Just For The Cat Lovers Here

[floydv]

Am I the only one that thinks Mimi is trying to seduce me?

Thanks! They're quite a pair, completely opposite in every way. And Graycie was actually cackling at some birds, but it always looks to me like she's smiling. They crack me up.

 

[Rob Croson]

I love the way our cats chirp back at the birds, too.

 

[Coss]

I've seen a couple of these before, but there were some I've never seen and they're really funny
(The one with the girl on the bike is my favorite, the cat sings)

 

[RUCRAYZE]

WELL PETS
Fat Cats on a Diet: Will They Still Love You?
By JAN HOFFMAN FEBRUARY 16, 2016 6:45 AM February 16, 2016 6:45 am

• study in The Journal of Veterinary Behavior suggests that owners need not fear rejection if they restrict their cats’ calories. After an eight-week diet, the cats actually demonstrated more affection after they were fed, their owners reported.
  
  Veterinarians not involved in the study, by researchers at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, hailed the findings.
  
  “Maybe owners will now be more likely to do what’s healthy for their cats,” said Dr. Bonnie Beaver, executive director of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists. ”
  
  In recent years, the epidemic of overweight and obese cats has alarmed veterinarians. “My friends in general practice now say they are surprised when a cat comes in with an ideal body weight,” said Dr. Martha G. Cline, a veterinary nutritionist at Red Bank Veterinary Hospital in Tinton Falls, N.J., who monitors Maya’s weight.
  
  Many factors contribute to weight gain in house cats. Among them is the complexity of the human-animal bond, namely how humans demonstrate love with food, and how cats learn “affectionate behavior” in order to get fed.
  
  “We say, ‘dogs have owners, cats have staff,’” said Dr. Richard E. Goldstein, chief medical officer at the Animal Medical Center in New York. “A cat learns to manipulate us very well: when she’s hungry, she’s the most affectionate cat in the world. And people will do anything to keep their cats happy.”
  
  Many owners “free-feed” cats, letting them graze at will. But bored indoor cats, like bored indoor humans, may eat beyond satiety. “Cats don’t self-regulate well,” said Dr. Goldstein.
  
  Concerned with the human role in feline obesity, Cornell researchers asked: If a cat’s food were reduced, would its behavior change? If so, how would owners translate those changes? For the study, 48 cats, each at least 25 percent over ideal weight, were put on one of three restricted diets, equal in calories. Owners answered extensive questionnaires about their cats:
  
  Before the diet, when your cat was hungry, did it beg? Meow? Pace? After feeding, did it jump in your lap? Since the diet, does your cat bat at you? Hide? Hiss? Steal food?
  
  Good news, cat owners! More than three-quarters of the cats lost weight. And though the frequency of pre-feeding behavior increased — begging, meowing, pacing — it did not begin earlier. (Translation: The cats may have intensified owners’ guilt about giving them less food, but did not protract their misery.)
  
  Better yet, owners felt that despite the restricted feeding, the cats did not turn vindictive. Instead, owners believed the cats showed more affection. After feeding, the cats would more often purr and sit in the owner’s lap.
  
  “We don’t know why,” said Dr. Beaver. “But cats don’t hold a grudge if you limit their food.”
  
  Dr. Emily D. Levine, the study’s lead author, now a veterinary behaviorist in Fairfield, N.J., said that one reason cats gain too much weight is that owners “misread” their pet’s behavior, unwittingly reinforcing it with treats. .
  
  When cats rub up against their owners throughout the day, owners like that behavior, she said, so they feel guilty and think, “ ‘Oh, they must want more food.’ So people feel good feeding their cats and don’t know other ways to give them affection.”
  
  And sometimes, if cats are expecting to be fed and the owner isn’t obeying, the cat may swat. “So you feed them to stop the behavior. There’s a learned component. It works.
  
  “A lot of cats are bored and that’s the bigger picture,” she said. “If the only thing they have to do all day is eat, they will ask for more and more.” Rather than overfeed cats to please them, she said, owners could engage their natural curiosity with interactive play, even training them — really — to go to their place and wait for food.
  
  Over the years, Mrs. Peluso didn’t notice as Maya, now 11, gained weight, a phenomenon similar to that of parents who do not see their children becoming obese.
  
  Photo
  
  
  
  Maya had new-found energy after slimming down.Credit
  Putting Maya on a diet was hard. “The begging! The meowing! I felt like I was torturing her!” she said.
  
  With just a few more pounds to reach her goal, Maya is a different cat. “The light is turned on inside her,” said Mrs. Peluso. Maya chases toys and plays hide-and-seek with their other cat. “She can jump on our bed and sleep with us,” she said. “We unknowingly got her into that situation, but we’ve been able to bring her back.”
  
  Some behavior modification obstacles remain, particularly when the couple goes on vacation. Mrs. Peluso’s mother cat-sits.
  
  “My mother says, ‘Where are the treats? The cats need to know I love them!’” And so, Mrs. Peluso said, “I have to hide cat treats from my mother.”
  
  

 

[AriLea]

Yep,
The dogs in our house belong to my daughter, but I am the cat's 'person', and I'm sure everyone else is just staff. I feel special !

 

[bowers baldwin]

 

[Muzhik]

I'm in an unusual situation, in that I am caring for my daughter's roomate's cat (Jax) until their housing situation is stabilized. My own cat is slowly going downhill and can only eat wet food. I have to put my cat in a room away from Jax to keep Jax from stealing her food, and my cat doesn't always eat all the food I put down. Until my own cat dies, I can't effectively limit Jax's diet, so I'm doing what I can.

 

[RUCRAYZE]

I'm in an unusual situation, in that I am caring for my daughter's roomate's cat (Jax) until their housing situation is stabilized. My own cat is slowly going downhill and can only eat wet food. I have to put my cat in a room away from Jax to keep Jax from stealing her food, and my cat doesn't always eat all the food I put down. Until my own cat dies, I can't effectively limit Jax's diet, so I'm doing what I can.

Hang in there, why not put Jax in the room, and let your cat have the rest of your home?

 

[RUCRAYZE]

Why Am I Obsessed With a Cellphone Game About Collecting Cats?


By RYAN BRADLEYFEB. 18, 2016

Photo

A screenshot from the game Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector by Hit-Point

• 
  Personally, I had a sneaking suspicion why, and it had something to do with aesthetics — something to do with Neko Atsume’s Japanese nature. Wasn’t there something about the game’s look and feel that tapped into the western obsessions with kawaii — Japanese cuteness — and the traditions of Japanese art? (It was, after all, even more popular outside Japan.) So I was happy when, last week, I bumped into an old friend at the local library. He’s getting his Ph.D. in art history, with a focus on Japanese art and photography, and I was hoping he could confirm what I suspected about the game — maybe even put some smart words into smart sentences explaining it. Something about how the angular structure of the landscape depicted on the vertically oriented smartphone screen recalled classic Edo-era woodblock work.
  
  My friend looked at my phone for a moment. Then he pulled out his phone and, after a quick search, showed me his screen, which displayed a painting — a maelstrom of cats, 13 or 14 in all, clawing, meowing, tumbling. It did not look like a wood block print I had in mind. “Have you heard of this guy? Foujita?” I had not.
  
  Much like Neko Atsume, Tsuguharu Foujita was a much bigger deal in Europe and the Americas than he was in Japan. Born in Tokyo, he moved to Paris when he was 27. Despite knowing no one, he managed to meet Modigliani, Leger, Picasso and Matisse within the year. He wore his hair styled in a severe bowl cut, modeled after something he said he’d seen on an Egyptian statue. He also had a watch tattooed on his wrist and wore Greek tunics and earrings and, on occasion, on his head, a lampshade. Foujita’s “Reclining Nude With Toile de Jouy,” a portrait of Man Ray’s lover Kiki, was wildly popular when it was first shown in 1922 at the Salon d’Automne. He also painted cats. Nude women and cats, in Japanese ink, Western style with Eastern sensibilities — that was what Foujita was famous for.
  
  Continue reading the main story
  
  
  By 1940, the year Foujita painted “Cat Fight,” the image my friend showed me, he was back in Japan, painting propaganda posters for the empire. During this period, my friend said, Foujita grew tortured and depressed, both by the war and his role in it and by the way he no longer felt at home in his native land. After the war, he returned to France and was baptized a Catholic. He said once: “Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.”
  
  It was when I read that quote from Foujita that I realized: The link between the artist and the game had very little to do with Japanese aesthetics and everything to do with the chaos in house cats. I had, at this point, been trying for days to get a cat named Chairman Meow to visit my Neko Atsume home. Chairman Meow is a cat with particular desires. He will visit only if you have left out a certain earthenware pot. I knew he had stopped by a few times over the last week because I saw the fish he left behind (he was, I thought, pretty stingy) — but I hadn’t checked the game in time to catch him while he was around and take a picture. It was infuriating. I couldn’t stop checking. Why wouldn’t the Chairman come when I wanted? I’d done everything right! The pot was out, the food was there. . . .
  
  Ah, yes. Of course. My problem was that I wanted something from a cat. Anyone who has cohabited with a cat knows, intuitively, that they are sort of wild. Cats can’t really be trained. They will push things off shelves at random. Feral cats make up most of the breeding population, so despite living alongside humans for some 9,000 years, house cats are still not fully domesticated.
  
  Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector is a game that appears to be about collecting cats. Only you never really collect the cats — merely your photographs of them, for your Catbook. The cats come, the cats go; maybe you see them, maybe you don’t. The cats do not care. They have other lives, other places to be. What brings you back, again and again, is that these semiwild creatures have decided, temporarily, to share their existence with you. You cannot collect them, merely the memory of them, for existence is fleeting and nothing, save for ourselves, is ever entirely ours.
  

 

[Coss]

We all like to relax, some have a favorite chair, for others a couch and now that the nice weather is arriving (at least here it is) there are different ways of relaxing; a lounge chair, or how about a hammock?
Seems there is a cat named Timo saw people relaxing in different things, and cats are king at finding comfortable spots. But sometimes it takes a while to figure out how to make something that should be comfortable work just right.