Cats

[Molly]

Meet Stan, Tenth Life's latest kitty posted by the Post Dispatch (and suggested by me!)

https://www.facebook.com/STLPD

Saw that on FB planet and wondered if you were the supporter!!

[Joe Shlabotnik]

As I said, your cat would eat you if it thought it could get away with it.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

[lukethedrifter]

Previous studies had suggested that cats kill about 500 million birds a year. Marra's group came up with something very different. "We estimate that cats kill somewhere between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds a year," Marra says. "For mammals, it's upward of about 15 billion."

and

A prominent New Zealand economist has set off a storm by suggesting that cats should eventually be eliminated from his country, claiming that they are posing a dire threat to native bird species.

Gareth Morgan, an economist and environmentalist, says that the cat is actually a “friendly neighborhood serial killer” when it comes to birds, and his Web site suggests that New Zealanders should gradually reduce the local feline population by having all cats neutered, and that when cats die, their owners should not replace them.

This problem, he says in his anti-cat site Cats to Go, is that cats are gradually endangering New Zealand’s rich avian diversity, having helped kill off nine native species while endangering 33.

[Mary1966]

The New Zealand story reminds me of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquest_o ... f_the_Apes

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes is a 1972 science fiction film directed by J. Lee Thompson. It is the fourth of five films in the original Planet of the Apes series produced by Arthur P. Jacobs.[2] It explores how the apes rebelled from humanity's ill treatment following Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971).

The opening titles set the film in "North America – 1991." Armando (Ricardo Montalbán) explains that in 1983 (ten years after the end of Escape from the Planet of the Apes, which was set two years ahead of its theatrical release date), a disease killed the world's cats and dogs, leaving humans with no pets. To replace them, humans began keeping apes as household pets. Realizing the apes' capacity to learn and adapt, humans train them to perform household tasks. By 1991, American culture is based on ape slave labor.

So, beware: do you want cats or damn dirty apes?

[Radbird]

[planet planet]

For fellow cat lovers, an inexpensive and really loved accourtement is the Kuddle Kup.

[sighyoung]

[Mary1966]

Snapping their claws?

[sighyoung]

Snapping their claws?

When you're a cat, you're a cat all the way
from your first little mouse to your last dying day.
WHEN YOU'RE A CAT . . .

[Mary1966]

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/fyi-guy/2 ... hat-order/