Cats

Developing an allergy to your dog or cat can be a nightmare, but hyposensitization could offer permanent relief

A study of more than 11,000 felines reveals the benefits of genetic testing before breeding

As a regular reader, you might know that Tet Zoo has been going for over nine years now. I've written about a lot of stuff, I’ve been intrigued and enthused by a substantial number of animals and animal-themed topics, and I’ve been attracted to a variety of controversial ideas and claimed discoveries.

Dogs are sloppy drinkers for a good reason: They splash water up because they cannot suck like people.

Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) disappeared from mainland Australia centuries ago, probably not long after humans first brought dingoes to the continent.

Scientific projects are very often years in the making. Within the past few days, I've had a new paper appear in the open-access journal PeerJ.

These endangered wild cats, with their distinctively short ears and long tails, aren’t much bigger than your average housecat. Although they have been protected under the U.S.

Children are quite a bit like cats. No matter how much you spend on gifts for them, inevitably it is the box – which had contained the gift – that seems to provide the most raucous and satisfying entertainment for them.

On the streets of Beijing, little old ladies coax even littler dogs to do their business. Some even bear the little plastic bags carried by civically conscious urbanite pet-lovers everywhere.

Every once in a while, scientists working in some remote corner of the globe catch sight of a creature so rare, so elusive and so amazing that you just need to sit up and say “whoa.” This is one of those times.

For over 100 years, a potentially significant dead cat has been sat in storage in a British museum. Specifically, the specimen – the lynx Ab4458 – has been at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery ever since it was added to the collections there in February 1903, and what makes it significant is that it was shot dead after living wild in Devon, southern England. As revealed in a new paper published by Aberystwyth* University’s Max Blake and a team of colleagues (myself, Greger Larson, Charlotte King, Geoff Nowell, Manabu Sakamoto and Ross Barnett), the specimen represents a historic ‘British big cat’, though with ‘big cat’ being used very much in the vernacular sense, not the technical one (Blake et al. 2013).

This lovely little kitten with a head that looks just slightly too big for its face is a Scottish wildcat, a very rare type of wildcat that has dwindled to about 400 individuals living in Britain, mostly restricted to the Highlands of Scotland.