Kitty, don’t roam -- please stay at home!

Heartbreaking things happen: for instance, a cat can get lost or just plain disappear.  Then: what to do?

Lily

How can the cat’s person – always loving but now also distraught -- find the missing feline?  It’s an unhappy situation to be in.

Knowing where the cat was last seen would help.  No need to search the neighborhood if it’s certain no doors or windows were opened since the cat was last spotted in the kitchen.  S/he’s somewhere in the home – and that’s challenge enough!

If there’s general uncertainty about where the cat was last seen, and equal uncertainty about the feline’s favorite haunts both inside and outside the house, that presents a bigger problem and may require a wider search.  The pet’s family can choose from among multiple approaches to take.

First, let’s hope the cat was microchipped on arrival (with the number noted and saved), and second, that good cat photos are on hand.  If Y on both, that will make “Lost” signs and contacts with shelters and rescue groups much easier.  (A cat collar with breakaway clasp is a good addition.)

If the cat was trained to “come” on command (with treats as obedience rewards), that could be invaluable in case s/he’s somewhere in the home and able to hear voices calling her.  With luck, she’ll respond, reappear and be welcomed back.  

If a pet parent doesn’t have a plan for finding the cat before he goes AWOL, here are some possible steps for both inside and outside. 

In the home (which can include basement, garage and any shed-like buildings), check seemingly very small and inaccessible spaces that cats are marvels at getting into.  Same with closed rooms and closets where a cat may have been exploring when the door was closed without knowledge she was there.

That goes for places in the garage and any vehicle, where cats seeking warmth sometimes settle in, out of sight. 

An outdoor search opens things up considerably. It’s common knowledge that  missing cats are often found close to home, hiding quietly when scared or injured and often not meowing when called.

Two things to do outside the home: set up a humane trap (possibly borrowed from an area shelter or rescue group) and keep watch so if the cat ‘bites,” s/he won’t have to be there long.  Also, leave a bowl of food outside, to attract that errant feline.

Loki

Search categories outdoors can include in-person action: post signs with the feline’s picture, use door hangers, knock on doors to alert neighbors, notify area rescue groups, visit local shelters in person (remember: cats usually don’t last long in shelters before being euthanized), inform workers in the neighborhood (landscapers and mail carriers are in positions to notice animals on the move).

Social media offers myriad ways to spread the word about a missing cat: Facebook, of course, including some communities with lost pet pages there, and Nextdoor, a free network for neighborhoods that offers a lost pet post and the pet directory.  Helping Lost Pets.com is another online means of searching.

From Catster magazine and Catster.com, check out (1) 13 tips on how to find a lost cat; (2) The search for Phoebe: Tips to find a missing cat and (3) 8 ways to keep your cat from escaping outside this summer.

Other places to look for a missing cat or get ideas for how to look include Mission Reunite.org/find a lost cat; PetFBI.org; and MissingAnimalResponse.com.

Then there’s always the case of the cat who decides to go home – back to his last home, that is.  Pray for that feline.

To start considering all these possibilities only after a cat disappears could impede success.  The best approach is to have a plan ahead of time so you can move quickly as soon as the cat’s clearly “outta here.”  

An even better idea is simply making any family cat “indoor only,” for everyone’s sake.

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Please help improve this post: tell us about other/better ways you used to find a missing cat and what methods here sound good – or not.  You can comment at 1moreonce.blogspot.com.

  

 

 

 

 

  

Vilified dog breeds, beautiful chickens & shelter cats

Doberman pinschers, Chow Chows, Rottweilers, pit bulls, mastiffs, German shepherds: what comes to your mind when you see this list of dog breeds?

Probably not “cuddlesome,” “lap dogs” or anything like that.   

Mystique

Those breeds are the ones people may be apprehensive about or even assume are dangerous – and the ones that traditionally make their jobs harder for insurance company employees.  Why?  Because they often charge extra or deny policies to homeowners or renters whose pets fall into those breed categories.

But, thanks to a New York law that took effect in January, our neighboring state has joined 3 others (Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan) in requiring “breed-blind” insurance.  And that brought joy to those who have long fought for such legislation, which ignores unfair assumptions about specified breeds.

A big, sad problem in states where assumptions about some breeds keep their owners from getting insurance policies is that too many dogs must then live in shelters instead of loving homes.  Understandably, people shy away from having big, thought-to-be dangerous dogs without insurance.  

More and more, though, dog advocates argue that canine behavior is based on how they’re raised, not their breed.  That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?  All of us probably know at least one perfectly nice pit bull or Rottweiler, and maybe that surprised us at first.  

Rosie

A common argument against certain breeds is that most people are hurt or killed by pit bulls.  Problem is, even if that breed’s numbers are highest, the data are too often anecdotal or biased.  Further, numbers don’t tell the whole story: did the dog act on impulse, was the dog provoked, mistreated or protecting its owner?  The full story can make a big difference, despite the totals.    https://tinyurl.com/26ezyh8

Years ago now, many of the dogs freed from football player-turned fight-dog owner Michael Vick were rehabilitated and adopted out to families all over.  Those dogs were among the first to prove such animals could recover from the horrible lives and training they had experienced.  (Until then, freed fight dogs didn’t get second chances.)

The study mentioned here on May 29 confirmed that breed doesn’t necessarily predict a dog’s behavior.  And The Dodo has reinforced all that: https://tinyurl.com/2p9y4jrv  

 Chickens’ glorious past

Although the history of chickens is debatable, it’s known they started out as colorful, exotic birds of the jungle.  Their long transition may have started in Thailand, where the development of rice and millet could have lured them out of the jungle.

Fossils suggest that after they reached Africa, it could have taken chickens “a full millennium to reach Scandinavia and Scotland.”  Even after spreading all over Europe, chickens still weren’t eaten -- to begin with.  They were treated with reverence long before they were seen as edible.  

At that point, “poultry husbandry" began.  https://tinyurl.com/3samakjw

Bring a shelter cat home

 Hurry up!  June is “adopt a shelter cat month,” according to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or Peta.  (“Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.”)

Bernie

And right now, with “kitten season” underway, shelters are fast filling up with winsome fluff balls who are hard to resist.  But shelters also house cats of all ages -- teens, adults and senior cats – and felines in those categories are often overlooked while irresistible kittens flood the market.

Which is why, since cute and cuddly kittens inevitably grow into teens, adults and seniors, it’s a great – and generous – idea to visit a shelter and choose a grown-up cat to adopt.  Often “the older the better” is better, and senior cats deserve to spend their “later-in-life years” in a home, not a facility.

Right now, decide which shelter you’ll visit first!   

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Greenish tigers, 'lost' animals & adaptable deer

Nimmo

“Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/In the forests of the night . . .”  Yes, as poet William Blake knew, tigers are big, beautiful cats.  And in their natural habitat, they are fierce hunters. 

But doesn’t their vivid striped orange beauty make them conspicuous to prey animals, who might see them “burning bright” in time to get away?  There’s a good reason for why tigers don’t miss too may meals (explained and illustrated in the March ’22 newsletter from the Performing Animal Welfare Society [PAWS]).

Tigers’ prey animals see them very differently from how we do.  Humans and many other animals (including great apes and marsupials) have “trichromatic” color vision, so we and they can see blue, green and red, and those three colors in combinations.

However, most mammals – including tigers and their prey – have “dichromatic” vision that lets them see only two colors, blue and green.  So prey animals see tigers’ orange coloring as shades of green in the forest, making tigers well camouflaged and harder to detect.

Dinner is served.       https://tinyurl.com/54zztave

Watch your words!

Our word choices can help determine whether a dog or cat outside alone with no owner around will be taken to an animal shelter or reunited with her owner.  That’s because “lost” and “stray” can suggest different meanings to people.

When people think of an animal as being “lost,” they’re more likely to assume he lives locally and take steps to help find his home than to take him to a shelter.  But when an animal’s described as “stray,” people are less likely to work at re-unifiying her with her owner, and take her to an animal shelter instead.

The problem is that for many reasons, once in a shelter an animal has little chance of being reunified with his owner.  And that’s a real shame because the great majority of animals brought to shelters are lost -- they belong to somebody.   

Still another good reason for reunifying lost animals with owners: that’s the #1 way to reduce animal

shelter populations.     https://tinyurl.com/y4r2nbjp

Oh, my deer

Lately, it seems, deer have become a popular discussion and argument topic for a wide variety of people – from activists who want to protect them, through environmentalists who rue the plant life that deer destroy, to hunters, who want license to kill them wherever and whenever possible.  

Since last November, I’ve held onto a New Yorker magazine article studded with surprising info about deer and how people have regarded them so differently over time – capitalizing on them, sterilizing and hunting them, protecting them.  One key sentence sums it all up pretty well: 

Many of our ideas about animals – which we eat, which we keep as pets, which we vilify or protect – are changeable with time and context and culture.     

Opening with a narrative about a 2016 deer-sterilization project on Staten Island, the writer moves on to other issues involving both deer and human inconsistency toward them.  One big surprise for me was learning about synanthropes: “a tiny minority of wild animals – not livestock or pets – that have adapted to thrive in the places that humans like and are forever building more of.”  These include city pigeons, rats, coyotes, Canada geese . . . and deer.   

“Today,” the author says, “there are an estimated thirty million white-tailed deer in the U.S., a hundred times more than there were in 1900.”     

 https://tinyurl.com/49j49cje

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