Archive for the ‘cats’ Category

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Cat House on the Kings

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

Kevin and I share a dream to one day own a nice house with a bit of land where we can have cats. I’m not quite sure how many cats we’ll have. Two seems like a minimum – one each – but female cats are quite sociable so perhaps we’d be better off with three or four. Secretly, of course, I want 700:

I’m incredibly impressed by The Cat House on the Kings, a “no-cage, no-kill lifetime cat sanctuary and adoption center” in California. Over its 16 year history, The Cat House has saved over 16,000 cats and 4,000 dogs, and it relies entirely on the goodwill of donors and volunteers. Its founder, Lynea Lattanzio, has set up an amazing facility, with an intensive care unit for seriously ill cats, an enclosed pasture for cats to safely run around, an isolated FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus) ward. They have spayed/neutered over 40,000 animals, and help find new homes for about 500 unwanted cats, kittens and other animals each year.

I have to admit, I’d love to give up life as a tech consultant and start a cat sanctuary, but it would be a little tricky to fit 700 cats in our current flat. They’d probably fill the place up to about waist height. But the least I can do is make a donation to the great work Lynea and her team are doing there. If you can spare a pound or two, please consider helping out. The kitties need you.

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Essentials for the home gym

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Kev and I like to go to the local gym as often as we are able, usually two or three mornings during the week, with longer sessions on the weekend if we can. I never used to be a gym person nor, indeed, did I used to have any truck at all with physical exercise. But three years of contentment has put the pounds on, and I am determined to get them back off again.

So I can’t imagine building a house, now, without having room for some gym equipment. It doesn’t need to be much, just enough to keep us moving. Kev swears that the best thing for a compact home gym is a Nordic skiing machine, because apparently it’s good for exercising your whole body.

Me, I want a simple treadmill. And I feel that it’s important to say that my reasons for wanting one have nothing to do with these, honest:

UPDATE: Unfortunately embedding has been disabled for the video above, so it won’t play. I can’t imagine why! If you want to see it then it’s still available on YouTube.

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What does project managing a self-build have to do with cats?

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

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Blogs, books and ethics

Tuesday, June 24th, 2008

I have spent a fair amount of time over the last few days searching for expertise online about cat psychology and behaviour, and have been frustrated by the lack of decent blogs on the subject. Many of the sites I saw were ’splogs’, or spam blogs, that have taken content from other people and chucked it up on their own blog so that they can make money out of ads. I deplore that sort of behaviour. Other sites were very badly written by anonymous authors. And yet others stated the obvious, such as “cats like to be stroked” or “don’t feed your cat human food”. Well, no shit, Sherlock.

There are a few good cat rescue blogs, but that’s not quite what I’m after. And the two blogs I found that do show an inkling of promise are either irregularly updated or not quite quality enough. I really am rather disappointed. I have searched on more than one occasion, hoping to perhaps find blogs written by cat vets, or maybe even a cat behaviourist/psychologist, but it seems that there’s very little out there worth reading. Lots of mad cat people, mind you, who have owned 17 cats their entire life, believe that their psychic link to Tiddles gives them a unique insight to the feline psyche, and want to proclaim that fact on garish pink websites that display a distressingly cavalier attitude towards grammar and punctuation.

So I turned my attention to books. Turns out that there are a lot of books about cat behaviour and psychology on Amazon, so I spent a happy hour or two reading through descriptions and adding the ones I liked to my Kits and Mortar wishlist. These are the ones I’ve liked the look of so far, in no particular order:

  • Psycho Kitty?: Understanding Your Cat’s Behaviour, by Pam Johnson
  • Is Your Cat Crazy?: Behaviour Problems and Solutions from the Casebook of a Cat Therapist, by John C. Wright
  • Twisted Whiskers: Solving Your Cat’s Behavior Problems, by Pam Johnson
  • The Cat Whisperer, by Claire Bessant
  • Why Does My Cat…?, by Sarah Heath
  • Cat Confidential: The Book Your Cat Would Want You to Read, by Vicky Halls
  • Treatment of Behaviour Problems in Dogs and Cats: A Guide for the Small Animal Veterinarian, by Henry R Askew

I don’t just have a problem deciding where to start (and given the number of unread books I already have stacked up, whether I should start at all!), I also have a problem deciding where to buy these titles.

Yesterday I discovered that Amazon has been abusing its market position in the UK to punish small publishers who don’t do as it says. The New York Times says:

In the latest in a series of disputes over the division of revenue from online sales, Amazon has disabled the “buy now with 1 click” icon on its British Web site for hundreds of books published by the British unit of Hachette Livre, from back-list Stephen King novels to, naturally, “The Hachette Guide to French Wine.”

The button allows registered users to purchase titles instantly, with free shipping. Customers can still buy the affected books, but they have to navigate to an open marketplace that links them to third-party sellers of new or used books. And they have to pay for shipping.

And it’s not the first time Amazon has bullied small publishers:

“The buy button is their weapon of choice and that’s how they impose market discipline,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, an American trade group that also briefly lost the buy icon, for titles sold from BackinPrint.com, a print-on-demand service for infrequently purchased works. “This is such a clear indication that once they have the clout they are willing to use it to the full extent that they can. It’s ugly with Amazon and will probably get uglier.”

[...]

The dispute with Hachette is not the first in which Amazon has resorted to removing the “buy now” buttons for certain books. In the spring it started disabling the icons for some small publishers in the United States that resisted Amazon’s demand that they use an Amazon-owned company, BookSurge, for print-on-demand services. Amazon is the dominant seller of such titles.

As a result, some smaller publishers in the United States have signed service agreements with Amazon. But a few refused Amazon’s demand to shift the instant printing of their books to BookSurge, which they say has been demanding a discount of as much as 52 percent on the retail price.

I have taken the Amazon wishlist widget out of the Kits and Mortar sidebar, and am seriously considering organising a boycott. Amazon control 16% of the British book selling market, and they use that to beat down small publishers who don’t have very strong bargaining positions. I appreciate that Amazon has a business to run, but putting pressure on small publishers and competing print on demand services is anti-competitive. And frankly, it’s just not cricket.

So I had a look for other UK-based places to buy Why Does My Cat…? by Sarah Heath, and compared prices to Amazon’s ÂŁ6.99 with variable despatch and delivery options.:

And I’m sure there are other online booksellers that I could use, too.

When I have a bit more time, I am going to dig into this a bit more, and will probably blog about it over on Chocolate and Vodka. In the meantime, if anyone knows of any good cat blogs, please let me know in the comments!

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Taking the cat for a spin

Friday, May 30th, 2008

One of the hardest things to do for an indoors cat is provide them with enough exercise to keep them fit and healthy. Cats that don’t move about enough are prone to putting on weight and risk getting diabetes – all of which makes for both sad kittie and sad owners.

Indeed, I saw this problem with my own cat, Fflwff, when she went to live with my parents down in Dorset. Introducing an adult cat into a household of three other adult cats (all female) is pretty tricky, and Fflwff spent about three months living on top of the wardrobe. She slept up there, ate up there, and only came down in the middle of the night to use the litter tray.

Fflwff sitting on top of my wardrobe

Fflwff’s a big cat, easily twice the size of some of the other cats we’ve had, and as such it’s important that her weight is kept in check. Unfortunately, even after my parents other cats died – thus giving her full ownership of the house – she did put on some pounds, getting up to 8.6kg (19lbs) at her podgiest. The vet recommended we get at least a kilogram off her, but that’s not easy for a cat that likes to sit about and sleep a lot!

The cure for Fflwff turned out to be the acquisition of two feisty kittens who now chase her round the house and steal her food, but that’s not an option for everyone. Providing you’ve got the room, though, a cat wheel can be a really good way to get your moggies moving.

The videos on YouTube of cats running on cat wheels seem mainly to be of Bengals, but don’t let that put you off – the idea is sound for any breed of cat or colour of moggie.

You can buy cat wheels from companies such as The Cat Wheel Company or PetZones, although they’re far from cheap. Given the concept of a wheel isn’t hard to grasp, it might be cheaper to find a local craftsman to make one for you. So long as the wheel is well supported and not too heavy, it should be pretty easy to make.

What may not be so easy is getting your cat to use it! The Cat Wheel Company has a few suggestions on training:

The main thing, I suspect, is to use positive re-inforcement. Use a toy initially to get them to understand that when they run the wheel moves, give food rewards every time they run to start with, then once the behaviour is established give random rewards to maintain it. A lot of cats seem to really love running on their wheels, so depending on the attitude of yours, it may not be that hard to get them to exercise.

It may seem strange to see a cat running on a wheel, but they clearly enjoy it and I’m definitely going to think about where I could put a cat wheel in when I come to designing my house. After all, well-exercised cats are not just healthier, they’re also less likely to exhibit bad behaviour, such as scratching or shredding, as a result of boredom.

Besides that, cat + wheel = hours of entertainment, so its a win-win situation for both hoomans and kittehs!

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Theremin-playing cats

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Here at Kits and Mortar, we’re not just interested in self-builds. We’re not just trying to figure out what ‘green’ really means. We’re not just drooling over episodes of Grand Designs. We’re drooling over I Can Has Cheezburger too, source of much kitteh-related hilarity.

Just remember, it’s important for cats to live in a stimulating environment, one that piques their curiosity and provides lots of things to play with. To that end, why not buy your cat a theremin?

And another…

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An Engineer’s Guide to Cats

Monday, April 14th, 2008

An important piece of research now on YouTube:

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