It's cat day today - here are a couple of cat-related items.......
New TV show about cats on Animal Planet [channel two hundred
and something] that seems like it might be quite amusing.....the last
line of this review is a classic....
And You Used to Think Hairballs Were Bad
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: May 6, 2011
What is the shortest measurable amount of time? You’d think the answer would involve advanced physics, something to do with some invisible force and nanoseconds. But no. Scientists now agree that the shortest measurable amount of time is the micro-instant between when a person first acquires a cat and when that person feels the need to use the phrase “bad kitty.”
Related
Preview: 'My Cat From Hell'Blog
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Julie Lawrence, Andrea Levine and Lyle Smith/Animal Planet
From left, Jackson Galaxy, Amanda and Matt, with Lu Lu.
The list of cat misbehaviors — scratching, biting, yowling, spraying, furniture wrecking, drapery shredding, hairball disgorging — is so long that it’s amazing that the animals can find time to get the 20 hours of sleep they seem to need per day. Most cats, though, know how to balance their evil tendencies with general adorableness, so that their owners are too busy reaching for the video camera to notice the claw marks on their upholstery and the blood on their arms.
That’s most cats. But the beasts in “My Cat From Hell,” a series that begins on Saturday on Animal Planet, are an entirely different story. These cats are the Regan MacNeils of the feline world: hissing, clawing, cursing, eyes aglow with demonic possession. But whereas Regan, the kid in “The Exorcist,” warranted a visit from a priest, these animals get a dude named Jackson Galaxy.
He tries to do for bad cats and their owners whatCesar Millan does for bad dogs and theirs on “Dog Whisperer”: psychoanalyze the situation and the animal, educate the pet owners, recommend some interventions. And he’s surprisingly watchable: genial, knowledgeable, full of information that might be of use even to cat owners whose animals are not possessed.
Mr. Galaxy — yes, it feels ridiculous writing that — looks like a Hells Angel, but his love and respect for cats seems genuine, and his advice appears actually to help the clients, most of whom are couples whose crazed pets are affecting their relationships. Some of these people are downright terrified of their cats.
“You pick her up like an explosive device and kind of hold it out here,” one owner in an early episode says of a cat named Fifi, trying to hold her far enough away from his body that she can’t scratch him.
Anyone not in the cat-owning club is likely to look at these situations and think: “What is wrong with you people? You’re being held hostage by a danged cat. Get rid of it.” But Mr. Galaxy’s philosophy seems to be that there is no cat-human relationship so messed up that it’s not worth trying to fix.
And he puts the onus squarely on the humans. By the time he’s through, they may have changed the furniture in their house, filled their best living spaces with cat-climbing towers, built catios and generally subjugated themselves to the problem cat. One young man starts out adamantly proclaiming that he is not a cat person but ends up taking his fiancée’s cat for walks with a leash. Advocates of the macho brand of maleness will be hooting at this fellow’s emasculation. The cat, though, seems pretty pleased with itself: another human properly trained.
MY CAT FROM HELL
Animal Planet, Saturday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
It's been a few days of obsessive detail about the raid in Pakistan
that killed Bin Laden, so the US Army chose this week to reveal the
surprising military secret that the Army has been using cats in secret
missions for many years.....hoping it would slip under the
radar with the media frenzy......but DDD found this slideshow "Cats
of War" for our alert readers....
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