CatDogBlog

Can’t cats and dogs just get along? Let’s find out with this Animal Planet report…

A big black bear turned scaredy cat when a puss got annoyed about the creature coming into his family garden.

Tabby cat Jack fiercely defended his home and sent the bear scuttling up a tree in the US state of New Jersey.

The bear tried to escape, but Jack stood his ground, sending the unwelcome visitor up another tree.

The bear was only able to break free when Jack’s owner called her pet inside. “He doesn’t want anybody in his yard,” she joked.

Bear-sightings are quite common in the West Milford area of New Jersey, but if the creatures have got any sense, they’ll be staying away from Jack’s territory.

Ten cats in search of owners will spend the next 10 days in a New York store window, their every move caught on camera for a reality TV show on which they will compete for best sleeper and mouse-catcher.

The show is the creation of a petfood company and will be shown on cable channel Animal Planet, as well as on the website MeowMixHouse.com where viewers will be asked to vote off one feline contestant each day.

There’s even a direct feed into the house through the cat house’s webcam! The Meow Mix House starts airing on Animal Planet on June 16th at 9PM.

The cats, chosen from shelters around the country, will compete for loudest purr, best sleeper and who can catch the most toy mice. Kitties who get the boot will be adopted into permanent homes.

Meow Mix, owned by Del Monte Foods Company, hopes the show will promote cat adoption, as well as their products, which will be the only thing on the menu.

Passerby taking a gander though a specially rented storefront on Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan can watch the cats lazing about a luxuriously outfitted cat-sized house that includes scaled-down sofas, beds, a fish tank (with fake fish), kitchen and a porch, all put together by an interior designer.

“It’s a Disney World for cats,” said Meow Mix’s Ryan Reed, in charge of ensuring the cats are well-cared for and well-behaved. Volunteers from The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals are also on hand to attend to the needs of the kitty stars.

Enjoying their final day of obscurity on Monday, the cats seemed unfazed by attention from visiting media, most of the cats were asleep on the set, which was unveiled to the public yesterday.

A cat named Sam, from Dallas, Texas, stood guard on the home’s welcome mat while Romeo, a Los Angeles native, lazily stretched out his six-toed paws before swatting a toy.

In the tradition of reality shows, the company will hire the top cat as “Feline Vice President of Research and Development,” responsible for taste testing and product feedback

Biographies of the cats play up their personalities, but in reality, they’re all pretty mellow, if not a bit dazed from all the attention. “In real life they’re all very sweet,” said Meow Mix’s Keith Fernbach. “But we try to give them a personality for TV.”

Like yesterday’s cat meows, I thought it’d be fun to show what dog barks the world over sound like. It probably works best if you try and say it with that countries accent Here’s another interesting list, this time what dogs sound like in different languages around the world:

Danish: vov-vov
Dutch: woef woef
English: woof woof/ruff ruff
Finnish: vuff
French: ouah ouah
German: wau wau
Greek: gav gav
Hebrew: woof-woof
Hungarian: vau vau
Italian: bau bau
Japanese: wan wan
Russian: hav-hav/gav-gav
Spanish: guav
Swedish: vov-vov/voff
Turkish: hauv hauv

If you want to know what an angry or crying dog sounds like in different languages visit this animal sounds page.

This is a fascinating list showing the sounds that cats mewing make in different languages around the world:

Danish: miav
Dutch: miauw
English: meow
Finnish: miau
French: miaou
German: miau
Greek: miaou
Hebrew: miyau
Hungarian: miau
Italian: miau
Japanese: nyan nyan/nyaa nyaa
Russian: miyau
Spanish: miau
Swedish: mjau mjau
Turkish: miyav
Urdu: meow

This dog… goes crazy when an unwanted intruder gets near his bone!


How’s that for automatic scratch-reflex?

Cats are known to be able to become infected with the influenza virus strain H5N1 (also known as avian or bird flu). As reported in a recent issue of Nature, researchers have discovered through laboratory testing that infected cats are also able to spread the virus to other cats. This new information has caused some scientists to believe that felines may be the next potential vector for transmission to people, although it is not yet known whether the virus can transmit from cats to humans.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control is recommending cats be kept indoors if they are within 6-miles/10-km of a known H5N1 infection. However, the Associated Press reported Dr. Arnold S. Monto of the University of Michigan, School of Public Health, stating scientists need to learn more about what role, if any, cats have in spreading H5N1 before making such blanket recommendations.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control based in Stockholm has issued the following written guidelines: “The following advice should generally be applied within the surveillance area (6-mile/10-km radius of a verified A/H5N1 infection in birds). The extent of this area may have to be modified after a local risk assessment.

The disease prevention advice list:
* Keep domestic cats inside the house to avoid exposure to potentially infected birds;
* Keep semi-domestic or stray cats outside the house and avoid contact with them;
* If a cat brings a sick or dead bird into the house, put on ordinary gloves and dispose of the bird as recommended by your Department of Agriculture;
* If your cat is sick and has potentially been in contact with birds, contact the local veterinary authorities;
* Notify of dead cats to the local veterinary department.

Hygiene rules that apply in general, regardless of any risk of A/H5N1 infection:
* Wear gloves when cleaning cat litter and wash hands afterwards;
* Do not touch dead animals. If you must for some reason, such as moving them from the yard, try to use a shovel or other object and wash your hands afterwards;
* Always wash hands before handling food.
* Also note that washing hands with soap and water and washing clothes at recommended temperature with an ordinary detergent is enough to destroy influenza virus.”
Read the rest of this entry »

A woman has filed a complaint against her neighbor, a veterinarian who, without permission, neutered her 10-week-old puppy and surgically quieted his bark. James Risch, the veterinarian, said he performed the procedures after he found the puppy barking on his porch and thought it was a stray.

“He maimed my puppy,” Nancy Miller wrote in the complaint to the Oklahoma State Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners. “This man is a menace to animals and should not be allowed to continue to practice.” She claims he took the dog from her fenced yard. He denies this.

He said he gave the puppy vaccinations, bathed it, treated it for ear mites, neutered it and performed a “simple procedure that reduces the volume of the bark but does not inhibit the dogs ability to bark.” He said the procedure, which is performed on a dog’s vocal cords, can make a stray more adoptable.

Risch wrote a letter of apology to the Millers, saying he did not talk to his wife or check around before he “impulsively took the stray pup from our front porch to the clinic. “I admit my wrongdoing. I would like you to know that I have sought counseling to understand and correct my impulsive behavior.”

Risch also wrote that he did not dislike the Millers’ other dog, Phil, “but rather it is the barking at nothing that can be like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I have made progress recently and have been more able to tune out the barking.”

Animal welfare advocates on Wednesday said they had worked with the U.S. government to develop new measures to protect pets in the event of another natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina, in which tens of thousands of pets died.

“We remember Katrina. That’s why we have pushed for including animals in the rescue plans,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society.

The group says that at least 50,000 pets died because no emergency plans were in place to save them after Hurricane Katrina flooded huge swaths of the U.S. Gulf Coast in August 2005.

Many pets were abandoned at the time, but hundreds of people ended up stranded in their homes after deciding not to abandon their animals when emergency officials said they could not take them along.

For nearly a year, animal welfare groups have been pressing the government to include animal rescue efforts in its emergency plans. The animal welfare groups and the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of emergency operations and natural disaster response plans, have started distributing brochures telling pet owners what to do if a natural disaster strikes.

State officials are being encouraged to prepare shelters for animals, stockpile pet food, train emergency personnel on how to handle animals and provide transportation for people with pets.

U.S. climatologists said on the eve of the official June 1 start of the six-month Atlantic storm season that there was an above-average risk of a major hurricane making landfall in the Caribbean and that the U.S. East Coast was under a much-higher-than-average risk of being struck.

A Spanish court has ruled that dogs should not be treated like children with allocated visiting rights when it comes to divorce cases.

A Spanish man was originally given permission by his wife to visit Yako, a golden retriever, when they separated but he appealed to a lower court when she stopped him from seeing the dog. The court ruled in his favor and set up visiting hours.

But the provincial court of Barcelona then overturned that decision, saying it set a precedent for pets to be treated like children in divorce cases.

“This sort of litigation is rare, given that common sense and reason dictate that people should not take such cases to court,” said court papers. This is going to cause quite the outcry from dog owners I bet.