From BuzzFeed comes a roundup of the 30 most important cats of 2011. If you’re an ailurophile you’ll want to see every one, but here are five of my favorites:
Guilty Russian cat (he appears 25 seconds in). Have you ever seen a guiltier-looking cat?
Fat cat on a diet! Is there anything sadder than a cat who wants his noms but isn’t allowed to have them?
The saddest kitten of all time (as the BuzzFeed caption says, “Lighten up—you’re a kitten!”):
Wrestling kittens!
And of course one of my favorites (right after Maru): Kagonekoshiro, or “white basket cat,” the chillest cat in the world. See his website here.
Pretty adorable all around. I can’t decide if that first one is a Brit or a Chartreuse. Hard to tell with the ears flat like that, and I’ve never seen a Brit look guilty. They look defiant: “What?!? It’s supposed to be like that. Have you no sense of aesthetics?”
And Maru is a person in a cat suit with oversized props and trick photography. Get over it.
I had a cat several years ago, unpedigreed (he was a stray) who, when you yelled at him, would look over his shoulder behind himsekf, as if to say, “Who are you yelling at?” L
Insouciant, Merlyn is…
I’m sorry, but I have the chilliest cat in the world.
In the winter, Clawed Monet sleeps ON TOP OF the pellet stove. I also have a cat cave with a foam liner, and he burrows UNDER the liner to sleep.
In the summer, he gets under the quilt on my bed to sleep.
There’s also a chair right next to the pellet stove that he favors, which is softer, but not quite as warm as on top.
So far, he has neither scorched nor smothered, but I worry about it. L
I see what you did there…
Hungry fat cat looks so pathetic, it would be hard to keep him on a diet.
My fat cat is currently on a diet. He sits on my office window sill and literally presses his nose against the window and if I look up he gets a panicky look a gives a silent mew. If I move he moves along the window so he can keep staring at me as he wastes away (he believes). At first this was funny, now he’s beginning to grind me down. A small bowl of food gives me an hour’s respite.
When I put my cat on a diet I found I had to feed him when he asked, I just fed him a very small amount. It worked, he slowly lost weight.
Food dispenser balls (and various other food-hiding techniques) are a convenient way to control food intake, as well as being fun for the kittehs. I have found that toilet paper tubes with one end squished in work well for this, as do the “slimcat” plastic balls (http://www.thepetstoreonline.com/multivet-slimcat-interactive-cat-toy.html)
The hungryfatkitteh’s food bowl is too small, too deep in proportion to its width, and in spite of its wire stand, not stable enough for serious cat chow ingestion.
Over 35+ years I’ve experimented with cat bowls of many sizes and proportions. Turns out that they prefer a wide, rather shallow bowl. My two grrrlz are currently eating out of two heavy, plain white, slightly translucent china bowls 6″ (15cm) wide and 2″ (5 cm) deep, the best I’ve found so far.
For water bowls, I’ve used large souffle dishes for many years. Oddly enough, when they have had the choice my kittehs have all preferred French Pyrex over glazed ceramic. (Of course, the tastiest water is always a muddy puddle outside.)
I’ve also found that the grrrlz seem to like it when their bowls, both food and water, are washed before refilling.
You are correct. Cats prefer a shallow bowl or even a small dish. If that’s a cat bowl, someone needs to rethink their design. But I suspect it’s a puppy dish or one of those things they use for mutilple relishes in restaurants.
Also, heavier bowls are less easily pushed around the kitchen by kitten foreheads. One of my grrrlz loves to “redecorate” the kitchen by moving dishes and leaving water puddles for me to step in. Maybe it’s a feng shui thing?
Kinda depends on the coefficient of friction vis a vis the floor…
I have a bowl mover, but he uses his paws, not his head. We have the bowl in a tray, so not much water spills out on the floor, but I do occasionally step in the bowl when he has moved it to somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
One of my two cats is also a bowl mover using paws.
My theory is that he doesn’t like to lap water directly from the bowl so he moves the bowl to slosh water onto the top which he then licks off.
Another annoying thing he does is that I have a bucket under a tap with a drip and he is forever tipping up the bucket just for the hell of it.
Sorry, you are wrong. The Most Important Cats of 2011 were the ones that made it to *your* website. My cat is looking forward to 2012.
Guilty? Not in a cat’s reality–it must be yet again the fault of some human.