Category Archives: Cats

More Friday Cat Fun

Engineer’s Guide to Cats, via: Engineering And… [broken link removed]. Cats can also guard you from bears 🙂

Cheetahs Released into the Wild

Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) Re-introduces Five Cheetahs into the Wild

It’s very important to closely monitor the behaviours of the individual cats to ensure their health and adaptation to their new environment. CCF has been conducting research on re-introductions and this is the third project. There is not a lot of suitable habitat due to the extent of land under livestock production and habituated cheetahs need large uninhabited areas. NamibRand is ideally suited for this long-term re-introduction project.”

This is the first time a structured re-introduction is being attempted. Previous attempts to re-introduce cheetah into this area have not been successful due to various reasons including unsuitable animals and the lack of an intensive, long-term monitoring program. The cheetahs chosen for this release are likely to settle into the area as they are habituated and will allow access to tracking. In addition, these cheetahs, having lived in a large camp and have been successful in hunting game previously and it is expected that they will successfully adapt tot their new environment.

One aim of the NamibRand Nature Reserve is to restore the balance of the natural ecosystem. Up until thirty years ago there were cheetah in this area of the country. However, livestock farming practices have eliminated cheetah in this region. Since the establishment of the NamibRand Reserve, game populations have increased substantially, providing adequate prey for these cheetah. Nils Odendaal, CEO of NamibRand Nature Reserve said “we are thrilled to finally be able to release cheetah on the Reserve, as it has been an ambition of ours for several years to restore cheetah to the area, creating a holistic ecosystem.”

via: Near Extinct Cheetahs Released in the Wild

Photo by John Hunter (of different Cheetahs in Kenya).

Friday Cat Fun

My cat ran up a $300 water bill:

Jennifer and Jim kept getting huge water bills, over $300 dollars. They knew beyond a doubt that the bills weren’t representative of actual usage, and no matter how they tried to conserve, the high bills continued.

The amazing cat cam could help investigate such problems too.

Leopard Bests Crocodile

Leopard savaging a crocodile caught on camera:

A series of incredible pictures taken at a South African game reserve document the first known time that a leopard has taken on and defeated one of the fearsome reptiles. The photographs were taken by Hal Brindley, an American wildlife photographer, who was supposed to be taking pictures of hippos from his car in the Kruger National Park.

The giant cat raced out of cover provided by scrub and bushes to surprise the crocodile, which was swimming nearby. A terrible and bloody struggle ensued. Eventually, onlookers were amazed to see the leopard drag the crocodile from the water as the reptile fought back.

Eventually the big cat was able to sit on top of the reptile and suffocate it. In the past, there have been reports of crocodiles killing leopards, but this is believed to the first time that the reverse scenario has been observed.

Video Cat Cam

I first wrote about the Cool Cat Cam about a year ago. Next, I interviewed the cat cam engineer. And
a few months ago I posted some photos by Fritz the Cat. Now enjoy some video catcat webcasts: Fritz in Aktion mit Catcam mit Musik – Catcam Smaka takes photos/Video! – Cat wears spy camera, makes film – Mr. Lee CatCam im MDR Aussenseiter-Spitzenreiter And then order your cat cam.

Using Cameras Monitoring To Aid Conservation Efforts

photo of Jaguar

How Hidden Cameras Aid Conservation Efforts for Jaguars and Other Rare Animals

Tobler and his fellow authors write that “despite years of research throughout the Amazon, there are few complete mammal inventories and our knowledge of the distributions of rare and elusive species is still poor.” They explain further that traditional techniques for inventorying which animals are present in a given ecosystem, such as identification of tracks and scat, direct observations, and trapping of animals often do not account for species of animals that are rare and/or low in their numbers in a certain area. For these reasons, they wanted to test out how well cameras could document animals in the rainforest, where cover is dense and many species are hard to observe.
…
Over the two years of the study, some of the more photographed animals included the Lowland tapir, which was caught on camera 102 times and also the White-lipped Peccary (seen 210 times). Among cat species, jaguars were photographed 51 times, ocelots 46 times, pumas 25 times, margays 15 times, and jaguarundis proved the most elusive, only being photographed twice.

The four species of animals that were not photographed included the pacarana, the grison, the Southern naked-tailed armadillo, and the Bush dog.
…
Given the recent lowering of costs and improvements in camera technology, hopefully their example and those of others will help other conservationists around the world to better understand the location of important and rare animals in their respective ecosystems. Given the large range of jaguars and their need for connected habitat, this study gives us hope to think that little hidden cameras might help us better understand where these charismatic cats and other rare animals roam, and consequently give us better information with which to help protect them.

Photo Credit: purplegrum at Flickr under a Creative Commons attribution license

False Teeth For Cats

False Teeth For Cats! What Next?

A team of eight British college students, calling themselves Fangs A Lot, have created the first false tooth for a cat and set up a business, Animal Solutions, to market false teeth for cats, dogs, and other animals. The group and its prototype false cat tooth have made it to the finals of the Ideas Igloo Roadshow, an invention contest for college students sponsored by Britain’s Make Your Mark Campaign and Microsoft, UK.

False teeth for cats may sound ridiculous, but they could be a solution to a serious problem for cats. Cats have notoriously bad dental problems. Cat owners seldom brush their cats’ teeth or scrape the surfaces of the teeth to remove plaque. By the time a cat is 3 or 4 years old, she may already have periodontal disease that can lead to tooth loss. Tooth loss may also come about as a result of tooth breakage, particularly in the canine teeth.

Link provided via our post suggestion page.

Photos by Fritz the Cat

Fritz the cat - photographer

fritz-cam by Fritz the cat:

My name is Fritz [photo of me on the left] and I live at 23 Cat Street [in Germany]. My mistress is an artist, and now it’s my turn to show what I can do. Since September 2007 we’ve owned a Mr-Lee-Catcam
…
Third time lucky. I went for a long walk with the camera. Perhaps a bit too long, because she was looking for me everywhere. Anyway, she was very pleased when I came home with the camera and a mouse. I’d taken over 200 photos while I was out. Unfortunately the battery gave up the ghost before the final capture … of the mouse, I mean.

See many more great photos by fritz at fritz-cam.

Cats Prevent Heart Attacks

I suppose some people don’t know how great cats are 🙂 Here is news of a study showing that those with cats are less likely to have heart attacks.

Whether it’s a frisky kitten or a tubby tabby, a cat at home could cut your heart attack risk by almost a third, a new study suggests.
…
In the new study, Qureshi’s team analyzed data on 4,435 Americans, aged 30 to 75, who took part in the federal government’s second National Health and Nutrition Examination Study, which ran from 1976-1980. According to the data in the survey, 2,435 of the participants either owned a cat or had owned a cat in the past, while the remaining 2,000 had never done so.

Qureshi’s team then tracked rates of death from all causes, including heart and stroke. Cat owners “appeared to have a lower rate of dying from heart attacks” over 10 years of follow-up compared to feline-free folk, Qureshi said. The magnitude of the effect — a 30 percent reduction in heart attack risk — “was a little bit surprising,” he added. “We certainly expected an effect, because we thought that there was a biologically plausible mechanism at work. But the magnitude of the effect was hard to predict.”

This is just one more example of cat power. As we have shown before: cats can be photographers and also protect you from bears.

Have a nice weekend.

Leaping Tigress

The pregnant tigress, in the photo, had wandered off the Sunderbans Tiger Reserve to a village, Deulbari, about 150 miles south of Calcutta. She was tranquillized and relocated deep inside a mangrove reserve (it is unclear if this is a different reserve than she came from based on the report, to me anyway). She is leaping off the fishing vessel used to transport her to the reserve.

Tigress’s spectacular leap to freedom

Tigers have been slowly disappearing from forests and reserves in India due to poaching, growing tourism, and a shortage of properly trained forest guards. The tiger population has dropped from nearly 3,600 five years ago to about 1,411, the government-run Project Tiger said recently.