability to pick up bad vibes from a person. So, I don't think, without more, a cat can tell if a person is good, bad or in between the two.

They can tell if a person is bad through their actions obviously. If a person abuses a cat that cat will then be fearful of that person if it happens more than once. My thought is that if a person inadvertently harms a cat but then is loving towards the cat afterwards, the cat will forget. But consistent abuse of any sort will clearly make the cat fearful of that person.

And there's no doubt that in good relationships between a cat owner and their cat, the cat warms to the person and a very close bond is created. So, cats recognise good people through their actions.

The big question, I admit, is that whether cats can sense if a person is bad. I don't think they can. A favourite author of mine and a renowned biologist, Dr. Desmond Morris, says that cats tend to go towards people who dislike cats if in a group of people there are those who dislike cats and those who like them.

He argues that cats do this because people who dislike cats don't look at them and when people look at cats, they can stare at them and staring can be off-putting to a domestic cat. That's his theory. I am not altogether onside with that theory.

But he is more or less saying that a person who dislikes cats and therefore is liable to be unpleasant around a cat can draw a cat in. This indicates to me that the cat is not picking up the fact that a person might be a cat hater and therefore to be avoided. Cats operate on simple physical, visual, olfactory and auditory signals to decide whether to go towards or move away from people and other animals.

Freddie Mercury's favorite cat waistcoat at auction will fetch far more than the estimated £7,000

The hand-painted favourite waistcoat of Freddie Mercury is under the hammer at the moment. The waistcoat contains images of his cats, one of which is Delilah, his favourite cat. Freddie was a great cat lover. I think he preferred them to people. The waistcoat is estimated to fetch between £5000 and £7000 at the Sotheby's auction. I would expect the price to be much, much higher than that. I will try and update this page if and when I hear the result of the auction but I do know that the gate outside his home covered in graffiti achieved as I recall something in the order of £400,000 which was massively higher than the auctioneer's estimate. 

Update: it sold for £139,700!!

RELATED: Freddie Mercury’s favorite cat DELILAH.

Freddie Mercury was much loved. His possessions are very desirable. His cat waistcoat was one of Freddie's favorite possessions therefore my estimate for the price would be something well over £100,000 at a very rough guess.

93% of the lots were sold above the estimate at Sotheby’s New Bond Street auction rooms, London, UK.

Above: Freddie Mercury’s favorite waistcoat (hand-painted with portraits of Freddie’s cats): Estimate £5,000–7,000.

Model with chronic back pain hits rock bottom and rebuilds her life with cat sitting franchise

A model has told The Sun newspaper that she hit rock bottom at one stage when she was a model because she developed chronic back pain which the surgeons could not fix. She had numerous operations which failed to resolve the problem but left her back looking a mess and at one stage she was confined to her bed in agony, contemplating suicide. She went further and tried to end her life but she was found the next day unconscious.

Helena when she was modelling. Image: Focus Features.

Her name is Helena Abrahams and she is now 52 years of age. She is a cat lover. She lives with nine cats. Her cats gave her inspiration to start a cat sitting business which proved highly successful. She now runs a franchise and has franchisees all over the country and she turns over £100,000 annually. She is making a good living thanks to her love of cats and getting her health back.

After multiple back operations. Image: Focus Features.

And she praises her cats for seeing her through the darkest days of her illness when she was surviving on Pringles because she had no money for food and any money that she did have she spent on food for cats.

She now has a successful business and a bright future. What is the moral of the story? Cat companions can see you through your darkest hours and give you inspiration to climb out of the abyss of despair and gradually build towards the zenith of success!

I will add a bit of detail to that overview of her story. She said that her whole career was based around her looks but because of her back pain and the multiple operations the surgeons "butchered" her back. It looks a mess but fortunately now after all these years it doesn't hurt as much.

She was even compelled at one stage to sell some nice jewellery that her parents had given her as a present. She had to pay her bills somehow. She had a relationship and that ended. She wasn't seeing anybody except her dad. In her late 30s she could no longer cope. Before she tried to end her life, she wrote letters about her cats to make sure that they went to good homes. She overdosed on the medication that she was using for her back pain.

She said:

"My cats really pulled me through the recovery, so it was natural for me to want to give something back. I really do care about cats, and how they are treated, and my clients see that. I treat every cat as though it is my own. I love working with animals and they have really turned my life around. I am still in pain, and I will need further surgery in the future, but I have so much to celebrate now. I have learned to see my scars as part of my journey, part of who I am."

She added: "For anyone who gets to that low point, please don't despair. There is always hope."

When you rescue a shelter cat you save two lives

This is a very sweet, cat loving couple in America who have a wonderful relationship with domestic cats. That message comes across loud and clear in the video at the end of this article. Note: sometimes these sorts of embedded videos from news media website stop working. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

When you rescue a shelter cat you save two lives. Screenshot.

They've adopted all their cats from shelters and have seven. The lady says that rescue cats are begging to be loved and they will give love if given a chance. 

And she made a nice point about adopting a rescue cat at a shelter. She said that when you do that you of course, save the life of the cat that you have adopted because there is a chance that they might be euthanised if they stay at that shelter for too long because nobody wants them; and secondly, you potentially save the life of another rescue cat because you make room for the cat at the shelter. 

Often shelters are quite full and sometimes full to capacity so in adopting one cat you open up one space for a new rescue cat to be brought into the shelter.

I think that is a very nice way to explain one of the advantages of adopting a shelter. And the husband in this charming relationship says that if you visit a shelter and you meet the cats it's like meeting people. You will meet a cat or cats where there is some chemistry between you.

I am sure that there are many millions of people who don't believe that a human can have a relationship with a cat which contains that magic chemistry but I believe it can happen and you can make it happen at a shelter because you can meet a lot of cat sometimes.

Arguably, there is a much better chance of meeting a cat with that chemistry at an animal shelter than there is at a cat breeder selling a purebred cat. Cat breeders might have four kittens for sale or less. And kittens don't really have a formed character when they were young.

But if you meet a mature cat that has for some unfortunate reason found themselves at a shelter, they will have a character and this allows a connection to be made based upon your character and there's.

It's notable, by the way, that this couple have adopted black cats. That is unusual as well because typically, as you know I am sure, people tend to reject black cats at shelters and prefer to adopt kittens with a more interesting coat type.

Adopting a black cat from a shelter is a sure sign that the person is a true, died in the wool, cat lover. Both these people are. There is no question about it.

Video

Mutual love gushing out of this feline-human couple

Mutual love gushing out of this feline-human couple. Screenshot.

This is a really good example of genuine love between human and cat. It is all over the screen. As I said it gushes out of each of them at any and every opportunity. They are made for each other and it is great to see. 

She says that she LOVES him and it is very obvious that she does. People say they love their cat or their human partner but don't always mean it truthfully or genuinely. But here it is genuine and absolutely true.

She says that in America they prefer to call ginger cats 'orange' rather than ginger in the UK. I have never heard that before. Ginger cats can be called 'yellow' or 'orange' or 'marmalade' or 'red'. The last one is the way the professionals refer to ginger cats.

RELATED: Orange, red, yellow, ginger or marmalade cats.

They are nearly always male. She relates to her cat as her man which I love. She seems to have given up on a conventional human-to-human relationship and prefers this sort which I can totally understand.

He makes her very happy. That is the measure of the relationship. If you see a human and cat getting a lot of happiness out of their relationship it is a big winner. It is all you can ask for in any relationship of any kind.

Her love for him means that she cares for him beautifully. Love brings respect and great caregiving. It all flows from that starting point.

As they say, if you want to know how to be an excellent cat caregiver: love him/her.  And of course, the nice touch is that he is a shelter cat. She saved a life as well. 

That is always a super starting point to a relationship. Cats show their gratitude.

Dave the stray cat befriended by 2 England footballers in Qatar to come to England

 

Kyle Walker who marked Kylian Mbappe in the quarter-final match between England and France, said: "John [Stones] named him Dave. Some people really don't like the cat but I love him. I love him."

The Three Lions returned to the UK without the World Cup but Dave the cat is going to be shipped out of Qatar despite the fact that the players said that they would only do it if they won the World Cup. This is a great result for Dave.

Dave on his way to a shelter in preparation for flying to England in due course. Image: Daily Mail photographer.

The promise that they would take him home was made by England defenders Kyle Walker and John Stone.

Before Saturday's defeat against France, Walker added: "Dave is fine. Hopefully I can stick to my promise that he will come home with us if we were to win the World Cup."

The video on this page at the top of the article shows you that Dave is coming home and the ladies in the video I believe are the ones who work at the Qatar Animal Welfare Society. They are being paid £2000 by the players to prepare Dave for his flight to the UK.

He will be micro-chipped, vaccinated, neutered and then he will have to spend four months in quarantine before making his trip to his new life in Manchester, England.

Dave is going to dislike that quarantine session tremendously but his future looks bright because he has somebody who really loves him and who will care for him.

The lady's name is Janet Barry, 68. The Times tells me that she is the head of the society. She said: "Dave a really lovely, talkative tabby and it's easy to see why the players fell in love with him. He's a beautiful cat and will be staying with me before he's flown to the players because we don't want him doing a disappearing act from the hotel.

She further added: "The FA [Football Association] approached me to help them after the players said they wanted him properly looked after and brought home."

The manager of the hotel where they stayed said that there are lots of stray cats around the souq "but Dave is now one of the fattest and healthiest after being fed at England dining tables for so long."

The stray cats are familiar across Qatar. There is one England player who is frightened of cats. He is the midfielder, Jordan Henderson.

His teammates, being aware of this, played pranks on him. A fellow midfielder, James Maddison, said: "The other day [Henderson] was eating and I just went behind him and brushed his leg with my hand. I have never seen someone shoot up so fast. He was so scared."

University students with the right attitude benefit from cats on campus

Although I don't think this study is particularly useful or enlightening, I believe that it is worth reporting it so here goes. The scientists decided that most studies about the benefits of companion animals to university students concerned dogs (83%) so they wanted to do some work on cats to see how university students responded. Could they respond positively to the presence of domestic cats on campus? Could cats benefit university students?

Yes, is the answer if they have a sufficient degree of emotionality and the right attitude! 👍✔️💓.

Student benefiting from a ginger tabby cat. Image: Pixabay.

They found in simple terms that the student has to have the right attitude to benefit. In short, if a university student has the following attributes they respond positively to a visitation from a cat on campus at university:

• The student is female.
• The student is open to a dog visitation program.
• The student is a cat owner.

In other words, we are talking about students who already like companion animals, in this case cats and dogs. They like dogs because they are open to a dog visitation program.

In addition, it appears that they decided that females have the right emotionality to respond to the presence of cats on campus.

Patricia Pendry, the co-author of the study report, said:

"Anecdotally, we've always been told that cat people are different from dog people, and that most students are not interested in interacting with cats. Our results revealed that students are interested in interacting with cats and that this interest may be driven by personality traits."

Further:

"Some people came in and made an immediate beeline for cats and others for dogs. I was pleasantly surprised by how many people were interested in interacting with cats, which made me interested in learning more about why they made those choices."

And:

"Our study shows that we may be able to reach a larger audience by offering interventions that include dogs and cats. People who are on the higher end of the emotionality trait may be more likely to participate and benefit from these interactions. We're looking for ways to help more people reduce their stress levels. Adding cats may be another way to reach a broader audience."

Conversely, students who have the following attributes did not respond positively to the presence of cats and campus:

• Those with a cat allergy.
• Those with a cat phobia.
• Those who are dog owners.
• And those who thought that interacting with a cat was risky.

I don't think that tells us much! 😎.

Kindhearted, cat-loving widower, one of 10 murdered by stabbing in Canada

NEWS AND COMMENT-SASKATCHEWAN PROVINCE, CANADA: The world has heard about one of Canada's deadliest mass killings on record leaving 11 people dead and at least 18 injured. Two attackers went on a stabbing spree in the rural heart of the country murdering people at random, one of whom was Wes Petterson, 77, a widower. He was stabbed at the same location as Lana head, 49, a mother of two and a 14-year-old boy and an emergency responder.

Damien and Myles Sanderson, the suspects. Image: Associated Press.

Ruby Works, a resident of Weldon, with a population of about 200, many of whom are retired people, said that Petterson was like an uncle to her. She said: "I collapsed and hit the ground. I've known him since I was just a little girl."

She said that Wes loved his cats and that he was proud of his home-made Saskatoon berry jam. He frequently helped his neighbours. She said that "He didn't deserve this. He was a good, kind-hearted man. No one in this town is ever going to sleep again. They going to be terrified to open the door."

It is reported that the two suspects, Damien and Myles Sanderson, travelled south of their killing zone in a black Nissan Rogue SUV for about 210 miles. One of them had been stabbed in the face. It looks as though one of his victims tried to defend themselves or was successful. It is reported that he approached the daughter of Doreen Lees, 89, from Weldon with his face covered asking if she would call for help. She did not assist him. She went back into her home.

Myles Sanderson is thought to be at large while Damien's body has been found by police. His injuries were not self-inflicted. We don't know who inflicted the injuries.

But this short article is about Wes Petterson who I would like the world to remember as a decent man, kind to others, a gentle cat lover who it seems had a good retirement and enjoying the company of his cat companions and whose life was taken from him unnaturally and for no apparent reason by a man intent on stabbing him to death. Why? The world is unfair, we know that. 

His cats will miss him. They will be confused. I hope and I believe that they are being cared for by the neighbours who he helped.

Ukraine: actress and her four cats killed by rocket fragment as she slept in 16th-floor flat

A well-known Ukrainian actress with a distinguished stage career, Oksana Shvets, was killed while she slept in her 16th-floor flat in Kyiv, Ukraine as a result of a freak accident, as it happens.

Oksana Shvets. Photo in public domain (assessed).

The flat is in the south-east of Kyiv miles from any frontline fighting or any previous missile strike. Regrettably, a missile that was flying above her flat was intercepted by Ukrainian rocket.

The Russian missile exploded and broke into several parts. One of those parts flew through her bedroom window, while she was asleep, killing her instantly.

Shvets was a known cat lover. She fed the local strays and took them in. At the moment she was struck by this piece of missile junk, it appears that her four cats were in her bedroom, perhaps on her bed at the time. Accordingly, they died with her.

Perhaps we can be comforted by the fact that it must have been an instant death. Perhaps she did not even realise it for a second.

It is incredibly sad that this well-loved person had her life taken from in such tragic circumstances. There is another potentially good aspect to this, if it is possible to say that, which is that her cats died with her. Without her they would have struggled to survive.

Sasha, an IT engineer was in the next room at the moment she was killed and survived unscathed.  I think he is her son.

Natasha Tsytsiarieva, a neighbour next door, said: "She was a beautiful person, a real star, kind to us all".

A fellow actor, Anatoly Petrov, 66, said that it is hard for him to believe that she has gone as they were acting on stage at the start of the war last month. Her last performance on February 12 was of a classic manipulative, scheming mother-in-law in a Ukrainian tragedy. Petrov played the young wife's father.

Her body was laid out amid the broken glass in front of her apartment block, covered by a shroud. Her son Sasha, 35, knelt over her body in shock and distress.

This is another tragic and distressing snippet from this brutal, unnecessary and illegal war started by Putin who wants to annex Ukraine and call it Russia. He wants to increase in an instant the population of Russia because it is declining. 

And he wants to return Russia to the old USSR. He is scared of Ukraine's democracy. He fears that it is contagious and that there might be a revolution in Russia to depose him. He doesn't mind whether he takes possession of a country that has been destroyed by his forces. And he doesn't mind if it takes possession of a country in which the citizens universally hate him and therefore his objective is entirely futile.

There is no doubt in my mind that he has engaged in war crimes. I agree with Biden on this. Many others will agree with me too. We can only hope that when this is over, he is somehow taken to The Hague, Netherlands, for a trial.

But it will never bring back people like Shvets.

Cheating on your husband and loving cats are linked by the Libra star sign

I don't think that this is hard science, if you know what I mean, but it might interest a few people. The Metro.co.uk website states that the most common traits among women who engage in infidelity in relationships tend to like cats and be Libras. They are also more likely to have one or two cheating parents, use Botox, have a boob job and other cosmetic enhancements.

Libra by Three Leaves on Deviant Art.

In the UK they enjoy Love Island, like the music of Adele, drink Pinot Grigio, drive a mini and yes be born under the star sign Libra. They do say however that women most likely to cheat on their husbands are Geminis. As it happens, Boris Johnson the UK's Prime Minister is a Gemini. I thought I'd just throw that into the mix because he does have a reputation for creating a very large family which necessitates changing partners from time to time.

Apparently, there is a "cheating gene". You inherit it from your parents which is why if your parents have been cheating on each other or have a history of it in the past then it is likely that you will carry the same gene and also be a less than faithful wife or partner.

And it seems that when children's parents are unfaithful in their relationships, they don't criticise the children for being unfaithful which in turn encourages the children to be unfaithful. That is the theory. Leos, Aries, Sagittarians and Scorpios are also more likely to have affairs.

In order to be totally fair and woke, I have to address what cheating men are likely to be doing, which according to the Metro.co.uk website is the following.

Have one or two cheating parents, be tall, like rugby, like rock music, wear aftershave, drive a BMW, drink lager, dye your hair, be a Libra and "be the current age of the last year of the decade e.g. 29, 39, 49". I'm not sure what that means. I'm not sure that it is important! No mention of liking cats.

This is a bit of fun, obviously, but perhaps you think there is some validity to astrology. There might. I am sceptical but open-minded about it.

Out of interest, Eminem, Kate Winslet, Kim Kardashian and Will Smith are four celebrities who are Librans.

12 K-Pop idols who love cats

Here's a list of a dozen K-Pop idols who're said to be seriously in love with cats. But I wonder if they truly are sometimes. Aren't these pop idols artificially created by producers and entrepreneurs? They are the guys who make the big bucks. They filter some of the money down to the artist. Minimum wage stuff! It is a production and I wonder if part of that production is the cat. The cats are always beautiful, sometimes pristine white to match the beautiful girls and androgenous boys.

Jisun and white cat. She is said to love cats. Photo in public domain.

• Jooheon (MONSTA X)
• Lisa (BLACKPINK)
• Kun (NCT)
• Jisun (fromis_9)
• Kang Daniel
• Rina (WEKI MEKI)
• Jaejoong (JYJ)
• Jimin (BTS)
• Hyolyn
• Yura (Girl’s Day)
• Handong (Dreamcatcher)
• Kyulkyung (PRISTIN)

To a Westerner it looks a bit strange. It certainly looks artificial. No doubt these are talented girls and boys but they are plastic caricatures of real people. And I believe that the cats are there to dress them up. They are the accoutrements of being a South Korean pop idol. You've got to throw all these bits and pieces into the mix. Domestic cats are innocent and popular and therefore if a pop idol likes domestic cats, they have got to be decent people. They've got to be pure of heart and the producers and creators of these K-Pop idols want that kind of image. It is the innocence of the cat adding gloss to the innocence of the pop idol. Just my take on it. 

As mentioned, the boys are nearly always androgenous. Sometimes you can't tell if they are male or female. Why is this? They are not very real as mentioned. They look very pure and innocent too. There are lots of tweets on the internet of the K-Pop boys sometimes with a cat or behaving like a cat or juxtaposed against a cat. It is all feline association to improve the image of the artists.

Lisa and terrified cat. Photo in public domain.

Best dozen US cities for cat lovers

According to a US lawn care and landscaping business, LawnStarter, the best dozen cities for cat lovers are listed below. This is an image and not an interactive table:

So, what do you make of this table? I'm not so sure about it myself, to be perfectly honest. No doubt they have done quite a good job. They have used various criteria such as access to veterinary clinics, the availability and cost of cat sitters and the feline friendliness of local rental properties. All good criteria but not comprehensive. I don't know what their full list of criteria is but I would rank as the top qualification for a city to be cat friendly as lack of road traffic. 

About Orlando they say:

Orlando has a place for your kitty with a good share of cat-friendly rental homes (No. 26), boarding establishments (No. 1), and cat sitters (No. 1).

The place where road traffic is the lightest and where the risk of your cat being run over by a vehicle is the biggest single fear for many cat owners when they decide to let their cat go outside.

People don't use cat sitters that much, in general, and all cat owners try and avoid the veterinary clinic for obvious reasons. So, I think the big issues really are more about how good the neighbours are by which I mean how good they are about accepting the presence of cats and how much traffic there is.

Neat and cheap catio or cat enclosure. Always a good facility for domestic cats. Photo in public domain.

If you live in a place where the neighbours don't like community cats or even outside domestic cats because they think they spread disease and are a nuisance, it's going to be a bad place to live if you have a cat. Also, there is bound to be big variations across a city such as Orlando, Florida where some parts of it are very cat friendly and other parts are less so.

I'm just picking a few holes in the idea of ranking cities in any country by their cat friendliness. It's more just an exercise to attract viewers to a page which no doubt was the purpose for LawnStarter. Nonetheless, it is quite interesting and quite useful provided you take it with a pinch of salt. My intention is not to undermine the people who did the survey, which appears to have taken quite a long time, but to simply provide my opinion.

Prophet Muhammad's love of cats transformed a Muslim cat hater to a cat lover

Qais Hussain's mother had an irrational fear of cats. She suffered from ailurophobia. Her son, Qais Hussain, in complete contrast, is a confirmed ailurophile; a cat lover. He has written a very interesting article for The Guardian. During the coronavirus lockdowns he wanted to adopt a kitten like many other people in the UK. As he lives with his mother it was impossible to introduce a kitten into the household.

Muslims with cat at mosque. Photo in public domain. Not all Muslims are this kind towards cats however.

He believes that her irrational fear of cats may have started when she watched a scary video about a cat in her childhood. She remembers seeing a black cat with green eyes jumping into a man's mouth and suffocating him. He also says that his mother actually hates all animals believing that "Cats are Satan incarnate, who use their cuteness and their adorability to bewitch and do the devil's work."

It seems to me that his mother had also been indoctrinated by many stories of mediaeval Europe when black cats were the familiars of witches and persecuted for hundreds of years. During that black era of humankind's relationship with animals, the black cat was seen as the devil incarnate, which is exactly what his mother believed.

He was desperate to adopt a cat and had the idea of reminding his mother of the stories of the Prophet Muhammad's love of domestic cats. There are many hadiths about how domestic cats and indeed stray cats should be treated by Muslims. Hadiths are believed to be a record of the words, actions of the Prophet Muhammad. They are reports of what Muhammad said and did. And therefore, they carry great weight.

IS DESEXING A CAT HARAM?

Once Qais Hussain's mother had been reminded of hadiths it flicked a switch in her brain it seems to me. She fully accepted cats and embraced their company. Her change in attitude allowed him to adopt a kitten who she adores. They named him Milo and she treats Milo as her fifth child.

IS IT HARAM TO SELL CATS?

Initially she was fearful and unsure around him but gradually got to know him. One day Qais returned from college to see Milo sitting on her lap while she watched TV. She now looks after him and in his words "she runs down the stairs to kiss him in the morning."

It's a good story. I'm not sure why his mother didn't already know the stories of the Prophet Muhammad and his love of cats but that's neither here nor there. She now loves them which is the right attitude!

I just hope that now she can learn to love other animals as well. As a postscript, Qais admits that Muslims treat dogs unfairly. Dogs are treated incredibly unfairly as they are regarded as unclean. Cats are regarded as clean. This is speciesism and I would hope that the senior clerics in the Muslim faith clear up this false anomaly.

Dame Mary Archer has loved cats since childhood

I've just discovered that Dame Mary Archer loves cats. For those who don't know, she is a high-profile lady living in the UK. And I use the word "lady" carefully because she is very lady-like. She is highly educated and very attractive. She is married to Jeffrey Archer the former politician and novelist. Mary Archer is a scientist trained in physical chemistry at Oxford University and she has a PhD. She is an expert in the chemistry of solar panels.

Dame Mary Archer and her Bengal cat Sunita 2015. Photo: Daily Mail.

But the point of this article is that she has always loved cats since she was a little girl. She also loves her study at her home in Cambridgeshire, UK. An article about her dated January 2015 and published online on the Daily Mail website shows her with a Bengal cat, Sunita (see above). She says that Sunita likes water which is very typical of wild cat hybrids and also likes the warmth of a computer which is typical of all domestic cats.

Dame Mary Archer says she likes cats because they're self-sufficient and entertaining but I'm sure she likes them for other reasons, but the one stated are the ones I normally hear. I think we can add: reliability, consistency, persistence, likeability, emotional and physical warmth (on a cold and hostile winter night). And many more reasons. I just love their reliability. They are far more reliable and consistent than humans.

Postscript: I learnt about Dame Mary Archer's love of cats because she was a character witness at the criminal trial of Lady Lavinia Nourse (79) the wife of a famous and now deceased British judge who was accused wrongly of child abuse long ago. The jury took a mere five minutes to acquit her which strongly indicates the inappropriateness of the prosecution. But that is another story. As a character witness Mary Archer said that both lady Lavinia and herself were mad about cats. I suspect that that was meant to give the impression that Lady Lavinia is inherently a good person and I agree with it! If a person is mad about cats, they cannot be a bad person. And therefore, they can't be a child sex abuser.

What percentage of people hate or love cats?

It would be interesting to know the percentage of people who love cats compared to the percentage of people who hate cats. There are no statistics on this so we don't know! There is a third category: people who are ambivalent i.e. neither love nor hate cats. I am referring, of course, to domestic cats.

As there is no data on this, I'm going to suggest a figure: 20% of people dislike cats, 60% like or love cats and the remainder are ambivalent i.e. 20%. That is a wild guess, straight out of the top of my head without much thought. The general idea is that more people like or love cats than those who dislike or hate cats. And we have to distinguish between people who dislike them and those who hate them. The number of people in the latter category are relatively small and they are a danger to the animal.

They are predisposed to abusing cats, shooting feral cats (in America legally or illegally) and generally misbehaving with respect to stray an outside cats. There's lots of videos and articles about, normally teenage, boys abusing outside cats for their entertainment. Quite horrible and ridiculous because they end up uploading a video that they made of their abuse to social media which then gets around and they end up with a knock on the door by a police officer.

The same distinction must go for loving and liking domestic cats. True cat lovers are quite rare relatively whereas there are many millions of people in say America who like cats but don't necessarily live with one. Like all things in life there is a wide spectrum of attitudes towards companion animals.

It is important, from my perspective, that parents educate their children to at least respect animals and I am referring to all animals. They should learn that although they might fear cats or even dislike them for whatever reason, they should respect them and leave them alone, at least. It stops and starts with the parents and education. Animal welfare is about knowledge and education. The more you understand animals the less likely you are to disrespect and abuse them.

DISAGREE WITH ME ON THE NUMBERS? Please comment and tell me why.

"Today I said goodbye to my buddy Benjamin: never experienced a more affectionate and loving kitty."

The full title: "Today I said goodbye to my buddy Benjamin. I adopted him as an older kitty and have never experienced a more affectionate and loving kitty. He was one in a million" is direct from reddit.com. I feel I need to comment on it here, on this website. When I comment on reddit.com it disappears. No idea why. I find the photo very sad. I guess I can feel the guy's distress as I have been through it before several times.  The passing of my first cat hurt the most. It was over 25 years ago and I still feel the emotional pain. It will never leave me. 

They say cats are members of the family. It is true and for me her passing was more distressing than the passing of my sister, mother and father. None of these deaths were anywhere near as painful as the passing of my darling cat. It was love. Anyway, I won't go on as it is too maudlin. Shouldn't indulge in self-pity. Have to move on. 

This guy's cat almost looks like a Bengal cat because of the strong tabby markings and the rich, golden brown background colour: very reminiscent of the Bengal. But I don't think so. He says that he adopted him as an older cat which might indicate a rescue cat. His cat looks elderly in the picture.

You can build a friendship with a cat even if initially you are not sure. Just be consistently loving and interact gently and frequently, over years and bingo, you will probably be handsomely rewarded with a very loving and attentive cat companion who'll sleep on your arm as you see in this photo from reddit.com.