Cat Chit Chat

Here are three Ragdoll cat pictures. The first one is by the celebrated cat photographer, Helmi Flick . The second is by Dani, a breeder and great cat photographer in Holland and the third by an amateur photographer, Flickr username: quatre mains who has kindly licensed use of the photo under creative commons. Ragdoll cat - seal point - Photo copyright Helmi Flick The photos on this page are protected by copyright © except where indicated. Violations of copyright are reported to Google.com (DMCA). Ragdoll cat " Myst" - Photo copyright Dani The next photo is of a Ragdoll show cat at a cat show in Holland: Beautiful Ragdoll cat - Photo quatre mains (Flickr) You can read about the Ragdoll and see more photos by Helmi on this page .

Is is sensible to buy over the counter pet antibiotics? Are we knowledgeable enough to prescribe pet drugs without veterinarian supervision? Breeders probably are as they have learned through constant veterinarian visits. I don't know where you would get them in the UK. Apparently in the USA there are ways to acquire pet antibiotics over the counter. Antibiotics for fish, for example, are freely available at pet stores. In the USA you could drive to Mexico if you are suitably located as pet antibiotics are available over the counter in that country. Over the counter pet drugs should be the sort of drugs that are safe to use without diagnosis and prescription. Antibiotics are used to fight bacterial infections. Do you know that your cat has a bacterial infection rather than a viral infection? Most URIs are caused by a virus. Antibiotics are bacteria specific and are not generic. One antibiotic does not cure all bacterial infections. Are you able to select the correct antibio

Well to be honest mine don't do that! Maybe we just think that cats put their bum in our face because we as humans are sensitive to what we consider rude behavior but which the cat considers acceptable and normal. In other words in the normal course of events our cat will present his or her bum to us and she will present her face to us etc. We are just overly sensitive to those times when our cat presents her bum to us and think there is some sort of weird reason for it. Cats do put their bum in the air when you stroke them. The reason is on this page . That might be what people are talking about. There is nothing in the books about cats putting them bum in your face other than as described on the linked page above. There is one other possibility. Cats like to scent exchange. They like to deposit their scent on us as it makes them feel more secure. Scent glands are situated around the body including towards the tail. If a cat rubs against you with his or her rear area while a

It is easy to decide to euthanize your cat if she is very old, in incurable pain, losing weight, has an incurable disease and sleeps all the time. What if she is 20 years old, has an incurable disease, is not in pain, sleeps all the time, is static to the point where flies burrow into her fur and lay eggs, sleeps 24/7, refuses to come inside and requires permanent antibiotics to manage an infection in her kidneys? That is my lady cat. My vet has just telephoned me. It happened a minute ago. I thought it was nice of her to phone me, very nice of her. I gave her the information. She hinted that it was time to consider euthanasia. I became tearful. I love my cat more than any other creature in the world. But am I keeping her alive for me or for her? Am I hanging on for me? As I look out the window now, I see her in the garden. She is static. She is lying down. She is in nature. She is glazed over. She recognizes me and comes to me when I go out to her provided I can wake her up. S

Here is list of over the counter pet drugs available in the USA with some detail on usage:

How to Look After an Old Cat? Cats are living longer. People are living longer. This is due to better food, health care and lifestyle etc. That means more older cats. It might be useful to think about things that we could do to help an older cat. Some people believe that there are things we can do and I'll list them. They all translate to being aware of our cat's health and diminishing abilities and accepting that old age brings change. One of those changes is the coat. And another is being less active, which can mean a tendency to put on weight. But (and this is my personal viewpoint) we should not try and "shoe horn" an older cat into a young cat's body. We change shape as we get older and so should a cat. It is natural. Sometimes I feel that we tend to treat cats as robots and think of them as all the same. That said, being overweight is to be resisted. One point about being less active has come to my attention recently (Oct 2011). My old lady cat (20) si

500 million estimated at 2011. There are some idiotic answers on the Internet. We don't know how many cats there are in the world. By far the greater proportion of cats are domestic cats. There are relatively few wildcats left in the world. My estimate is that 99.9% of all cats in the world are domestic, feral or stray cat. Countries like France, Germany and the UK have about 10 million domestic cats each. You would have to add feral cats to that. There would seem to be an equal number of feral cats and domestic cats in the USA (see below) so I wonder whether that rule applies to European countries. I sense that there are less feral cats proportionally in northern European countries because of the climate. In Mediterranean European countries there is no doubt that there are more feral cats in proportion to the total. The UK has 400 wildcats - the Scottish wildcat. There are about 80 million domestic cats and 80 million feral cats in the USA (160m total). There is probably abo

Texas Parks & Wildlife list 4 wild cat species in Texas (2011): Bobcat (Lynx rufus) Jaguarundi (Herpailurus yaguarondi)   Ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) Mountain Lion (Puma concolor)   You can read about these cats starting on this page . You will be hard pressed to see these cats, particularly the jaguarundi and ocelot. Note : the IUCN Red List does not include Texas in the range of either the ocelot or jaguarundi. The most northerly part of the range of these species is Mexico. The other two wildcat species are listed by the Red List as being found in Texas.

Scottish wildcat or a hybrid? Photo by Peter G Trimming At 2011, the greatest threat to the survival of the Scottish wildcat is its interbreeding (also called crossbreeding) with the domestic cat to create a Scottish wildcat hybrid. The purity of the wild cat is gradually eroded through interbreeding. The African wildcat also interbreeds with domestic cats. This is to be expected as the wildcat is the ancestor of the domestic cat. They are almost the same cat. It can be difficult to see the difference in appearance between a Scottish wildcat hybrid and the purebred Scottish wildcat . One fairly clear difference is in the tail. The wildcat has a thick tail with clear dark banding (4 rings) ending in a black tip. The rings nearer the root of the tail are fainter than those at the tip. The dorsal stripe that follows the spine stops at the beginning (root) of the tail. The hybrid cat has a less thick tail and the dorsal banding follows through continuously from the cat's bac

Charlie sticking his bum in air Photo: Michael Why do cats show you their bum? There is one situation under which cats do show you their bum. One of these is when we stroke our cat's back especially the lower back. A cat might raise her bottom and present it. This seems rude to us but is actually natural for our cat. It is a throwback to when the cat was a kitten. The kitten's mother will lick her kitten's bottom to stimulate defecation, something that is important from a health standpoint. Mothers will also lick her kitten on their back and other parts of the body. When we stroke our cat's back we are acting as a surrogate mother and our cat's instinctive, reflex response is to raise her bottom for her mother to lick it.

Flat faced contemporary Persian cats Photo copyright Helmi Flick The reason why contemporary Persian cats have flat faces is because the breed standard of the cat association says that they have to have flat faces. The elements of the face should be in alignment in the CFA breed standard ("the forehead, nose, and chin appear to be in vertical alignment"). This came about over about 50 years of cat shows, judging cats, selectively breeding cats and rewriting the breed standard. Breed standards allow for a certain amount of discretion by judges when judging at cat shows. This gradually resulted in a shift to the more extreme appearance of rounded head, very long hair, cobby body, small ears and flat face. The traditional Persian cat is not extreme in appearance and has a "doll face" appearance. The underlying reason why the drift from normal face to flat face took place is the desire of cat breeders to create ever more eye catching purebred cats that wil