Tag Archives: cats

According to the American Animal Hospital Association, April 19th is Crazy Cat Lady Day. I have to admit — I had never heard of this day before. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure where the term “crazy cat lady” came from or who might have inspired it. Full confession: I sometimes worry about being labeled a crazy cat lady myself when my office at the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center fills ups with a litter of foster kittens. So, I decided to treat Crazy Cat Lady Day as a learning opportunity, and this blogpost will report my findings on the topic.

I was wasting time, mindlessly watching cat videos on Facebook, when I ran across this horrifying video. At first glance, a cat using a clothes dryer as an exercise wheel

A recent article in the New York Times described a number of research studies on “gifted word learning” dogs that can associate spoken words with objects, sometimes after very little exposure to the object. But what about cats? Do they learn language in a similar way? In this blogpost, I’ll explore what science tells us about how cats understand human language, how this differs from dogs, and whether it’s possible to teach your cat words.

The winter holiday season is the setting for Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale The Little Match Girl. The story features a child, alone and outdoors in the freezing cold, sustained by visions of warmth, delicious food and a loving family. Like many fairy tales, The Little Match Girl does not have a happy ending. The tale of Esme the cat—told in the blogpost below—is very much like the story of The Little Match Girl, except Esme’s story will have a happy ending.

Cats are wonderful creatures with whom to share our homes and lives. They entertain, comfort and sooth. While cats, like Mary Poppins, are practically perfect in every way, they do have one annoying habit: vomiting up hairballs. Cats never seem to vomit a hairball neatly in the corner. Instead, they always choose the exact spot you’re most likely to step on it—soggy, squishy and simply revolting. So why does your cat vomit hairballs? And when might hairballs indicate a medical condition? Let’s take a closer look at what’s new in our understanding of feline hairballs.