LAX Cat Fingerprinting: A Simple Hoax or Sign of the Times?

Cat airline travel, formerly a feline right of passage, may soon go the way of the Hindenberg, if what the lady from Southwest says is true.

In a recent phone conversation with my partner Hank, the Southwest lady said the airlines are “straying away” from companion animal travel on their passenger planes.  I swear, that’s what she said and that’s the words she used. 

This news comes as a major shock to me.  It just can’t be true.  How are Brody and Herman ever going to see Niagara Falls, the Big Apple, and the remnants of the Berlin Wall if they can’t fly?

Anyway, maybe it’s not true, because I just read another story about how incredibly misinformed some airline employees are about cats and travel.  In fact, as it turns, one new worker was actually telling folks they would have to get their cat fingerprinted if it traveled through Los Angeles International Airport.  Read about it here.

 Well, I obviously need to get to the bottom of this one.  How about you, do you find that the airlines are “straying away” from pet travel, or has your little kitten been wracking up the free flyer miles no problem visiting a hot little Persian they met in Miami?  

I’d love to hear what the real story is for jet-setting kitties, and the people who pack for them.

Best Jazz Album Name Ever

Do I need to tell you how great to have a cat actually playing guitar on the cover of Who Let the Cats Out?  Cats are a lot more musical than we imagine, if they can just calm down and not run out of the room when someone starts to teach them. 

Mike Stern’s Who Let the Cats Out is clearly among the great jazz album names that include cats in the name.  I’m not entirely familiar with all the cat jazz album titles in the world, so make sure to remind me with comments of the many I will probably miss.

I like that Who Let the Cats Out is both a funny riff and so very true.  Because we all heard Who Let the Dogs Out, but the truth is dogs that get let out are far easier to find than cats who get let out. An out cat can’t hardly be found if he wants to be, which he usually doesn’t.

Naturally, Who Let the Cats Out is a jazz album. If cats were a musical genre, they would be jazz.  And if cats played music, they’d play jazz.  My cat Brody plays the keyboard, and it’s improvisation at a very pure level.  No technique, knowledge, or musical score can impede him when he starts tickling the ivories.

The Greening of the Kitties (and their Mousies)

My cats love green stuff.  They adore catnip and wheatgrass.  They love to gnaw my houseplants and always find the lettuce in my grocery bag.  You could say green is their color, so it was only fair I brought back something for them from the Green Festival, a yearly pro-environmental fair which happens to be my favorite place on the planet to spend my green.

Cats in general need to green-up their acts, or rather, their people do.  This story on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website points out that cats can be as bad for the environment as anyone, so it’s a good idea to educate cats and their people on the effects of some of their choices.  Fortunately, what’s good for the environment is usually good for cats, like purchasing food with less additives from more-responsible producers.  

My Green Fest cat gift is another great example.  Dye-free, made from all natural materials, no plastic whatsoever, this hand-made mouse toy made by Purrfect Play was worth a little more green than your average mouse toy.  Not only because I got to support someone who is working to reduce my cats’ carbon paw print (i.e. kitties’ planetary impact), but because of how much my cats like this product.  Of course, the real product testing at the Self Help for Cats labratory is always conducted by the cats themselves.

Upon awakening in the morning, I presented Brody with the green mouse (actually white and tan), and to my surprise, it must be stuffed with some very powerful catnip (organic, of course).  Well, Brody went nuts - he immediately bit deeply into the mouse and lost his head, digging pointlessly into the sheets with a wild stare and flipping his body about as if trying to remove his fur suit over his head, feet first.  The verdict — Brody give two fangs up for the Purrfect Play mouse, which was immediately saturated in cat drool at a heretofore unheard of rate.

So you see, cats really do dig green stuff.  With enough organic catnip mice, cats will be well on their way to saving the planet in the most entertaining fashion the world has ever known.

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If you liked this post, you might also enjoy reading how cats can help sea otters in Kitty Toilet Training a Dream No More.

Teaching the Cat to Meow

The latest news here is that I’ve started to give my cat Herman Panther meowing lessons.  I realize that because his older “brother” Brody rarely utters a normal meow, Herman never learned how to properly talk Cat. Instead, he learned to squawk from the crows who sit on the phone line outside our second-story window. With them he shares a glossy-black exterior, a mucho-mysterioso stare, and unfortunately an extensive crowing vocabulary.

After years of listening to him speak his own brand of squawk-talk, a tongue that impresses demand even at a whisper, I realized that providing Herman with a more melodic meow model, a sweeter sound to copy, would be smart.  Unfortunately, Herman seems to have moved on from his “picking up noises” stage in life.  What with the cat pushing a whole ten years, it’s another case of horrible timing on my part.

I’m just getting started, though, and I have a plan: I plan to catch him when he’s half asleep and plant the seeds of cat song into his fertile serenader’s spirit by singing meows to him.  I will be relentless, and one day, if I’m lucky I will be rewarded with those two familiar feline syllables.  

Barring that, I might also be satisfied with at least a more melodious squawk.

Think Outside the Box, Don’t Poop Outside the Box.

If your cat is getting creative with its waste matter, as you probably groked it’s not something you want to ignore. We humans can be mighty thick when it comes to cats communicating with us, but we always seem to understand the urgency of dealing with a BM issue, be it number one or number two.

Cats who do it outside the box are sending a message, although its not entirely intuitive for humans to understand. We don’t speak cat poop, but we can have it translated for us. Really, it could be many things that the cat is trying to say. Whatever is said its certainly being said urgently by the cat. It’s best really to try to look at it from the cat’s perspective, as pissed off as you may be.

Obviously, the very first thing any expert will ask you is how clean is the box? You need to keep the box clean, or you really can’t blame kitty pooping in your shower stall.

At the same time, you want to keep in mind that it could be a health issue. Cats don’t have a lot of means for telling you they don’t feel great. The only time my Maine Coon crapped on my comforter, he was clearly having a digestive problem. This is another good reason to keep the box clean. It’s healthier and if you cat uses it, you don’t have to worry that’s he’s trying to tell you he’s sick.

I’m just lucky I have ol’ Hank to help keep our box clean. Man can clean a litter box, I tell you, and don’t think that cats don’t notice. But even we occasionally get behind on our schedule, and we’ve had issues. Trust me. Since moving to our new place, keeping the litter and pee in the box has been a handful. But that’s another story for another day.

Cats in the Doghouse: Crafty Souls Build Pads for Pets

Here’s a book that bears a look, and even a purchase if you happen to be one of those inscrutable do-it-yourselfers.  As for me, building a House of Catitude in all but a virtual sense is well beyond my crafting capacity, but I say, “power (tools) to you” if you find yourself creating, for example, an attractive Zen Cat Bed.

(Unfortunately, my cats Brody and Herman would tear the bejesus out of this framed-sisal station, its contemplative stone garden and living wheat grasses – first assassinating the greens and then spreading soil and sisal to my living room’s four winds.)

But just because Herman and Brody would destroy the Zen Cat Bed in no time doesn’t preclude some other cats from getting their zen on, doing the cat lotus posture there and such. Probably, the Zen Cat Bed just needs minor tweaking to be a place to chill and not where to lose one’s cat mind in such a destructive fashion.

But believe me, the last thing I want is to sound overly critical of this delightful book of projects.  There truly are some attractive ideas in Pads for Pets: Fabulous Projects for your Furry, Feathered, and ‘Phibious Friends (Chronicle Books, 2003), from simple stuff to the architecturally complex. Although I must point out, clearly the emphasis in this field has been on dogs and doghouses, and you can guess how we feel about that here at Self Help for Cats. (Hint – we aren’t purring.)

As the dog section is by far the most developed in the book, the dyed in the wool cat DIYer may need to borrow from the canine or goldfish sections to really find a project they can sink their glue gun into.  For example, I would actually even consider making my cats an Orphan Sock Bed – sort of a rag rug made of stuffed single socks, presumably the match of lost socks. 

Wouldn’t it feel great to finally rid oneself of the uselessness of those odd single socks for such a cool sock bed?! That is, until one of the matching socks turned up.  I’d have to make a whole other sock bed then, just to set things straight.  It could get ugly actually, and even snowball what with the likelihood of further bed-sock matches later developing. So you understand why it’s better if I never got started down that path, right?

Even if I happen to be a complete crafting catastrophe, that certainly doesn’t mean Pads for Pets doesn’t have some ideas you’ll really dig.  There’s a whole section about throwing a dog party, what with hats, a cake, party games, etc., and I don’t see why you can’t adopt that right over to cats, you know?  Why not, I ask?  Why the heck not?

(I’ll tell you why not, because probably a room full of cats made angry by their elasticized party hats with pieces of cake spread all about on plates – well, that just doesn’t sound like a good situation.)

Clearly, the creative nutkins behind this utterly original book have their hearts totally in the right place, in their left ribcage that is, and beating strong for a good cause.  Book sales help PAWS (Pets Are Wonderful Support), an organization all about animals helping people in their time of need.  And what’s the point of helping yourself if you can’t, in the end, turn around and help someone else?  Remember that, kitties! 

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Pads for Pets is by Elizabeth Quinn with Pets Are Wonderful Support (P.A.W.S.).  Photographs by Frankie Frankeny.

Cats Gone Night Crazy? Coping with the PM Feline Freak-Out

So we bring cat in from the wild and expect it to act all sophisticated and keep a decent sleep schedule like a normal person. Next thing you know, cat needs to be checked into a padded room at the stroke of midnight. If your cat transforms from love angel to whack devil about the time you want to go to bed, don’t start Googling feline funny farms. Probably the one who needs a metaphoric lobotomy in the situation is you, the human.

Yes, it’s quite a problem that our little furries with the sharp claws happen to be nocturnal by nature. In recent decades, as cats have made the big move from the barn to the bedroom, lots of people have discovered their sleep disturbed in one way or another by the nightly “kitty crazies.”

My own worst story was waking up one early hour to feel my adorable and wild-ish Maine Coon chomping deeply into the connecting tissue of my small right toe. Now if you’ve never awoken to the bite of an animal, well, it’s like being chased by a swarm of bees or confronting a mama Grizzly or having to escape from a fire – it’s one of those things that’s always best when it happens to someone else.

Meet the Cats behind Self Help for Cats

Having laid a foundation for the Self Help for Cats paradigm, it’s time to introduce you to the stars of the show: Brody and Herman Panther. These are the scoundrels shown hard at work/sleep in the above banner photo. Notice how they are on top of their paperwork and reading. Without these two, Self Help for Cats would be nothing at all.

The talented duo have already been featured in several newspaper articles for their incredible contributions to me, their collaborator, medium, archivist and main patron.

In the Self Help for Cats book, you will read about how Brody’s Maine Coon Cat ancestors shaped their own destiny, with romantic stories about going half-wild in New England, later kicking butt at the first American cat shows, and, later still, losing out at the same shows to prissy, “precious” breeds. The Main Coon didn’t let the public’s finicky attitude for felines get him down, no: He boarded a train to California to sire, a few generations removed, the brilliant nut-cat I found one day at the San Francisco SPCA.

It’s just part of the story behind the Self Help for Cats movement, one piece of the puzzle that adds up to the fact that cats and people are on a collision course with destiny. We sit on the verge of the lip of a whole new future, a new age in which cats and people collaborate on levels that right now we can hardly even begin to imagine.

I know this seems unfathomable to you, but trust me, with the steps and exercises in the Self Help for Cats book, redefining your felines’ future is going to be simple as pie.

Greed & Cats: Can Felines Adapt to Global Capitalism?

Among cats’ not-so-admirable qualities, it is generally agreed upon that greed is missing in action. Cats don’t typically fight over food, like dogs might. They may tussle over who gets the best sleep spot, true, but many are just as happy to share it.

Yet despite this apparent deficiency, I’m here to assure you that it’s never too late to turn things around and instill a little old-fashioned greed into your cat, and give them half a chance in the Real World.