Pleasing 4 Pets

A border collie, named Spot recently escaped from the home of his new owners in Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK to embark on a four mile quest to locate his original owner.

The grieving dog managed to dodge traffic, crossing roads and junctions to find the grave of his last owner, Denis Goodier, a farmer who died at 73.

Almost like an echo from the classic story of Greyfriars Bobby the dog would not leave his master’s tomb and stayed there until he was eventually seem on the grave at St James Church in Sutton close to Macclesfield.

Widow Margaret claimed that Spot hadn’t been to her husband’s grave because she had found Spot a home straight after her husband’s death.

She said:

“They always had a very close bond. Denis thought the world of Spot, but I was amazed when I heard he had trekked all that way to the grave. I had to give Spot away after my husband died because I couldn’t cope with him.”

Spot was given back to Brian Belfield, sheepdog trainer after the incident who was the people who had originally sold Spot as a puppy to Denis Goodier.

Brian Belfield called the dog’s pilgrimage, which occurred on Christmas Eve, “amazing”.

Talking to BBC News Online Brian said:

“Some dogs have got some sort of navigation system based on scent and all sorts of things that we just cannot understand. But it does happen. I know of one foxhound in Snowdonia that got lost yet found its kennels 80 miles away. It trekked over some awful terrain and turned up a fortnight later, after search teams had given up looking.”

The 43 year old goldfish Tish, who features in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest goldfish in the world finally died a few weeks ago.

Tish came from a questionable background when he was won by the young Peter Hand when he was a teenager from a roll-a-penny stall at a travelling fair visiting Doncaster in South Yorkshire 43 years ago.73 year old Mrs Hilda Hand, the mother of Peter has been looking after Tish ever since.

Tish had changed from his original deep golden colour to very light silver over the years. Most of his life had been spent in a standard round goldfish bowl although he did have a bit of a habit in attempting to jump out of his bowl so Mrs Hand had decided to move him into a larger swankier tank.

Tish outlived ever other pet in the Hand family household including; hamsters, dogs and guinea pigs.

Hilda Hand feels that Tish’s long life was down to good care:

“I think a mistake a lot of children make is to over feed their goldfish and put them in the sun. Tish was fed the same brand of fish food every day and we kept him in the shade. We changed his water regularly and always used a net to take him out and not our hands. “I don’t think we will be getting another one, we couldn’t replace Tish, and he was part of the family. People always used to ask how Tish was doing.”

In Houston, Texas, last week, a cat was heard meowing high up on a 6 story support pillar on the Houston freeway. The striped grey kitten was spotted high up and seemed to be stranded unable to get down so a lift had to be used to take a worker up the pillar to rescue the cat.

Charles Jantzen, an SPCA investigator claims that the cat will have fallen through the expansion joint of the freeway and fallen or landed on the pillar, no one is quite sure how the kitten had managed to climb so high or get there in the first place and it was obvious that the female kitten had wandered far from home and may have been missing for quite a while. Rescuers, however, are not sure just how long the kitty may have been stranded for on the pillar.

The rescue mission was videoed and showed Charles Jantzen gently coaxing the frightened kitten to him and grabbing the kitten to safety. Mr Jantzen claimed the cat was most certainly dehydrated and would get special treatment from the SPCA.

It was a nearby resident, Blake McGee who had heard the marooned feline when he was walking past the pillar one evening, when he realised the sound was coming from way above him he realised that there was a stuck cat needing help.

The equipment which had to be used by the SPCA in the rescue was an extended liftable platform.

A 6 year old German wirehaired pointer called Maggie recently arrived in Cambodia for an unusual task; she had been shipped in to sniff out the tiger droppings within the largest nature reserve in Cambodia.

The dog was originally trained in Russia and is able to sniff out signs of larger wild cats as part of a national campaign to aid boosting the tiger population within Asia. The tiger population has plummeted to around 5,000 from double this number a century ago.

The dog has been scouring and sniffing undergrowth for tiger scent at the 3,000 kilometre Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area within north eastern Cambodia.

It is not clear how many tigers is actually still left in Cambodia, where local poaching and habitat encroachment are causing a huge decimation of the population.

The organisation had to turn to dogs after their field surveys and camera failed to find the large cats from the previous year. The sighting of a tiger in this area was in 2007 through a paw print which was found in the park.

“We think this is the best method when we have a large area and not that many tigers,” said Hannah O’Kelly, a wildlife monitoring adviser for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.

Linda Kerley, one of the consultants at WCS who trained the dos in Russia said “As we gain the technology to extract things from scat like DNA and hormones, all of sudden scat becomes a gold mine of information.”

It is predicted that the 9 million pet cats that are owned in the UK are killing over 150 million small animals a year and scientists have just produced an electronic tracking system to try and prove it.

Wildlife researchers are equipping 200 neighbourhood cats with electronic tags which mean that the researchers can monitor the cats to discover how much wildlife is destructed by the average feline.

Most experts believe that the 9 million domestic cats in the UK are killing mice, birds, moles, rabbits and a variety of other wildlife creatures each year. In the case of the house sparrow, they are becoming rarer and their numbers have dropped sharply – cat predators could be a serious threat to the end of this species.

Rebecca Dulieu a Reading University biologist, has set up the experiment which should provide the real answers to how threatening the average cat is to wildlife using electronic tracking tagged to computer analysis which are able to monitor unprecedented detail in the cat’s movements.

“We know what cats do in our homes - they sleep,” said Dulieu. “But we have virtually no idea of what they get up to outdoors, particularly at night. Now we can find out.”

Guinness, is a recruit for the experiment, he is an 11 year old average black cat whose owner is Robert Davey, IT engineer. Robert has been provided with a diary so he is able to record the kill record of his cat with a plastic storage bag to store the animal bodies. The dead bodies are passed to Rebecca Dulieu for analysing.

“We have found our cats are bringing back, on average, 4.8 dead animals a year,” Dulieu said. “Most are mice but there are also rats, dormice and shrews. Birds make up about a third of the total. One cat even brought back a weasel.”

Angela and Udo Baecker had recently moved from a ground floor flat into a new apartment, when their pet dog, Boxer took a leap from the window of his owners’ apartment not realising that his owner’s new apartment was actually six floors above ground level. Luckily, Boxer managed to land three floors down onto the neighbour’s balcony in the town of Cologne in France.

The lucky dog’s owners are Angela Baecker and Udo, both aged 29 years, immediately called for the local fire department as soon as they started to hear the whining and barking from the balcony, even though they could see Boxer from their own balcony they could not get to him to get him out of his predicament themselves and to make matters worse their neighbours were away on vacation.

Angela Baecker was quite shaken by the incident and she commented “We’ve only been in the new apartment for a week, but thought Boxer would have got used to it after climbing up all the stairs. We never thought he’d try his usual trick of jumping from the window to get into the garden.”

It is expected that the dog will probably not jump out of any more windows soon.

Dogs Trust released a report recently which showed that 75% of dogs are now panned from landlord’s private rental properties and now during very uncertain times with property and with more people renting privately than ever before it is expected that thousands of pets in Britain are at risk of becoming abandoned.

The Dogs Trust look after as much as 16,000 dogs currently who have come from owners who are finding trouble getting a pet friendly rental property and have had to reluctantly hand their pet over to the charity.

A recent national survey which involved 1,400 pet owners revealed that 14% of dog owners have tried to keep their dog as a secret from their landlord and a further 8.5% have had to hand their dog over to a rescue centre, in severe cases 0.5% of respondents’ have opted to have their pet put down.

Clarissa Baldwin, Dogs Trust UK said: “Even though a dog is for life, in some extreme cases, owners are having to give up their beloved pets or else face becoming homeless.”

Currently the Dogs Trust is in talks with the Association of Residential Lettings Agencies for developing a new campaign which will encourage private landlords to accept tenants that own pets which is called “Lets with Pets.”

Pet owners have been advised to provide full details of your pet to your landlord which should include; age, size, vaccination history and any references from a previous landlord.

Dog and cat owners have been advised by the government that they need to provide their pets with both ‘mental stimulation’ and ‘entertainment.’

The government’s new code of practice provides advice on the diet of pets and suitable places for pets to go to the toilet.

Further advice includes how owners can tell when their pets are under stress and also gives advice on how to introduce cats to dogs without fighting.

Whilst owners can’t be fined for breaking the rules as set out in the new code of practice they can be prosecuted for animal cruelty.

The code was outlined by the department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) who claimed that they felt it was important to reiterate to pet owners the responsibilities as set out by the 2006 Animal Welfare Act.

The document for cat welfare is twenty six pages and begins with the following warning to cat owners: “It is your responsibility to read the complete Code of Practice to fully understand your cat’s welfare needs and what the law requires you to do.”

Hilary Benn, Environment secretary said: “Cats need opportunities to climb and jump, such as a simple ‘platform’ type bed or safe access to shelves and the tops of cupboards. Cats that are not very tame, such as some farm cats, may prefer to live outdoors in more basic shelter but you still need to look after them. Dogs should be introduced to cats very carefully; the dog should be held safely on a lead at first so that it cannot chase the cat,” she added.

It is a sad fact that many people call cats names and demonise these beautiful felines as if they were evil, clawing creatures.  Perhaps the stigma from hundreds of years gone by surrounding cats lives on into this day and age.  No matter where its source is there are many ill-educated people who misunderstand these loving and graceful animals.  It seems to often come from a bad childhood experience where a cat has scratched or bitten a child or due to the fears and misconceptions of a parent being passed on to their children.

(more…)

If you have more than one cat you will at some point get to witness the ferocity and violence of a cat fight!  In a multi-cat household you’ll have one cat that usually chooses to take on the alpha cat role.  This cat will always be the one that wants to be fed first and will demand the most attention.  However on the day where the other cats muster up the courage to knock him off his lofty alpha position the fur will really fly!

(more…)