Cat Urine Boosts the Number of Young Fathered by Male Mice
	It has now become clear that Jerry was a regular mouse-Casanova because of Tom. The scent of a cat may be the dread of any mouse, but it may also function like a sexual booster for these small rodents, as revealed by a new research published in the Journal of Ethology. The cat smell turns male mice into aggressive Don Juans, thus enabling them to get more females. Many previous researches had shown that cat odor typically tri ... [read more >>]
	12 May 2008, 03:29GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Yahoo Messenger Rolls out Cat Emoticons
	Yahoo Messenger 8.1 and Yahoo Messenger 9.0 Beta have just received a new IMVironment that comes with a brand new pack of emoticons which could be used by the connected users. Entitled Emoticats, the IMVironment is actually a Yahoo Messenger animation that allows you to choose from several cats portraits and send them to the users you're chatting with. Besides that, you can easily set up one of the cats pictures displayed by ... [read more >>]
	12 May 2008, 03:16GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Smallest Tiger
	The world's most beautiful tiger is at the same time the smallest: the Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae). This tiger subspecies inhabits the island of Sumatra and is today reduced to a number of 600-800 individuals. The Siberian tiger is the largest cat ever to exist, measuring up to 2.8 m (9.3 ft) without the tail in length and weighing up to 384 kg (850 pounds), which is almost twice the weight of a lion. The B ... [read more >>]
	23 April 2008, 10:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Water Cats
	You may love or hate cats, but they gained their right of citizenship in most urban and rural human settlements. Along the millennia, cats accompanied people mostly through their will. Some civilizations adored and worshiped cats (in Egypt, there was even a cat goddess, Bastet), but in other cases cats were useful auxiliaries in the battle with the rodents. Venice, for example, is a town of canals, gondolas and ...cats. Even if the sym ... [read more >>]
	11 March 2008, 10:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Two-Faced Cat!
	Another freak in the gallery of odd cats: a two-faced one! They may live nine lives, but with a face from SF movies. Renee Cook of Amarillo, Texas, got a real shock when her three-year-old Persian and Calico mix cat Amber delivered this two-faced kitten. "I picked it up and said, 'Oh my goodness, two faces'. I thought it was dead at first because it was cold. But then it started to wiggle and it kept wiggling a ... [read more >>]
	21 February 2008, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Rage: the Same Mechanism in Humans and Felines
	Just a month after the attack of an escaped tigress at San Francisco ended with the death of three teenagers, a new research published in the journal "Brain, Behavior, and Immunity," shows that cats become enraged exactly the same way as humans. Enraged cats react by hissing, arching their back, retracting their ears, extending their claws and fur. In humans, the rage is nothing less dangerous, as it can be connected with hi ... [read more >>]
	04 February 2008, 06:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Your Cat Can Really Turn You Insane!
	The purring pussycat on your arms can bring you down. Aliments or water containing parasite eggs from Cat feces can contaminate water and food with eggs from the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii, as the cat is the only species hosting the parasite during the sexual stage of its life cycle. The parasite can be transmitted to humans also from consumption of raw or undercooked meat of an intermediate host (like sheep, cattle and rabbit). ... [read more >>]
	17 January 2008, 04:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Lynxes, the Panthers of the North
	The lynx is the "panther" of the northern forests, from Spain and European mountains to Siberia, Canada and Alaska. The best conditions for a lynx require the combination of two habitats: dense old forests, luxuriant and thick, for breeding and raising their offspring and rabbit/hare rich green pastures and young forests. Adult lynxes are 6 times the size of a domestic cat and are taller than your knee level. In the case of t ... [read more >>]
	18 December 2007, 15:31GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Fluorescent Cats Obtained through Genetic Engineering!
	In nature, only fireflies and marine creatures (like jellyfish, abyssal squids and fish, and others) are fluorescent, but now, after researchers managed to obtain fluorescent pigs, rabbits, butterflies and tank fish, based on genes from these creatures, now we have fluorescent cats, too. This was achieved by a South Korean team by inserting in the cat genome a fluorescent protein gene, through a procedure that could help develop treat ... [read more >>]
	13 December 2007, 03:17GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Four Facts About Pets
	1.Numerous studies showed that the love for your pets can improve your health. It decreases stress, the number of visits to the doctor's, and even increases the survival chances in case of heart attack. A pet can help stroke patients to recover and psychiatric patients to hold on their anxiety. Pets appease people, turning into the center of their attention and affection. Research proves that, at least in the case of mental health. ... [read more >>]
	03 December 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Does Imported Chinese Pet Food Kill Cats and Dogs?
	There may be an economical boom in China, but do cheap products respect consumers' life? After toxic compounds were found in Chinese toothpaste and so-called "herbal drugs", now the cause of the toxicity of pet food brought from China has been explained by an UC Davis team in a research published in the Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation: a deadly combination of melamine and cyanuric acid causes kidney failure in ... [read more >>]
	29 November 2007, 04:22GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

7 Things You Did Not Know About Tigers
	1. Today we say the tiger is the king of the jungle but the tiger originated in the Pleistocene of Asia, about 2 million years ago, in a clime of temperate forests. This nocturnal and solitary cat has a territory varying in the case of the male from 60 square kilometers in tropical forests and savannas to 4,000 square km in prey-poorer Manchurian forest. Females have smaller territories: 30 to 500 square km, and the territory of a male com ... [read more >>]
	03 November 2007, 06:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Cats and Halloween: Urban Legend or Reality?
	Black cat owners, beware! Here comes the Halloween! The time when the mind of many crazy people out there gets… unleashed. At the Iowa City Animal Care and Adoption Center, people are still shocked by what they saw the day after the 2004 Halloween: a black cat duct-taped to an 8-ft (2.5 m)-tall crucifix. These rare events fuel the myth of the black cats’ satanic sacrifice connected to Halloween, and a general fright amongst U.S. animal ... [read more >>]
	30 October 2007, 07:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why is Cheetah the Fastest Land Animal?
	There's nothing faster than a cheetah on the hunt. The maximum speed is of 112 km (70 mi) per hour, but the average hunting speed is still of 72-90 km (46-56 mi) per hour. No living or extinct animal runs or used to run at such speeds. How can this be possible? The cheetah is a very special cat, with specific adaptations. First, the claws of the cheetah are semiretractile (they do not retract completely into their pads, like i ... [read more >>]
	26 October 2007, 16:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

6 Things You Did Not Know about the Jaguar
	1.The jaguar's closest relative is not the leopard, as you would have thought due to the spotted coat pattern, but the ...lion! A large European jaguar (Panthera gombaszoegensis) roamed the European Mediterranean and temperate forests 1.5 Ma ago. This cat evolved into a lion and then into a jaguar. The direct ancestor of the modern jaguar is the Ice Age North American jaguar Panthera augusta. This jaguar species lived 1,800,000 ... [read more >>]
	26 October 2007, 14:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Man-Eater Lion
	People are an easy prey for any large predator. And between death by hunger and death by shooting, perhaps a lion won't starve till dying. In Mozambique, the rainy season is the moment when the lions turn into man-eaters, because the too tall grass impedes them to approach to their normal preys. This happened in Fort Mangoche: a man was standing in front of his hut, beating the drum, while the woman was cooking. The hut was locate ... [read more >>]
	20 October 2007, 06:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Did the Saber Tooth Tigers Kill Their Prey?
	These were the horror cats of our prehistory. But as it wasn’t the case with T-rex, Stone Age people had to face these beasts. A new research has shown the way the terrible predators used to kill their prey and the surprise is that, despite their huge fangs, the bite of these predators was surprisingly weak. Smilodon fatalis lived in grasslands from North America to South America (in the west coast down to Peru) being almost the size o ... [read more >>]
	02 October 2007, 03:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

How Does A Cat's Memory Work?
	Now, scientists have found the cause of Sylvester's failure in catching Tweety. A new research has determined just low long cats can remember a certain type of information: for 10 minutes. The study compared cats' working memory of their recent movements correlated to their visual memories, and discovered that cats remember better something they’ve touched with their bodies than what they’ve seen when they have stumbled with ... [read more >>]
	21 August 2007, 04:44GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Can This Cat Really Predict Death?
	During the European Dark Ages, cats were linked to black witchery and persecuted. They were regarded as harbingers of death. But Oscar is not from the Dark Ages, nor does it live in the hut of a hex, but still is a harbinger of death more precise than a Swiss clock. This cat has the unusual quality of forecasting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours; in that moment the patient ... [read more >>]
	26 July 2007, 15:16GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Rats and Cats, Trained to Detect Landmines
	Playing cat and mouse can have a different outcome from what we see in some cartoons. Tom and Jerry can be even very good friends when solving some very special tasks. In the past years, a special Colombian police unit has been training rats and cats put in the same cages as part of a project to teach the rodents to sniff out the over 100,000 landmines planted especially by leftist rebels across Columbia. The standard met ... [read more >>]
	26 July 2007, 04:16GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cats and Dogs, More Aggressive During Full Moon
	A connection between vampires, werewolves and full moon has not been established yet. Still, British police has found one between full moon and small dirty businesses (like petty thefts) or violent crimes. A new study has found that dogs and cats too are more exposed to injuries and illnesses during full moon than during other periods of the month, even if the reason for that is still not clearly known. The team discovere ... [read more >>]
	16 July 2007, 04:22GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cats, Dogs, and Foxes Skinned Alive in China for Their Fur
	China's economy is just speeding and now the country is the world's largest exporter of fur garments; but for these 12 years of rapid progress, a great price is paid by the fur-bearing animals. There are no laws regulating the confinement and slaughter of the raccoon dogs, foxes, minks, rabbits, and even dogs and cats, in a highly profitable business. While conditions of Western fur farms have been highly criticized, what happens ... [read more >>]
	13 July 2007, 14:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Internet Has Saved Hundreds of Cats from Being Eaten
	The growing power of the Internet has changed the destiny of over 800 cats which were to be skinned and served up as Chinese delicacies. 30 animal lovers rushed to a parking lot in Shanghai after reading an Internet posting by animal rights activist Huo Puyang signaling two trucks carrying cats in wooden boxes. Huo's daughter-in-law stumbled into the trucks while searching for their missing pets. One of the trucks sped right away. ... [read more >>]
	12 July 2007, 04:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Origin of the Domestic Cat, Revealed by DNA
	In the case of cats, we really have doubts on whether they are really domestic or just live with us under the same roof. But as any domestic animal, cats too come from a wild animal. But the wild species (Felis sylvestris) lives in Africa, Europe and half of Asia. So the question is: where did the people domesticate the cat? Now DNA analysis have detected the house cat's maternal ancestors back to the Fertile Crescent (Egypt-Israe ... [read more >>]
	29 June 2007, 04:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Cat with 26 Toes!
	Cats can have nine lives, wings (cases of rudimentary extra-limbs), but they can also have at least 26 toes. Normal cats have 18 fingers: five on each of their front paws and four on their rear. But Des, a 10-year-old cat of Felindre, near Swansea, UK, displays two extra toes on each paw and could be a UK record. This condition (extra-digits) in humans and animals is called polydactylia. "He came to us when he was a ... [read more >>]
	12 June 2007, 15:21GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Global Warming Booms the Number of Cats
	Hot weather means hot cats. And now droves of cats and kittens are swarming into animal shelters nationwide, due to the global warming, as one pet adoption group says. Several shelters of the national adoption organization called Pets Across America face now a 30 % increase in intakes of cats and kittens from 2005 to 2006, and the massive influx of cats, stray, owned or feral, is signaled by other shelters across the nat ... [read more >>]
	07 June 2007, 03:55GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Chinese Cat Has Grown Wings
	Is there any connection between sexual harassment and the flight ability? It seems so... A Chinese woman said her cat has grown wings, reports the Huashang News. Granny Feng remained stunned when she saw how her pet mysteriously grew two 10 cm (4inch)-long wing-like sprouts on its back. "At first, they were just two bumps, but they started to grow quickly, and after a month there were two wings." said Feng, of ... [read more >>]
	02 June 2007, 05:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Female Promiscuity to the Max: Cheating Cheetah
	Don't think that only humans live in marriages. Wild cats, too, live in families with strict rules when it comes to sex. Only the 2-3 dominant males in a pride father the cubs. And this is the case of leopards and tigers, too. A male dominates the territory of 2-3 females, which form their harems, and they will mate only with him, even if they rarely meet (it's like spouses sleeping in different rooms...). The fem ... [read more >>]
	30 May 2007, 15:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Why Catnip Induces Sexual Arousal in Cats
	From the humble domestic cats to the mighty tyrants of the animal world – lions and tigers – the felines have a soft spot: they are extremely vulnerable to a volatile oil encountered in the stems and leaves of the catnip (catmint) plants (Nepeta species, from the mint family). When cats smell catnip, they start displaying behaviors which are common to that to heat: they rub their genitals, roll over, vocalize and salivate. The response ... [read more >>]
	30 May 2007, 15:36GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Amur Leopard, Close to Extinction
	Leopard is the symbol of grace and force. Unfortunately, these magnificent beasts have been intensively persecuted and poached since ancient times, and have disappeared from many areas, like North Africa, Middle East or Eastern China, while only in South Saharan Africa some populations maintain healthy. A recent census has discovered that just 25 to 34 wild Amur leopards or Far Eastern Leopard are left, 66 less than necessary to s ... [read more >>]
	21 April 2007, 04:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A New Leopard Species Discovered
	We are now looking for life “out there”, beyond Earth; and from time to time, scientists discover unimaginable surprises: big beasts here on Earth that passed unobserved. The current such discovery is not a creature from the bottom of the oceans, but a big cat, up to 23 kg (58 pounds) from the islands of southeastern Asia: the clouded leopard of the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. The shy rainforest animal was originally believed to ... [read more >>]
	16 March 2007, 08:03GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Cats' Records
	Grace, power and intelligence ...This is a combination that fascinated people since ever; in cave painting 30,000 years old found in Europe, scientists discovered images representing the so-called cave lions (direct ancestors of today's lions). Cats emerged 37 million years ago. First cats were arboreal and resembled the palm civets. They were agile, with a keen hearing and binocular vision. Modern cats are amazingly homogeneo ... [read more >>]
	12 March 2007, 12:24GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia