Tag Archives: cats

June is Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, and we’re highlighting our feline friends throughout the month with a series of cat-focused posts. Last week’s blogpost highlighted the risk of the ongoing H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak for your cat. Today I am blogging about chonk.

June is Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, and we’re highlighting our feline friends throughout the month with a series of cat-focused posts. Last week, I highlighted some household hazards specifically affecting cats. Today’s blogpost will focus on a much larger issue, the current nationwide outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1. The term highly pathogenic refers to how the virus behaves in birds. It may behave differently in other animals.

June is Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, and we’re highlighting our feline friends throughout the month with a series of feline-focused posts. For the first post of June 2024, I’m going to highlight some specific household hazards for cats.

Hairball Awareness Day is celebrated on the last Friday in April. This year it falls on April 26th. Like many cat owners, I find hairballs one of the more annoying facts of cat ownership. I hate stepping on those cold, slimy, cigar-shaped wads of hair strategically deposited on the bedroom rug in the pathway to bathroom. Even with the light on, the hairballs are always perfectly camouflaged by the pattern in the rug. I am not the only one who thinks hairballs are important. Since 2020, when using the PubMed search engine I found seven scientific publications on hairballs; six studied domestic cats and one reported on hairballs in snow leopards. This new information on feline hairballs will be the focus of this blogpost.

Many of my readers might be surprised by the title of this blogpost. Usually, the question is posed in reverse, i.e. “Does my pet pose a risk to my baby?” True, pets do pose some risks to children, but the benefits of pets in teaching responsibility to children, providing companionship and preventing allergies are well known. In most cases, you can mitigate the risks to children from cats and dog bites. So, in today’s blogpost, I will focus on the flipside of this question and discuss the risks your baby or toddler poses to your pets and how to make your child-friendly household pet-friendly as well.