Risking your life to save animals is one of the most heroic things you can do. Examples.

The title is so true and there are many saintly people who do it. They are still very rare individuals. They are the kind of people who raise my spirits and make me believe that there is hope for us all. Sometimes though I am pessimistic about things including what I see as a breakdown in societal norms.

This video below, which is embedded here (and may therefore one day stop working), starts off with an animal with which I am very familiar; the kitten. A little ginger tabby kitten and therefore male was sat in the middle of road with fast moving traffic. How the hell did he get there? There is only one plausible answer: he was chucked away from a car. 

A lot of people throw their kittens away on the road which achieves the opposite for me in terms of my morale and feelings about humanity.

Anyway the man in the video spotted the kitten and stopped about 100 years beyond him. He raced back endangering himself and his car. He took a risk in doing it and saved the kitten's life I'd say as this kitten was bang in the middle of the highway. He was about to be hit.

I think the man who rescued him drove over the kitten but his tires missed him.

This effort is followed by some others, equally impressive.

The police officer puts a seat belt around the deer that he rescued from beside the road. The deer must have been hit and we have no idea if it made it. It does not look hopeful in the video which is all the more reason to praise the officer for trying. The brilliance of true animal rescue: giving without obvious reward. There is a reward though: the satisfaction that you did the right thing. Good for one's self-esteem that is.

@bicharada34 #animaisselvagens #animals #animais #animaisnotiktok #salvandoanimales #animaisfofinhos #vidaselvagem #foryou ♬ som original - bicharada

This is why cat adopters should always adopt from a rescue center and not purchase from a breeder. In doing that they are playing their part in cat rescue; saving lives. There is an instant boost to the bond between cat and person under these circumstances.

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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.

Amsterdam joins those municipalities introducing cat restrictions to protect wildlife

Although the world centre of domestic cat owner restrictions and feral cat eradication is Australia, the attitude of the Australians appears to be spreading to other parts of the world. The news, today, is that Amsterdam in The Netherlands is keen to introduce restrictions on domestic cat ownership and to alter their policy towards feral cats.

There is no doubt in my mind having read cat news articles for very many years on a daily basis that the attitude towards domestic cats has changed and continues to change. The direction of movement is restrictions on cat ownership and to, in some way, eliminate feral cats either as fast as possible or over a long period of time.

In Amsterdam a campaign and planning has started to encourage cat owners to:

• microchip and sterilised their cats
• keep the feral cat population to a minimum
• no longer release feral cats under TNR programs to "ecologically vulnerable areas"
• Ensure that owners place a bell or a collar around their cat's next to make it much harder for the cat to prey on wildlife particularly birds. Comment: the brightly coloured colour, an anti-predation device, is fairly successful (50% success) in warning birds of an approaching cat. However, bells are less successful because cats learn how to keep them quiet! Neither is going to work that well. And I can see difficulties in convincing a large number of cat owners to place a wide, brightly coloured collar around their cats' necks. It looks a bit peculiar and it certainly doesn't look aesthetically pleasing which is quite a big factor in the human-to-cat relationship because caregivers love the appearance of their cat. It is one of the important aspects of the relationship. I'm being negative but perhaps you might say that I am being realistic.

RELATED: Noticeable, brightly coloured, cat collar protects birds from cat predation (47 – 54% reduction).

Research indicates that in The Netherlands domestic cats kill around 18 million birds a year. That is probably an estimate and we don't know if it is accurate.

At one stage, a Dutch organisation, Huiskat Thuiskat, applied to the court to try and force the government to prevent people from letting their cats roam freely unsupervised. It didn't work of course. Cats are allowed to roam unsupervised because they aren't a danger to people whereas dogs can be.

I'm told that there are about 2.9 million domestic cat companions in The Netherlands.

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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.

Heartbroken man searches for his cats after earthquake in Japan

The video says it all. He is a cat lover and he wants his cats back. It is all that he cares about. He has lost his work but that's relatively unimportant because he's far more concerned about the living and life than the works that he created. He feeds cats that he hopes survived. He feeds all the cats lost in the quake, if they can find the food.

The 7.6 magnitude quake struck western Japan's Noto peninsula on the afternoon of New Year's Day, flattening homes, triggering a tsunami and cutting off remote communities.

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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.

Adoption rates have declined from US animal shelters due to increased living costs

I've been doing some research on animal shelters and adoption rates in the United States. Euthanasia rates are linked to adoption rates. The picture is a little confusing but overall it would appear that fewer people are adopting animals from shelters than they were before the pandemic. There are added complications. Some shelters have not opened as they usually would have, which was the norm before the pandemic, which puts a barrier between the adopter and the shelter. This slows adoption rates.

Adoption rates have declined from animal shelters due to increased living costs in the US. Image: MikeB

Also, because there was a surge in adoptions during the pandemic, the marketplace encouraged people to go into dog and cat breeding. Now that purchases of dogs and cats has decreased, it's left breeders with a surplus of animals. My guess is that some of these animals are finding their way to animal shelters.

Some animal shelters are overcrowded with some overcrowded quite dramatically. One website says that animal shelters in America are 'broken'. Some are under extreme pressure being oversubscribed at about double their normal capacity. There aren't enough adopters because, as mentioned, people are more cautious in America and elsewhere about the cost of cat and dog caregiving which has climbed with inflation to a point where it becomes untenable for many people in the lower echelons of earning capacity.

Nathan Winograd, in his newsletter to me, says that 753,022 animals were adopted in America during the 2023 Home for the Holidays campaign. That's good news he says but it's almost "half a million below prior year totals because fewer shelters are participating and others are refusing to fully open post-pandemic, offering fewer adoption hours and increasing bureaucratic obstacles, such as requiring an appointment before visiting. As a result, they are killing more animals, despite fewer intakes."

The problem is not the number of intakes to shelters. These have remained fairly stable on my understanding of the situation. It is a reduction in people prepared to adopt shelter animals which is the cause of what might be described as a growing crisis at some shelters.

The Colleton County Animal Shelter in Walterboro, South Carolina would seem to be a typical example.  Laura Clark works there and she says that they have 65 permanent dog kennels. Sixty are available because they like to keep five open at all times for new dogs. At the moment they have 195 dogs in their care. Of those, 141, are at the shelter full-time. They are at more than double their capacity.

Clark says that when she first started working at the shelter they took in over 3,000 pets per year which is come down to around 2,000. But the problem as mentioned is adoptions for the reasons stated. 

Also, there might have been a backlash to unethical breeding. During Covid-19 there was a lot of unethical breeding; breeders producing unhealthy dogs which has been discussed a lot on the Internet. This educated people about the problem. They are now more cautious. This has possibly resulted in less purchases of dogs and therefore reduced the intake as mentioned at shelters.

But post-pandemic attitudes have changed about dog adoption. I presume by the way that the same applies to cats. Most of the discussion on this topic is about dogs which is why I have referred to them in this article.

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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.

27-year-old woman adopted a rescue cat of the same age and becomes a record holder

The Guardian reports on an interesting story for me. I think that this story is actually unique in the world of cat adoption from a rescue centre. Vicki Green adopted Flossie from the well-known UK cat rescue charity Cats Protection in the summer of 2023. She adopted Flossie on the passing of her childhood cat, Honeybun, with whom she was very closely connected.

Vicki wanted to adopt another cat and had the opportunity when she finally purchased her own flat in London last summer. She wanted to adopt an older cat and a rescue cat. She achieved her objectives.

She was told by Cats Protection that Flossie was a 27-year-old tortoiseshell. She thought that the charity was mistaken and meant 17, but no, they meant 27 which is an extraordinary age for a domestic cat and particularly a rescue cat at a charity.

Flossie. Screenshot

At the time Vicki Green was 27 herself and so the cat world had that highly unusual situation where the adopter, a 27-year-old young woman, was the same age as the rescue cat that she was adopting.

Vicki thought that Flossie wouldn't live more than a few months but she wanted to give Flossie a good end-of-life experience which I think is very commendable. Some people like to do that and they play a valuable role in the cat rescue scene. It is altruistic. It is a very nice thing to do and there are in fact benefits for both the cat and the adopter although you have to deal with end-of-life issues which are tricky and distressing.

Flossie and Vicki. Screenshot.

Anyway, Flossie is still living and alert and very much alive. She likes to play and has her little routines like all domestic cats do. She's obviously a full-time indoor cat living in an apartment which probably suits her down to the ground at her age. She likes to go out onto the balcony which Vicki describes as Flossie's sanctuary.

She likes to jump onto Vicki's chest in the evening when she goes to bed and then she moves down to her lap and then finally settles down at her feet for the night. She wakes up at 6 o'clock looking for her breakfast with a loud and confident meow.

This is so typical of a domestic cat and one that is much younger than Flossie. Vicki bought her some stairs to get up onto the sofa but Flossie doesn't need them. And she says that "She doesn't look old at all."

"She never turns her nose up at the chance of a good meal," Vicki says.

 

She might make 30 and that would be very, very exceptional. It's nice to report on this unique story. Vicki believes that she owns the world's oldest living cat. She is absolutely correct because Flossie is recognised by Guinness World Records which has confirmed that she is the world's oldest living cat at the moment.

Details: The oldest cat living is Flossie (UK, b. 29 December 1995) who is 26 years and 316 days old, as verified in Orpington, UK, on 10 November 2022.

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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.