CatWatch, the newsletter for cat people.

Volume 14
Number 7
July 2010

July 2010

The Costs of Pet Ownership
People sometimes adopt animals without thinking about the commitment, not only in time and effort, but also in costs. Obviously, this is compounded based on the number of pets in the household. To help prospective adopters get a handle on the financial resources needed to care for a pet, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals created a chart for adopters to visualize the breakdown of costs for several types of animals, including cats.

Sorting Out Elimination Disorders
Many serious feline conditions — some of them even life-threatening — commonly display themselves in the excessive passage of watery feces (diarrhea); the painful retention of dry, hardened feces (constipation); the frequent voiding of abnormally large amounts of urine (polyuria); or difficult, perhaps even impossible, urination (dysuria).

Short Takes: July 2010
This study ("The influence of olfactory stimulation on the behaviour of cats housed in a rescue shelter" in Applied Animal Behavior Science, 2010) examined the impact of environmental enrichment in an animal shelter when "novel smells" (odors other than those normally encountered in the shelter environment) were introduced in the cat’s enclosure. The odor exposure was presented as odorless cloth, or cloths permeated with the odor of rabbit, catnip or lavender.

FIP: What You Need to Know
Among the various illnesses that can bring an end to your cat’s life, none is more lethal than feline infectious peritonitis (FIP), which primarily affects young cats (less than two years of age) and cats that are 10 years of age and older. While the name of the disease suggests an inflammation solely involving the peritoneum — the membrane that lines the feline abdominal cavity and covers the organs that lie within it — the condition can ravage an affected animal’s entire system.

Your Cat’s Keen Sense of Smell
When it comes to nosing around, a cat has a major advantage over its human caregiver. The adorable feline that occupies your house has a whopping 60-to-80 million olfactory cells compared to a human’s five-to-20 million cells. Because of their well-equipped noses, cats may use their sense of smell as the primary way of interacting with their environment. "They have a large olfactory area in the nose and do a lot of sniffing," says Katherine A. Houpt, VMD, PhD, the emeritus James Law Professor of Animal Behavior at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine.