This clever candy is packaged to look like our favorite lucky cat, Maneki Neko! But open the cellophane and all you get are two white balls of candy. The cellophane is where the cat is at -in fact there are several wrappers with different cat expressions. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

What kind of music do cats like? This charming science fair display follows the scientific method of hypothesis, experimentation, resulting data, and conclusion. The student theorized that the cats would fall asleep to classical music. In this case, the conclusion is what I would call a punch line: “My hypothesis was wrong, because they did not care either way.” Flickr user Daniel N loved this display and took a picture for posterity. You can see a larger version at the photo page. Link -via Buzzfeed

Video Link

How about we celebrate Friday with a good old fashioned cat fight?  Now I wanna see a good clean fight, no hitting below the tail, shake paws and good luck!

via AcidCow.

On Wednesday, the Iowa Department of Public Health reported the first confirmed case of H1N1 in a house pet, a 13-year-old domestic shorthaired cat. The animal likely contracted the virus from its owners, veterinarians say, since two of the three family members living in the cat’s household had recently suffered from influenza-like illness. Late last week, when the cat came down with flu-like symptoms — malaise, loss of appetite — its owners brought it to Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine for treatment. The family mentioned to the vet that they had also recently battled illness, which led to testing the pet for H1N1.

Link

“I raced inside to get Sid and as I came out, Krillen rolled off the bag in an attempt to get out, but he was that frozen he just rolled to the bottom of the freezer on his back,” she said.

“At first we thought his eyeballs were frozen. I’ve never seen a cat with such big eyes.”

Fortunately, Sid, 28, knew it was essential to raise the body temperature of hypothermia sufferers slowly. So he put the cat under his shirt and got into bed with him.

It took three hours under the covers for the cat to stop shaking. Krillen appears to have recovered without frostbite. Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Bruce Mercer)

Knowing that without a mom the baby Chihuahua did not have long to live, Heather introduced the two. She says, “I just kind of just stuck the puppy in with the rest and hoped the mom wouldn’t notice much and she thought that was fine.”

Seven days later the baby Chihuahua, now named Liam, is still alive. Heather says, “She’s doing great, I don’t know if she’ll be litter-trained when she’s done, but she’s doing really well, she’s nursing and seems to be growing and doing great.”

Link (with video) -via Fark

(image credit: AZ Family)

Inspired by the book Pizza Fun by Judy Bastyra, Flickr user hale_popoki (that’s Hawaiian for "Cat House") made this Cat Pizza. Actually, it’s supposed to be a brown tiger pizza, but it sure looks more like a cat. I can haz pawperroni?

Urlesque blog has many more examples of pizzas shaped like things that aren’t pizzas (and vice versa): Link

A brand new animated short by Simon Tofield.

More videos of Simon’s Cat featured here on Neatorama: Fly Guy, TV Dinner, Let Me In!, and Wake Up!

For all fans of The Breakfast Club, and whether you love or hate cats, YTMND has a great post up, a video loop that further links humans and cats.  Presenting, The Breakfast Cats.

Looks like they’re crackin’ skulls.

The savannah, the most popular, is bred from a serval, a cheetah-like
wildcat found in Africa. It can grow three times larger than a domestic cat and can jump 7ft vertically.

Another breed to have arrived in Britain is the safari, produced by mating a domestic cat with a South American Geoffroy’s Cat. There are also plans by breeders to import the caracat, descended from a caracal, a lynx-like wildcat found in the Middle East and Africa. The savannah is banned in some US states and in Australia, where there were concerns it could kill koalas. [...]

Peter Neville, an expert in pet behaviour from the Feline Advisory Bureau (FAB), said: “Cats are predators. I wouldn’t be happy with a savannah around a small child, because of their genes and their size.

I, for one, welcome our new supercat overlords. Jasper Copping of the Telegraph bravely uncovered the supercat conspiracy: Link (Photo: BNPS)

Clyde’s owner Katrina Phillips was moved to tears when she got the call last week that Clyde was alive and well in Queensland.

“We just can’t believe he’s alive, it’s just unbelievable and it’s so emotional,” Ms Phillips said.

“I bought him as a birthday present for my daughter Ashleigh and one day, about three years ago, he just disappeared.

No one knows how the cat traveled so far, or what happened during those three years. Clyde will be reunited with Phillips as soon as an escort is arranged. Link -via Arbroath

Just like the character Garfield, Humphrey the cat refuses to eat anything else and consumes three portions of the pasta dish a day.

The bizarre obsession started when Humphrey was a kitten and stumbled across a plate of lasagne.

His owner, Sofia Atrill, from North London, says: “In the beginning I tried to alter the recipe and make it with cat food instead of the British beef mince my husband and I enjoy but of course he noticed.”

Link

Soon to be a candidate for this list, no doubt: Top 15 Amazingly Fat Cats

Hey, Neatoramanauts I’m back from my little hiatus with my family and I’ve got a fascinating video about a little cat named “Kitty” and its owners Laetitia and Guillaume backpacking from Miami to Argentina.

Thankfully, Google has a French to English translating option (the translation is a little rough, though) so using that I’ll give you the low down on this neat adventure:

1 euro each, 15 000km, 13 countries, 3 years running. Some are willing to kill people for a paper called money.

In a world of economic crisis where money becomes obsessive and when life is hard without money, this young couple from discovering the concept of money through meetings, poor, rich, middle class, everyone tells them how they live or survive.

Still believe in the phrase “money does not buy happiness, it is through their journey that no man will discover, learn, suffer and seek answers to their questions.

He will share the adventure at breast height with both cameras and their companion Kitty, a kitten appeared two months on the road in Louisiana. Sacred destiny for a cat!

More than a walk, a look at a changing society.

Check out more here:

Official site – Link
Blog – Link

** For those of you with no experience reading or understanding French scroll all the way down the page (on the blog) and you’ll see a tiny bar that says “Google Translate”. Use that to choose your language and you should be set!

Domestic cats normally come in solids, stripes, and patches (I have one of each). Some cats have been bred with spots, but the only naturally spotted house cat is the Egyptian Mau.

It is the only naturally spotted cat and has been used in the breeding programmes of other cat breeds, such as the British Shorthair, to provide the spotted gene the breeders require tointroduce the pattern to another breed.

This beautiful cat is part of the post “Fear Me, Love Me, Worship Me: A History of the Domestic Cat”. Link -Thanks, Roy Shechter!

(image credit: Flickr user Muffet)

All he really wants is a drink, but he was a distinctive way of getting it! -via Arbroath

Why do some people (usually women) hoard cats? What makes somebody, that would otherwise be normal, be "the crazy cat lady"?

Perhaps its mental imbalance (a specific obsessive-compulsive behavior known as compulsive hoarding or animal hoarding) or perhaps, the answer is a little bit more mundane for some (see mark 1:20).

Here’s the trailer for a documentary called "Cat Ladies" by Christie CAllan-Jones of Chocolate Box Entertainment: hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

Engineer Andrew Williams was asleep when the fire broke out at his bungalow in Bracknell in Berkshire.

As black smoke filled the property, his neighbour’s cat Hugo came through a cat-flap and raised the alarm by clawing at the father-of-two’s face.

Rescuers said that the fire could have killed Mr Williams if he had not been awoken by Hugo. A smoke detector had been moved during work on the bungalow.

Hugo had been in the house before, and was in fact a regular visitor. He was not in the habit of clawing Mr. Williams’ face. Link -via Arbroath

Earthquake-prone Japan has a market for these suits that you strap onto your cats and dogs so that they can survive for days after a major earthquake. Each suit contains all of the necessary gear including water, biscuits, aromatherapy oils, and rubber foot pads, all contained in the pockets of a flame-resistant coat.

Link (in Japanese) via Rinkya via Popped Culture

Psychologists from Queen’s University Belfast in North Ireland, in a study published in Animal Behaviour, conducted a series of experiments on 42 kitties to discover if they are left- or right-pawed.

In two of the experiments, in which the cats had to reach for a toy mouse, the kitties were ambidextrous. But in the third experiment—in which bits of tuna were placed in a jar for a cat to fish out—showed a definite paw preference: 20 out of 21 female subjects used their right paw, and 20 out of 21 male subjects used their left.

Link

image by flickr user cjc4454 used under creative commons license

Previously: Cat Man Do, Let Me In, and TV Dinner.

One-year-old Tango became the star of the discussion programme after finding his way into the school hall where it was being recorded.

He ducked under a desk and headed towards the panel. At first, Dimbleby and guests including employment minister Jim Knight and Tory security spokesman Dame Pauline Neville-Jones were oblivious to his presence.

But as he pawed under the table he caught the eye of LibDem MP Julia Goldsworthy, who in astonishment mouthed the word ‘cat’ at the production team.

Meanwhile, Jackie Ellery of Newquay, England hadn’t seen her cat Tango in hours. As she wondered about his whereabouts, she sat down to watch TV.

She said: ‘My friend phoned me to say, “Have you seen your cat on the telly?” And there he was.

‘It’s lovely – he’s a mischievous cat anyway and because we live so close to the school he’s often in the school grounds.’

Tango, who returned to his owner that night, has since become something of a celebrity. Mrs Ellery said: ‘I’ve even been asked for his paw-tograph.’

Link – via Arbroath

The video:

[YouTube Clip]

Riana bought her first cheetah, Fiela in 2006, after realising the big cats were in trouble and heading for extinction with only 1000 left in Africa.

She left her full time job working for the department of justice – a position she had held for 22 years – and found temporary employment on a game ranch where she could raise her beloved big cat. [...]

The cats in Riana’s own home are truly part of the family and are allowed to roam freely.

Imagine the size of their litterbox! Amy Oliver of the Daily Mail has more: Link (Photo: John Lienbenberg/Barcroft Media)

If you need the protection of a guard animal, would you be better off with a Rottweiler … or a cat? Watch the video first …

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Christophe.

[Osthaus] tested the thought processes of 15 of them by attaching fish and biscuit treats to one end of a piece of string, placing them under a plastic screen to make them unreachable and then seeing if the cats could work out that pulling on the other end of the string would pull the treat closer.

They were tested in three ways, using a single baited string, two parallel strings where only one was baited, and two crossed strings where only one was baited.

The single string test proved no problem, but unlike dogs (which Osthaus has previously tested) no cat consistently chose correctly between two parallel strings. With two crossed strings, one cat always made the wrong choice and others succeeded no more than might be expected by chance.

Link

Recently, the identity of this secret force has come to light: cats!

Although no longer allowed to roam freely through the galleries, around 60 felines earn a living in the basement of the huge former Tsarist palace.

Maria Khaltunen, Hermitage State Museum: "They (cats) work here. They execute, so-called, preventive activities so that rats and mice will stay away or are kept at a minimum. All the museum visitors can see them in the summer. Generally they walk on the square and on the embankment, and also they come out into the big yard. But these (cats) are only those who like to deal with people. Others who prefer living in their community stay in basement."

The priceless treasures of the museum are under the watchful eye of these cats. These four-footed employees are always on guard against rats and mice that can damage the Hermitage collection. They work in the labyrinths of the basement, hunting by day and night.

Cats have been guarding the museum for the last 200 years since the Tsarist period. They first appeared during the reign of Peter the Great’s daughter, Empress Elizabeth. Fed up with hundreds of rodents running through the palace Elizabeth signed a decree ordering the best rat and mice-catching cats to be sent to Her Majesty’s court.

Link [Flash video]