cat (Page 2)

Oscar is still at it: After all this time, the five-year-old cat named Oscar, who was adopted as a kitten by a nursing home in Providence, Rhode Island, still has the amazing ability to detect death. (If you got our FREE weekly email newsletter, you would have already read this story! To sign up, click here).

Oscar when he was just a kitten. Although he is not a social guy, he has “predicted” over 50 deaths by cuddling up to those who had only hours left to live. Oscar has even out-guessed the nursing home staff and will scratch at the door of a dying patient if he is not allowed in.
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Don’t reach down to pet that stray cat: The number of reported rabies cases among cats increased by 12% in 2008 compared to 2007. More than 36% of US cat-owning households did not visit a veterinarian in 2006, which is more than double the percentage of dog-owning households that didn’t visit a vet. This might be because so many cat owners adopt animals that turn up on their doorsteps, and some of them never really become tame.
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One of the things we often report on here on unknowncountry are cattle, cat (and human?) mutilations. It turns out that Florida is now having a wave of cat mutilations.

Cat mutilations have been a dismal reality throughout the world at least since the 1970s, and there have been periods when waves of mutilations literally circled the planet. Cattle mutilations are bad enough, but these are particularly vicious and horrible because of the way the pets are eviscerated and then generally put back where they were found, often on the owners’ doorsteps.
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A lost dog is more likely to be reunited with its owner than a lost cat. In one city in Ohio, researchers found that 71% of lost dogs were found, compared to just 53% of lost cats.More than a third of the recovered dogs were found by a call or visit to an animal shelter. On the other hand, more than half of the cats returned on their own, but less than one in 10 dogs did. Maybe this is because owning a dog has been linked with being healthier. For instance, a 1995 study found that dog owners were more likely to be alive one year after a heart attack than non dog owners.
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