Published This Month In The Journal Of The Blatantly Obvious

That male cat ranging over better than 500 hectares? Five'll getcha ten, it isn't food he's looking for.

This may come as a shock to most of you, but according to some observations we have made here at the farm they also tend to lick their nuts with the remaining 3% of the time they have remaining. That is unless they have had them cut out, in which case we venture a guess that they then dream about licking them with the 97% of their time that they spend sleeping.

I know, Derek; I watch them 97% of my time.

I know, Derek; I watch them 97% of my time.

what the hell is an OUTDOOR HOUSECAT??? LOL, they're either indoor cats or outdoor cats...sorry to be nitpicky! HA! Those geniuses couldn't even get that right.

I've done my own research on cats as well (well, one 18-year old cat in particular). It seems they only cough up fur balls IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT and on the carpet, RIGHT NEXT TO hard surface floors. It's a proven fact.

An outdoor housecat is a cat that never comes inside the house, but is of the same species as housecats. One of our indoor cats was born of outdoor cats. Here on the farm we have two inside cats (inside only) and 4 outside cats (they live in the shed with their too-many kittens). When we lived in the suburbs, we had indoor-outdoor cats.

Whats next. Do bugs bite?

Soccermom:

I concur with your observations, having observed a sixteen year old for much of that period. In my research, there was normally a deep howl loud enough to wake the household in the moments prior to the carpet event.

Kate, you've scooped Blazing Cat Fur on this one. He is usually onto stories of this nature faster than flies on a discarded hoagie.

I have had two cats, one for 15 years my current puddy for the last ten years. Both were allowed in and out anytime. I can tell you that both spent about 97% of their time sleeping or resting.

This is not a thesis, it is an observation. .... same thing actually except that i won't get a useless government job for my work with cats.

I don't care how lazy and pukey and phoney and sheddy they are! I love them!

Some of the other 3%

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qbc2J0zZr8

"“I don’t know why anyone lets their cats outside,” said study author Jeff Horn,"

He's unaware of working rural cats?! Mine were feral, but took them in when they started earning their keep around the shop by catching a mouse or two every day and the rare rat.

Finding uneaten severed mouse heads and gallbladders everywhere is annoying though.

Don't forget that part of that 3% is used to find the neighbors garden where they bury their treasures!

“I don’t know why anyone lets these scientists outside,” said one of the cats in the study.

I've numerous mouse's heads but never a gallbladder - do you have a pic?

err ... I've seen ... I've seen ... f'ing keyboard.

This was an amateurish thesis, be assured.

I have extended government funding and am halfway through a 4-year PhD thesis to determine "If Bears Shït in the Woods".

Watch for it.

mhb23re

Our cat Spike, and he was aptly named, was an indoor/outdoor cat who lived 17 years, tough as nails. Cost us a fortune to repair the results of fights, even lost his tail. Debated putting a small T shirt on him to hold his cigarette pack tucked up one sleeve. Our new cat, London, will be strictly an indoor one.

mhb, you might be disappointed, but my thesis entertains the notion that "If a bear shits in the woods and nobody sees, did it really happen?" Deep stuff.

I think my cat chooses to use the area capet over the 90% of laminate covering the main floor of the house is that the carpet provides traction for all of the contorting and contracting she must do to hork out her latest "here's a little 3:00AM present to the family".

Magnificant animals nonetheless.

I'm going to try to invent butt-flavored cat food.

"but never a gallbladder - do you have a pic?"

no pics and I'm no mouse internal organ expert, was guessing what they are. The fresh ones are olive green, 3/8" long at most, kidney shaped, and apparently don't taste good.

Both cats remove them with surgical precision and eat everything else but the head. The heads usually go in a little pile at the door.

Cats! I love them too. Once, our dainty, lady like female caught a mouse, in the house, and proceeded to consume it. This made me feel queasy, but I was glad she was getting rid of it. I asked my husband—husbands are very useful in the mouse department!—to check on what remained afterwards and to discard it, please. He came back and said there was nothing left. I summoned my courage and took a look: she’d eaten the whole thing, head, tail, and all! I was actually quite impressed. She was a sweetie pie. Her brother was a complete doofus, who wanted in when he was out and wanted out when he was in, all day. But we loved them both. Yeah cats!

The cat at our shop is a terrific mouser. Need to feed him diet mice however and give him regular worm powder. It's been said that when a cat gives you its kill, that is the highest compliment you can receive. I'll take a pass

We had a mouse in our home and it was dispatched by our "indoor" cat. Took 45 minutes to clean the blood off the walls. Who knew that a little mouse could have so much stuff in it?

Outdoor cats are fine for the rural area, but the idiots who throw out there cat at night so it can crap in your garden, spray your home as it's territory, attack anything near your bird feeder, caterwaul all night and end up making a mess when run over, I say keep them inside and keep your pet problem to yourself. My house cats that get out only when supervised or fenced in do a fine job of keeping rodents at bay along with lizards and any other low flying bugs.

I blame Fred Flintstone for starting the bad habit of throwing the cat out for the night.

btw, 97% of my cat's time is spent sleeping, resting or watching "their" territory from their favourite perch. It's called instinct, now University of Illinois, where is my degree?

Back on Grampa's farm there was an old queen cat that you could see dragging home Richardson ground squirrel after Richardson ground squirrel. She was feeding her annual litter but there were always more gophers than kittens.

So, how long a period of time do I have to study my cats to determine if they're normal or aberrant?

I don't relish staying up for days or weeks on end timing their sleep patterns. And what if my observing disturbs them, how do I account for this?

Oh,and I don't have a Master's degree,so am I even qualified to do this study?

Should I hire someone who IS qualified,and if so, what are the rates for a cat observer? I have a nephew who has a Masters in finance and he doesn't work cheap,so am I going to require another mortgage to pay for the Master's work?

This is really getting complicated!

When I woke up this morning,I thought this was going to be a good day.

Our present cat Xena came from a local farm. Outdoor 95% of the time. Occasionally shows up to eat. Turns out she is going into at least 2 other houses with cat doors to check out what there is to eat there. Stopped counting when she got to 100 birds/frogs/rats/mice.

Gobi D, that's why we never had a cat door: I'd have been afraid to get out of bed in the dark or in the morning because of the nasty surprises that may have been waiting who knows where!

Being a dog person, I don't see cats as pets. They do basically the same thing no matter where they are, whether it's your house or stray.

If you were shrunk to the size of a mouse, would your pet kill you? I think most cats would.

lookout - yes, I'm a cat person as well. My cat (whose name was Cat)..dominated me completely. Wanted out at 4:00 am...and I had to get up as he was insistent.

But in return, I do remember waking up to loud purrs as he brought his latest catch (mice) back as a gift to me. Once even what remained of, I figured out, a large bullfrog.

And yes - they eat the whole thing. [I refused the gifts].

ET, we're on the same page here for sure. I like that!

Jason M, I hear you and you’re probably correct: if I were as small as a mouse, I'd have run as fast as I could from one of my beloved cats: by nature, they pounce at small things that move fast.

But a dog might attack a small, fast moving, meaty being too. I was, unfortunately, present—too far away to intervene—when two dogs chased, cornered, and then killed a cat . . . a cat they knew!

As the Greenies are wont to do, anthropomorphising our pets—and other non-human animals—usually isn’t a good idea. (This reminds me of William Steig’s fabulous kids’ book, “The Amazing Bone”, in which a fox shrinks to a very small size: Steig is not into anthropomorphising.) Part of what I like about cats: as Kipling said in his “Just So Stories”:

“Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild—as wild as wild could be—and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.”

Cats are cats, and they are proud to be. They will change their nature for no one. I like that!

"If you were shrunk to the size of a mouse, would your pet kill you? I think most cats would."

Posted by: Jason M at June 10, 2011 1:01 PM

I have my concerns...