Spay or Neuter a New Cat
Millions of cats are euthanized each year in shelters due to the overcrowding of animals. Cats can easily have over 10 kittens in a given pregnancy leaving owners with problem of trying to find homes for these kittens. There is an easy remedy to this problem and that is spaying or neutering your cat. Not only is this the responsible thing to do but it is better for your cat. If unspayed female are more at risk of developing the following conditions: breast cancer, pyometra, tumors of the uterus & ovaries. While unneutered male cats run a risk of developing testicular cancer. 

The Price of having a cat
When people see a cute kitten they immediately decide to adopt it. Once home they realize they have made a mistake. They are not prepared for the responsibility of a cat, not all members of the family are happy to have a cat, resident pets don’t adapt well to the new addition or it just doesn’t fit into your lifestyle. The costs of pet ownership can be quite high. Licenses, training classes, spaying and neutering, veterinary care, vaccinations, grooming, toys, food, kitty litter, and other expenses add up quickly.

Checking the health of your new cat
When a household decides to adopt a cat, be it from the shelter or a breeder a great deal of time should go into selecting the right animal. Have questions about where the pet came from, how they have interacted with the staff, do the pet have a behavior issue, etc. If you are buying from a breeder, ensure they are registered with an appropriate cat council. When visiting the cattery check out the overall health of the animals. Always have everything in writing, including the final cost of the cat, health guarantees etc.

Buying purebreds from pet shops or backyard breeders
If you are buying a cat from a pet shop or a backyard breeder there is probably little chance that a proper screening of genetic problems has taken place. Pet shops generally charge more for purebred kittens than a registered breeder would. Not only this, but they most likely won’t have certified paper to ensure their authenticity and health. As a result, you may be buying a cat that could have substantial medical bills in the future or even pass away suddenly. 

Seek veterinary help
People don’t realize the seriousness of a medical condition & fail to take appropriate action & get the cat to a vet. This may be due to the lack of knowledge they posses or funds. Cat owners should look into the cost of having pet health insurance or a special Cat Fund prepared in case of emergencies.

Flea Control Product
Unless recommended by your veterinarian, cats should be treated with a cat flea treatment only such as Frontline. Pet owners think they will save money by sharing their dog’s flea control product with their cats. This can prove fatal as cats are extremely sensitive to pyrethrins & pyrethroids which are often in dog flea products. The use of these on cats can result in death.

An appropriate diet
Cats have very specific dietary needs and as such need a balanced diet. There are many commercially available brands of cat food available which will fulfill your cat’s dietary requirements. Don’t attempt to feed your cat a home-made diet or other human consumed foods unless you have spent a great deal of time researching, as certain food s can do more harm than good.

Your roaming cat
Some owners feel that having your cat roam outside the home is beneficial for them. In actuality it may do more harm as free roaming cats & their lifespan is considerably shorter than that of indoor only cats, or cats with limited/supervised access outside. Outdoor cats run the risk of being highly stress by been hit by a car, attacked by another cat or dog, plus many other dangers they encounter which is very traumatizing.

Declawing VS not Declawing
Declawing has been a heated debate for many veterinarians, cat advocates, and owners alike. Some veterinarians consider declawing a “routine” surgery, while cat advocates consider it cruel, inhumane, and unnecessary in almost every case. Declawing is not for everyone and cat owners should have all the facts before making this decision.

Litter Box Maintenance
Cats will use a litter box only if it is kept clean, and if the litter is not scented or pleasant to the cat’s feet. Carefully maintaining your cat’s litter box will almost guarantee that you will not be faced with litter box avoidance problems. Don’t try to over clean the box with disinfectant or bleach as cats are very sensitive to these and other chemicals. It is also recommended to have an automatic litter box to help in reducing the maintenance. If your cat suddenly starts urinating outside the box despite your careful maintenance, you should immediately suspect a urinary tract problem and call your veterinarian.

Hey kids, if you held a contest to find the strongest animal in the world, who do you think the winner would be?  Would it be an elephant? Or maybe a giant squid?  If we made all the animals the same size to make it a fair contest, the winner is an animal that can lift 850 times its own weight. Imagine carrying around 850 of your friends!

Have you guessed it yet?  The strongest animal in the world… is a beetle!

Beetles are incredible insects. There are more species of beetle than any other group of living things. In fact, one quarter of all known forms of life on Earth are beetles!

Beetles all share the same basic shape: they have a hard exoskeleton, a body with six legs, and two pairs of wings. The front pair is hard, like a shell, and makes a protective cover over the delicate inner wings.

We can usually tell beetles apart by this hard wing cover. For example, one of the most famous beetles, the ladybird or ladybug, has a red wing cover with black spots. Some wing covers can be extremely beautiful, in glittering metallic colours that make the beetle look like a little jewel. A fun fact about beetles is that they shed this hard outer shell as they grow, and you can find empty shells  attached to trees and the undersides of leaves if you look carefully.

The strongest beetle is the rhinocerous beetle, which gets its name from the giant horn at the front of its head. The rhinoceros beetle is actually the strongest animal in the world – it’s the only one capable of lifting 850 times their own weight. Even ants, which are famous for their strength, can only lift 50 times their weight.

One of the scariest looking beetles is the stag beetle. Its jaws are so big that they look just like the antlers on a deer! They eat leaves and bark, but they can also deliver a powerful bite if you try to bother them, so it’s best to leave them alone.

Some beetles even like to swim.  Whirlygig beetles swim around on the surface of the water, and spin in circles if they’re frightened. One fun fact about whirlygigs is that if they need to dive underwater, they take a bubble of air with them so that they can stay under!

Some cultures even see beetles as sacred.  Scarab beetles are one kind of sacred beetle. Another name for scarab beetles is dung beetles, because they roll up a ball of dung, move it to a protected place, lay their eggs in the dung, and when the eggs hatch, the beetle larvae eat the dung! They live in Egypt where the desert meets the farmland, and this is also the place where Egyptian burials take place. Because of this, and the baby beetles’ habit of popping unexpectedly out of a ball of dung, they came to represent eternal life to the ancient Egyptians. There is even an ancient Egyptian story that says the sun is rolled across the sky by a giant scarab god!

So next time you spot a beetle when you’re out for a walk, stop a moment to give it your respects. After all, beetles can lift more than any other animal, turn into submarines, and roll the sun across the sky: that deserves a round of applause!

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Cats are born with claws, the same way that humans are born with fingernails and toe nails. Cats need claws in order to mark or scratch a specific place or territory that they have been in. Humans need finger nails to, scratch themselves or others, or for opening a letter envelope. Cats basically stretch their agile bodies in order to prepare their muscles when they dig their claws deeply into wood perhaps or a tree, and then they pull back from their hold. Scratching is a basic physiological need of cats. 

So do cats need to be declawed? If cat owners truly care for the welfare of their cats, they would have to think twice on declawing their cats. 

Declawing, what is it?

Declawing is done by taking away all the front claws of a cat. In a way this procedure is equal to the amputation of all the finger tips of a human being. For cats this surgery is painful and, for someone who is walking on all fours, terribly unnecessary.

Though the recovery of declawed cats may only take a few weeks or so, its physical and/or psychological effects could last a cat’s lifetime.

The following are the possible results once a cat has been declawed. 

Ouch, ouch and ouch

Immediately after surgery, declawed cats suffer severe pain, though it is quite impossible to gauge how much pain they are experiencing.  Declawed cats could be considered as amputees. Cats usually try to go on with their cat lives even with pain unless the pain eventually becomes unbearable. Although they may look and act normal does not mean they are free from aches.

Complications after the surgery

After the surgery, declawed cats usually experience one of the following post-surgery effects: presence of abscess, feelings of lameness, claw re-growth.  Based on studies performed on declawed cats, it has been found that twenty five percent of them develop various complications. The same result has been found on cats who went under tenectomy. This is also a form of surgery that is currently being offered as an alternative to declawing. It is called this because only the tendons extended on the toes are the ones amputated.

Stiffness of the joints

Cats that are declawed experience stiffness of the joints since the tendons that manipulate the toes retract because of the surgery. As time goes by, these same joints freeze and ultimately they will no longer be able to extend their toes.

It has been thought though that cats really do not miss their claws since they also “scratch” continually even if they no longer have anything to scratch with. However, this act is really the cats’ way to stretch those frozen joints.

Catarthritis

Believe it or not, research shows that declawed cats immediately shift the weight of their bodies to the back and onto the larger pad in the front of their feet, away from their toes. The result is still evident despite giving these cats strong anti-pain relievers. If such an effect continues after declawing, the cat will ultimately stress its own joints in the leg, its spine and eventually suffer from arthritis. 

Cats who cannot claw, bite

Since the natural instinct of cats is to claw especially when threatened or scared, in the absence of claws cats are forced to resort to another form of defense – their teeth. Declawed cats that are aggressive naturally are more prone to biting.

Declawed cats have no “nine lives”.

There is a serious risk of death for cats that are declawed. Death could be brought on by the anesthesia they received, or any complications in surgery or hemorrhage. 

Declawed cats that resort to biting run the risk of being abandoned by their owners. These cats could then be put in a shelter, and since they turn to biting, the probability of being adopted becomes slim. Usually un-adoptable cats are put to sleep or they are used to train dogs to fight usually as bait. 

In summary, cats are extremely and highly trainable to be taught to use a post for scratching instead of common household furniture, rugs or curtains. Though declawing  cats is one of the options a cat owner can take, it is basically an unkind and a very animal-unfriendly thing to do. It all depends on the cat owner whether Kitty is more (or less than) valuable than that expensive Italian rug. The choice is theirs.

One has obviously heard of adopting children and taking care of their needs throughout their life. But the concept of adopting animals is not so prevalent. I personally came across this phenomenon when I first accompanied a friend. She wanted to pick up a dog to fill up the void and loneliness in her life. I went along for moral support and also to ensure that she does not fill her house with a myriad of dog species.

Being a purebred fan, I had never even considered the option of adopting a pet. I always felt nice and smug about knowing that my older cat is a purebred Maine Coon. Knowing the place from where she came always gave me a sense of superiority. It was almost as if by keeping a purebred as a pet, I was a class apart. But a visit to the animal shelter made me realize my folly. When I looked at the animals in the shelter I could sense that they were yearning to be picked up by a family and to be loved.

The number of animals that become available for adoption multiplies soon after Christmas. It usually happens because children coax their parents into buying pets for them as gifts but loose interest soon after. The parents do not explain to their children that by taking in a pet they are agreeing to a lot of responsibility and work. And the sad part is that when the child looses interest, they do not have the time in their busy schedules to attend to the pet personally. And so these poor animals are abandoned, sent off to an animal shelter or left stranded to be confiscated.

While my friend made her choice, I decided to adopt a cat myself. I could not take home a dog since my busy schedule does not allow me to spend the kind of time dogs require. Choosing was easy. As I looked in a cage full of kittens, one of them came up to the door, held her paw up and meowed. The doleful eyes were imploring me to pick her up. I knew I had made the right choice when she playfully climbed my curtains at night in my house and a smile appeared on my face inadvertently.

To add to it, I have to admit that though my older cat, the purebred Maine Coon is well behaved she has that snooty air about her, swishes her long downy tail around attracting your attention and behaves like a pampered little princess all the time. On the contrary, my younger cat from the shelter has a gentler and loving demeanor and can endear herself to you in a second.

If you are a deer or elk hunter you may have heard of diseases like Mad Cow Disease. People get Mad Cow Disease from eating infected cattle and beef products. Can you get anything similar by eating big game? If you hunt deer or elk there is a disease call “Chronic Wasting Disease”. Chronic Wasting Disease is a member of group of transmittable brain diseases that affect elk and deer. The brains of these animals become riddled with holes and almost look like a sponge – that you may wipe and clean your S.U.V. with.

There are other similar diseases that have been around for a long time. Scrapie is a disease that affects sheep. It’s been around a long time – perhaps 200 to 400 years. Sheep get Scrapie – never humans. Similarly well publicized is a disease known as “Mad Cow Disease”. “Mad Cow” is obtained and spread by eating infected cattle. The disease spreads and takes a long time to appear – sometimes a decade. However it is only spread by cattle, and eating infected beef products, nothing else. For all the zillions of people who you know , or do not know , who have eaten beef , only a relatively small amount have ever come down with this disease. You have hundred of thousands of times more chances of the a airline losing your luggage on the way to your hunting trip to Canada than getting Mad Cow Disease by eating infected beef. So far it appears that the Chronic Wasting Disease found in America and Canada does not infect or transfer to people who have eaten this infected meat. It is true that any effects take up to decades to appear. Still Chronic Wasting Disease does not appear to be able to spread by eating infected meat – obtained by hunting big game in North America.

The knowledge of the appearance of Chronic Wasting Disease in big game animals first occurred when scientists discovered this Chronic Wasting Disease in a captive mule deer near Fort Collins in Colorado. This occurred as far back as 1977. Whether it was because it was now a known disease for wildlife biologists, and was there all the time before, or whether because the diseases had spread – Shortly thereafter the disease was found and appeared in mule deer at a sister research station nearby to the Fort Collins station. At the very worst in the most densely affected regions In the area known as the heart of the disease problem – rates of infection are as high as 15 % of the mule deer population and 1 to 2 % of the sparse population of elk that reside there It is true and can be determined that the big game disease of Chronic Wasting Disease is certainly on the upswing and definitely spreading. Reports as far away as Canada are now known and reported. However this seems to affect only elk and deer that are in captive game ranches and not wild animals endemic to these areas – and that hunter’s dream of.

Even though no reports of people getting sick from eating tainted hunted game have been reported and as well for a longer term case study – for all the fact that Scrapie diseases in sheep had been around for 300 years and no human being has been stricken with Scrapie or a similar malady what precautions can you take to reduce and minimize any risks?

First of all do not shoot, handle or consume any animal that is acting abnormally or appears to be sick. Best to contact your state or Canadian provincial wildlife department if you se such a case. Next use latex gloves when field dressing your deer or elk. Bone out the meat from your animal. Do not saw through the brain or spinal cord.
It is best practice to minimize the handling of brain and spinal tissues. After field dressing an animal, wash your hands, saws and knifes thoroughly with strong chlorine, Javex type bleach.

All told if is best to avoid consuming the brain, spinal cord, eyes, spleen, tonsils and lymph nodes of harvested animals. Lastly if you do have your animal commercially processed, request that your animal is processed individually without meat from other animals being mingled with the meat from your animal.

All in all as in the sport of hunting and in protecting the health of yourself, your family and friends as well as your hunting buddies it never hurts to play it safe.