Do cats grieve?

Cats feel emotion therefore in answer to the question, "Do cats grieve?", the answer is almost certainly a Yes.

How can we know that cat's feel emotion? Some scientists will deny they feel emotion. Perhaps these are the scientists who carry out experiments on cats for some of the large cat food manufacturers. These scientists views are not objective and like all humans their views are driven by self interest.

Many cat keepers exaggerate their cats abilities and turn their cats into children. This is understandable but it is not objective either.

But even at a practical and unscientific level, concerned and observant cat keepers will recognize clear signs of emotion being expressed in their cats.

I can only talk about my cat. She will express frustration in her voice. If I don't answer her call in the morning her voice will change to one which shows frustration and even irritation. This is a small indication of an emotional response. Cats are very similar physiologically to humans. It is for this reason that they are tested on sometimes.

Do cats grieve? If as I say cats feel emotion, it is a natural consequence of the death of a cat they have lived with that they will grieve the loss of that cat as it is a normal emotional response.

One factor that may come into play is memory. My view is that cats have short memories. But they are trainable, meaning they will, like all animals, including humans, be conditioned to respond in a certain way due to events that impact their lives. Take for example a stray cat I am caring for on occasion, who I have called Timmy. If you raise your arm at a certain angle and in a certain way, he will flinch. This is a conditioned reaction to someone hitting him, I suspect.

Breeders occasionally talk about a cat that becomes clingy (towards the human) and more nervous after the loss of a fellow companion cat. This will happen for a while until memory plays its part and the emotional impact fades.

Some of the emotional reaction from the cat may be dependent on the emotional impact of the human keeper. That I accept. However, it is my view that cats grieve the loss of companions.

Do cats grieve? to home page

What do White Tigers Eat

White tiger - A White Bengal Tiger cub - photo copyright Frank Peters

In answer to the question, "what do white tigers eat", the answer is that they eat the same as orange tigers. White tigers are not a separate breed of wild cat. They are the tigers that we are familiar with. Except they carry a recessive gene in homozygous form (2 copies of the gene at the same location), that turns the usual orange fur, pale to an off white cream color and the strips to black, grey and chocolate color.

This would appear to be a form of dilution of the orange color and mackerel strips (the tiger is a mackerel tabby cat essentially). In the domestic cat the dilution gene is a recessive gene symbolized by dd in a cat with the dilute color. In the domestic cat (and the same process may occur in the tiger), the presence of the gene has the effect of enlarging the pigment granules, which are deposited less evenly in the individual hairs. Clumps of pigment of differing sizes are fixed within each hair and parts of the hair will have little pigmentation in it. This has the effect of colors appearing more dilute or faded. In the white tiger this translates to near white and less contrasty strips.

White tigers are normally larger than the "usual" tiger. There are also snow tigers (white tigers without strips - see picture >>>) but these seem to be the result of mankind's selective breeding in a zoo environment for the purpose of attracting visitors.

In fact the white tiger although hunted to extinction in the wild many years ago is widely bred in captivity and the population in zoos is growing (perhaps too much due to lack of space). The breeding in zoos of this animal is to attract visitors. Zoos have inbreed white tigers, which can throw up defective recessive genes causing inbreeding depression ("depression" meaning weakened health). I am afraid humankind has not done wonderfully well in respect of the white tiger. Having slaughtered this large cat we inbreed her to ill health for commercial gain.

Back to the question, what do white tigers eat? This is what all tigers eat:

Deer (barking deer, chital deer, swamp deer, hog deer, Rusa deer, Red deer, Sika deer), antelope, buffalo, farm livestock, sambar, young rhino, elephant calves, water buffalo, guar, wapiti, moose, peafowl, monkeys, civets, fish, frogs, crabs, lizards, pythons and vegetation and fruit such as grass and fruit.

However as white tigers only exist in zoos they will eat whatever they are fed by the zoo keepers! Probably meat that is not fit for human consumption.

Out of interest their favourite is wild boar and deer. A tiger hunts alone. She approaches to within about 20 meters. Chases, pounces and pulls down the prey whereupon he/she will snap the spine of the prey at the nape of the neck with her large teeth (this is exactly same way domestic cats kill their prey) or if the prey is large, kill by suffocating the prey by clamping her teeth on the prey's throat. She starts eating at the rump usually and hides the prey in dense undergrowth. She'll gorge herself.


Picture RHS - Snow tiger Tenerife Zoo - photo copyright Martynf65

Sources:

• www.seaworld.org
• http://library.thinkquest.org

What do White Tigers Eat to Cheetah Habitat

American Shorthair tabby

Above -- American shorthair tabby cat - a pure and wholly normal cat. The cat illustrated has a classic tabby coloring and pattern, the blotched tabby pattern with the very distinct tabby "M" on the forehead - photo strictly copyright Helmi Flick.

The American shorthair tabby is, for me, the best coat color and pattern for this most normal and balanced of American cats. But is she American? The origins of this cat breed is in England so it is fair to argue that this is an English cat, the English Shorthair. 

Yet, as the first of this breed came over to America in the early 1600s I think the English can concede that by now an American shorthair tabby is an American cat.

The tabby pattern is the most natural of all cat patterns and colors because it has evolved naturally as the best in terms of camouflage and in the early days before domestic cats became wild cats (about 9,000 years ago) it was all about survival in a natural environment. And the landscape is often brown and broken in color and texture.

I have made an extensive post about the tabby cat coat under the heading cat coats tabby. In summary, each hair is not a single color but has a horizontal banding of black and yellow. The black color is made up a substance (a pigment) called eumelanin and the yellow color is made up of a pigment called phaeomelanin. The gene that dictates how this coloring is deposited in the hair as it grows is the Agouti gene (symbolized by the letter A - a dominant gene). The tip of the hair is black.

In the American shorthair tabby, the Agouti gene works in conjunction with another gene (a tabby gene) which is recessive and which is symbolized by the lower case letters, mc. The presence of this gene results in eliminating the black to yellow banding on certain hairs and allowing only the production of black pigmentation, which is present throughout the length of the hair. This happens in a clump of hairs and in a blotched tabby, as shown above, the clumps form swirls and blotches throughout the torso. In a mackerel tabby (named after the fish's strips) the patterns are striped

Above -- Silver Classic American Shorthair tabby cat - photo strictly copyright Helmi Flick. The silver tabby lacks the yellow pigmentation causing the yellow banding referred to above. Without this pigmentation the black stands out more producing a high contrast pattern, something that breeder aim for generally in patterns. If some yellow pigment remains it is called "tarnishing " in the cat fancy. This color is produced by a dominant gene called the inhibitor gene, symbolized by the letter I. It retrains and subdues the development of the pigment during hair growth.

The CFA allow no outcrosses for the American Shorthair, which means that breeders whose cats are registered with the CFA must breed American Shorthair to American Shorthair.

Click on the link to see more fine photographs and read more about the American Shorthair cat. This a very normal domestic cat. See a classic silver tabby American Shorthair show cat at a show.


Source:

• Robinson's Genetics for Cat Breeders and Veterinarians

American shorthair tabby to American Curl

Blue Abyssinian Cats

Blue Abyssinian cat - slate blue and oatmeal - photo strictly copyright Helmi Flick. Note: I am not 100% sure that this is a picture of a Blue Aby but I believe I am correct - wrong? please comment - thanks.

As you probably know Blue Abyssinian Cats are not a bright blue or even a mid-blue but more like a delicate blue/grey color mixed with a beige like color. A number of cats have to be blue/grey and these are the grey cat breeds.

The Abyssinian is a tabby cat but a special one with tabby pattern unlike the classic tabby cats. The Abyssinian tabby allele produces a restricted (much reduced) tabby pattern (on this occasion the term "allele" means a mutant form of a gene. This term is often used to mean one of a pair genes, however, but Robinson's Genetics says the former usage is more correct). The pattern only occurring (it seems very faintly) on the legs, head and tail and more faintly on the remainder of the cat.

There are many tabby patterns, the classic being a blotched pattern and the two other well known patterns are the spotted (seen for example in the Bengal cat) and the mackerel patterns (strips, you can see this pattern in the Toyger cat).


Ruddy Abyssinian Cats

The ruddy Abyssinian, the color we normally associated with this cat breed is produced by a combination of these genes:

-- Ticked gene in homozygous form (meaning both copies of the gene) indicated in genetic terms like this: T^aT^a (ticked gene)

-- Agouti gene in homozygous form (meaning both copies of the gene) indicated in genetic terms like this: AA

All Abyssinians have the combination genes of T^aT^a and AA. In addition there are these genes: B (browning gene) and D (dense coloration). In the ruddy Abyssinian the ground color has been intensified by selective breeding.



Blue Abyssinian in foreground. Background is a Russian Blue. Photo copyright SHARPSHOOTA.com.


Blue Abyssinian Cats

The coloration of Blue Abyssinian Cats is produced by the above set of genes with the exception that the gene D (dense coloration) is substituted by the dd. This produces ticking that is blue/grey over a color that Robinson's Genetics describes as "cream to oatmeal".

The genetic symbol dd represents the dilute recessive gene (lower case letters) and as it is "dd" these particular genes present in this cat are in homozygous form or there are two together which allows the genes to produce the dilute effect.

The individual strands of agouti affected hairs have banding of slate blue or blue/grey and beige (or oatmeal as mentioned above) rather than black and beige (some people say yellow rather than beige). The appearance (phenotype) should be of a warm but dark blue cat.


Sources:

• Me
• Robinson's Genetic's for Cat Breeders & Veterinarians
• CFA
  

Blue Abyssinian Cats to Abyssinian cats

Maine Coon Cat Health

The health of cat breeds and in this instance Maine Coon Cat Health is important to people. In fact it is often one of the most important aspects of a cat breed. It must be and it should be. The welfare of cats should be our primary concern.


This Maine Coon cat ("Hugo") is not ill as far as I am aware. He is here because it is a nice picture (copyright stevegarfield) and is reproduced under a creative commons license.

The Maine Coon is a fine looking cat with a long American history. This cat is large and looks robust. This is not surprising, after all, as their origins are in the barns of Maine, USA, as a semi-feral mouser cat. You've got to be pretty tough to live like that.

One difficulty in discussing cat health problems is to make sure that the problem is breed specific. Some conditions are found in all domestic cats. But if that is the case sometimes a particular cat breed has a predisposition to a disease (i.e. it is found more often in a certain cat breed because the disease is genetically inherited).

These are the diseases that are known to be found more commonly in the Maine Coon cat than in other breeds - Maine Coon Cat Health problems. Note: Maine Coon breeders are aware of the need to manage and eliminate these diseases through screening and wise breeding so this post should not frighten anyone off from adopting a Maine Coon cat.

Maine Coon Cat Health - Hip Dysplasia

It is well known in the cat fancy that this disorder is more common in the larger cats and the Maine Coon is the largest domestic cat as registered by the CFA. This disease impairs mobility. As I understand it, it is more common in larger cats because the condition is more apparent in larger cats as the extra weight exposes the weakness in the hip joint.

The word "dysplasia" means an abnormal development or growth of organs, cells or tissue in the body.

In this instance the growth occurs in the hip with bone tissue being replaced by fibrous tissue. This is because the hip joint is ill fitting causing wear. Cartilage is produced to repair the joint. The disorder is both inherited and caused by environmental factors. If severe it causes painful arthritis and is crippling. (Wikipedia says it also affects the Siamese cat - link to Siamese cat health problems).

Patellar luxation is sometimes found in Maine Coons and can "occur concurrently to hip dysplasia"). The knee cap slides to the inside of the leg. Can cause lameness and reluctance to jump (source: Medical, Genetic & Behavioral Aspects of Purebred Cats).

Maine Coon Cat Health - HCM

This stands for Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It is an inherited disease. This means that the cat in question (not all cats in a breed) is programmed genetically to acquire the disease. HCM is late onset (adult onset - becoming noticed when the cat is an adult) meaning that it is not congenital (symptoms present at birth). HCM is the most common heart disease reported in domestic cats. It is known to be present in the Maine Coon cat breed. About one third test positive apparently. This seems a high percentage.

I have a friend Valley Girl who cares for a wonderful polydactyl Maine Coon. Maine Coons have a predisposition to be polydactyl as well but this is not a health problem. She has contacts in the Maine Coon world! And she reports what seems like a high percentage of Maine Coons dying young of HCM and one dying of hip dysplasia complications. I don't wish to harp on about genetic illnesses but I have always kept moggies and it has never entered my head that my cats might die, at say aged four, of a heart disease. I find the high percentage worrying. I don't know how other people feel but a poll on my site indicates that people are concerned about a cat's underlying health. On that basis inherited diseases damage the reputation of a cat breed and the MC is a very popular cat.

The symptoms are a thickening of the left thickening of the left ventricular free wall & interventricular septum. As it affects the Bengal cat as well I have made several posts about this disease in relation to the Bengal cat:

• Cat heart disease (general discussion)
• HCM and Bengal cat an update (including link to other posts)

A cat will be suspected to have HCM when a heart murmur is present. Cardiac ultrasound is used to confirm the presence of this disease. As stated, the development of HCM starts in adulthood, which could mean early adulthood (8-12 months) or much later at say 8 -12 years. Screening should take place every year of adulthood therefore. Breeders regularly screen and remove cats from the breeding program that test positive.

But not all breeders do screen as far as I am aware, which is a shame as it means they perpetuate the disease in their breeding lines (this may apply more to Bengal cat breeders who are just coming to terms with the fact that their cats may contract HCM). It also means they may pass on the disease to other breeders if they loan or sell their stud to another breeder.

In Maine Coons substantial research has been carried out (I believe) and as a result the gene involved is known to be autosomal (not sex related - a gene located on a chromosome that is not a sex chromosome) dominant with variable penetrance. On the following page is an abstract of some research carried out on the Prevalence of HCM in Swedish Maine Coon cats that were asymptomatic. It is reproduced under a creative commons license fully complied with to the best of my knowledge.


Maine Coon Cat Health - PKD


Maine Coon Cat Health - photo reproduced under Wikimedia commons license photo credit: CDC/Dr. Edwin P. Ewing, Jr. This picture is of human kidneys as far as I am aware.

This stands for Polycystic Kidney Disease. It is a Maine Coon Cat Health problem. It is present in Persian cats as well amongst other breeds. It also occurs in humans. This is also a genetically inherited disease.

Cysts form in both kidneys (see photo above). Kidney function is impaired and it deteriorates with renal disease at aged 3-10 years. The gene responsible is autosomal dominant. The symptoms are weight loss, depression, occasional vomiting and increased thirst and urination. PKD cats need not be euthanized unless deemed necessary, but it is a fatal disease.

Maine Coon Cat Health - Gingivitis

This disease affects any cat but is mentioned in relation to the Maine Coon so is probably more commonly present in this cat breed (i.e. a genetic predisposition). Symptoms are swollen gums that bleed. This causes discomfort and loss of appetite.


Maine Coon Cat Health - Spinal muscular atrophy


The symptom of this disease is the death of neurons in the spinal cord. These neurons control muscle function. Accordingly, the muscles fail to work properly and muscle weakness ensues resulting in a non normal gait and a less athletic cat (cats are usually very athletic). The cat's life is impaired but it is not fatal (it seems).

It is transmitted by an autosomal recessive gene. It has been transmitted widely. Breeders can now test for this disease.

The Maine Coon has more than the usual genetic predispositions to certain diseases from my research or at least this is the impression that I have. This may be due to careless breeding early on in the breeding program (i.e. many decades ago). It would seem that modern breeders are more in tune with the need to control and manage these diseases - I hope so.

One last point. A concerned Italian breeder is worried that enough is not being done in Europe to eradicate HCM from the breed. He emailed me. This is his email: Maine Coon Cat Health in Europe.

Maine Coon Cat Health - Sources:

• Tufts Oct 2003
  
• Wikipedia
• Picture of cats.org
• Robinson's Genetics
• http://www.mcbfa.org
• http://www.winnfelinehealth.org
  

Maine Coon Cat Health to Maine Coon cats