Cat Chat

Wouldn’t it be really great if we could just bring home a new pet and they would instantly love each other and get along? Sometimes that isn’t the case, especially with cats. The new cat introduction process doesn’t have to be as much of a nightmare as some believe. Below are a few tips in helping the newcomer feel more at home with your existing resident cat.

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Temple Grandin in her excellent book "Animals Make Us Human" says: "One of the most important things you have to realize about cats is that they haven't been domesticated...  Basically they made themselves into pets...  You can't train a cat using punishment and negative reinforcement...  But you can train a cat to walk on a leash by using positive reinforcement."  

This is great and worked for me - I used brushing (which our cat liked) to whistle train him to come - which usually worked...

Anyone else train their cat to come?

Like most people who saw The Hangover (against my original dismissal of the film as yet another stupid foray into idiocy rather than the absolute comic masterpiece it turned out to be), I found the tiger locked away in the hotel hilarious. How did it get there? What shenanigans could those four guys have possibly gotten into? Its very presence in the hotel alone was enough to cause hysterics.

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Wild tigers have dwindled down from 100,000 to less than 3,200 in less than 100 years. This is an incredible loss of species due to conflict with humans, loss of habitat, and of course, illegal poaching. In order to save this species from extinction—which is exactly where it is heading—the U.S. Senate has proposed introducing a new stamp to help fund integral conservation programs for the jungle cat.

This has to be one of the coolest ideas ever put to work for big cat conservation—and it’s definitely much cooler than those awful Elvis Presley stamps we had to bear years ago. With just a few extra cents every time we buy stamps, we could help protect tigers by funding efforts to stop poaching, educating the public about the tigers and how to protect them, and creating protected areas to give these animals—as well as other species—safe grounds to live on.

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