Caturday felid trifecta: Woman gives up job to become “cat nanny”; cat versus cougar; Washington D.C.’s cat count; and lagniappe

From Cole and Marmalade we hear of Anna Wan, a UK woman who gave up a high pressure job for one of the world’s most pleasureable jobs—a visiting cat nanny. Click on the screenshot to read:

An excerpt:

Anna Wan from the UK decided to trade her work colleagues for cats. And who could blame her? After all, who among us wouldn’t like to give up the rat race to be a feline nanny?  

After working in PR and events management for years, she decided her ideal job would be more flexible and allow her to be around cats more and people less.

At 38, she was recently married and settling into life in Wokingham, a town west of London. Now, she was ready to take a chance and start a cat-sitting service called The Feline Nanny.

Her website is at the link, and Wan offers three levels of service, all of which seem reasonable.

Services the Feline Nanny provides range from basic to more extensive, depending on the client’s needs.

• A daily health check
• Playtime with the cats
• Emptying litter boxes
• Cuddling with lonely kitties
• Replenishing food and water
• Taking out the trash and collecting mail
• Keeping the home looking lived-in

Wong has her own ginger tabby, which, of course, is named “Garfield”:

Soon after starting her business, Wan found a steady list of clients. To make cats comfortable, she cares for them in their homes and gets to know each cat’s unique needs and personalities. 

As cat lovers know, they can become easily stressed in unfamiliar places. Never fear; the Feline Nanny is here so they can relax when their pet parents are on vacation. 

Wan and Garfield from her FB page:

Now, many cat owners in the area are relieved to have first-class service from a cat lover with a lifetime of experience. Plus, she’s a member of the National Association for Pet Sitters, has a clean driving record, and is fully insured for pet sitting and associated services.

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A post shared by A bespoke cat sitting service (@thefelinenanny1)

So if you’re in or near London, and want first-class cat care, you know who to call. This job seems pretty cool to me: you get to interact with a lot of cats and get a lot of exercise going from cat to cat. How many cats? She takes care of as many as twenty cats a day, and has a client list of 150 moggies.

Living the dream!

 

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This is great: a cat with moxie! There isn’t much information about this video, but it doesn’t matter. Turn the sound up to hear the cougar hiss while the housecat remains unfazed:

 

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Reader Paul called my attention to this site, saying, “This organization is counting all the cats in the Washington, DC area via a number of techniques, including phone apps for the public to use. They use image recognition software to match up photos of the same cat.”

Click on the screenshot to read:

Why are they counting the cats of Washington? The rationale:

This research focused on the cat population network. The cat population in most communities consists of outdoor, owned, and shelter population segments. Many cats move among these segments over the course of their lifetime, often because of human actions (abandonment, adoption, trap-neuter-return, etc.). This dynamic system is the cat population network.

To identify effective strategies for managing this population network, it is necessary to understand the relationships and transitions between these population segments. The DC Cat Count accomplished this task by simultaneously quantifying the outdoor, owned, and shelter population segments in Washington, D.C. and combined these data sets into an integrated network analysis. In doing so, the DC Cat Count developed high-quality population size estimates for each population segment. This is the first project ever to comprehensively estimate population size for all cats in a large urban area using cat counting data and advanced statistical methods.

That link also gives the elaborate methods: camera surveys, shelter counts, and surveys of residents.

They analyzed nearly six million photos, and cats were the most common animal found, with squirrels a close second.  Now of course “detections” do not equal “number of animals”, for the same animal could have been detected more than once, or they might have missed some cats.

The camera survey is described here, which has a detailed interactive map of where cameras were placed and cats were spotted (n.b. this is not to be mistaken for the locations where cats with spots were seen).

So how many cats are there in Washington, D.C.?  I couldn’t find an answer!

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Lagnaippe: An elegant cat in Halloween dress:

h/t: Paul