A cat in rural Colorado has tested positive for the Bubonic Plague. Health authorities say it was probably the result of an encounter with an infected rat.
A cat in Colorado has tested positive for the Bubonic Plague.
You read that right. The same bacterial infection that was called the Plague of Justinian back in the 6th century BC, killed one out of every four people living in the Mediterranean, then flared up occasionally every century or two before returning with a vengeance in 14th century Europe, where it was called the Black Death and killed a third of the population on the continent.
That plague.
The kitty ranges near a public park and likely caught the infection from a rat, local health authorities told KUSA, an NBC news affiliate.
Like many infections, it was never completely eradicated, and WHO statistics show about 100 people die annually of plague.
“While plague is a serious disease, and cases of animal-borne disease in household pets is never something we like to see, it is normal and expected for some animals to contract plague in Jefferson County each year,” said Jim Rada, director of Environmental Health Services for the county. “The good news is that modern antibiotics are effective against plague, and as long as it is treated promptly, severe complications, illness or death can be avoided.”
When we think of outdoor dangers to cats, we tend to think of abusive humans, vehicle traffic or poisons, but this is a reminder that nature can be lethal as well.
Frodo the Cat is 20 years old and doesn’t get around like he used to, so his handy human put his handy skills to work and built the little guy his own lift.
Liam Thompson is a 21-year-old Youtuber who’s known for building cool stuff.
His cat’s name may be Frodo, but Thompson said he’s in “Gandalf territory” at 20 years old and has been having trouble getting around to his favorite spots, especially a sunny corner of the backyard where he likes to sit poolside and enjoy the New Zealand warmth.
“Despite his ancient-ness, he still insists on hobbling down these stairs every day to sit out in the sun,” Thompson says in a video about his latest project. “That is, until today.”
The video shows the handy Kiwi building an “elevator” — more like a stair lift for a cat — out of wood, an electronic hoist and a handful of small hardware pieces. The passenger compartment is a simple cart, and at the press of a button the cart descends or ascends the stairs along a wooden track.
Frodo isn’t bothered in the slightest.
“Are you ready to go downstairs without having to move a muscle?” he asks his cat before the maiden ride. “I hope so, because it took me four days.”
Thompson is delighted as the elevator works perfectly and Frodo rides it without fear or protest, laughing as the orange senior cat makes himself comfortable during the ride. The current setup requires Thompson to push a button, but perhaps in the future he can add a simple button for Frodo directly on the cart.
Speaking of elevators, this cat thinks he’s Leslie Chow from The Hangover:
The Electric Life of Louis Wain tells the story of one of Victorian England’s most revered artists who was known almost exclusively for his humorous cat illustrations.
Movie: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain Director: Will Sharpe Genre: Biopic, drama Medium: Amazon Original (streaming and in theaters)
Louis Wain was an artist in the employ of The Illustrated London News, one of the most popular newspapers in Victorian England, when advances in photography and printing made it possible for newspapers to regularly include photographs in their pages.
Demoted from staff illustrator to contributor, Wain’s professional skills seemed destined for obsolescence when he and his wife, Emily, returned to their cottage one rainy afternoon in 1886 and heard the distressed mews of a kitten. They found an adorable tuxedo cat soaked and shivering in their garden, brought him inside and were instantly smitten.
They named the baby Peter, and in the months that followed Wain made the growing kitten the subject of most of his idle drawings, sketching him in various situations and with increasingly anthropomorphic features. Wain’s cat sketches were only intended for his wife, but when Sir William Ingram, editor at The Illustrated News, saw the whimsical cat drawings he commissioned Wain to fill two pages with cats as a special feature for the paper’s Christmas edition.
Wain’s cats were a huge hit with readers, marking the beginning of a second, much more successful career as a pet portraitist and one of Victorian England’s most beloved artists. Wain gave his cats human expressions, had them do human things, and put them in contemporary clothing to the delight of newspaper readers and, later, book publishers who sold many thousands of copies of illustrated books featuring nothing but Wain’s anthropomorphic cats.
A pair of young female cats play with cat dolls.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain weaves a narrative from its subject’s professional life and his lesser-known private life. A polymath, philosopher, amateur boxer and author of some particular ideas about cats and electricity, Wain (played by the always-excellent Benedict Cumberbatch) was an eccentric and not particularly happy with his life until his family hired Emily Richardson (Claire Foy) as governess — a home teacher — for Wain’s younger sisters.
Despite the fact that Emily was a decade his senior and such relationships were looked down upon in Victorian England, Wain and Emily married, made it clear they didn’t care what others thought about them, and learned to enjoy life in each other’s company. With the addition of little Peter, the Wains were a happy family.
Louis Wain did not, however, have an easy life. Three years into their blissful marriage, Emily was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Her illness, the subsequent mental deterioration of one of Wain’s younger sisters, and Wain’s own eventual struggles with mental illness cast long shadows over his outlook and his work.
Wain’s cat drawings were so popular, they were sold in stand-alone books in addition to filling the pages of widely-read publications in Victorian England.
Today, psychologists, art critics and scholars of the man’s career still debate whether — and to what degree — his mental state was reflected in his artwork as his cats took on increasingly psychedelic and abstract qualities. What began as simple kitten sketches morphed into whimsical scenes of expressive cats and eventually trippy images that wouldn’t have looked out of place as album art in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Did Wain truly suffer from severe mental illness, or was he a casualty of a society that banished its “undesirables” to asylums and “lunatic houses”? Was Wain on the autism spectrum? Did the increasingly psychedelic bent of his drawings stem from medications he was given at a time when mental illness was poorly understood and poorly treated?
It depends on what you see in the illustrations. For a man so revered by the public, Wain was remarkably casual about his output — a quality Cumberbatch displays admirably throughout the film — and he didn’t bother to date his drawings. He was prolific, completing many hundreds of cat images throughout his career, in addition to the journalistic images and livestock renderings of his early career, when he was a newspaperman.
Wain’s cat illustrations took on more psychedelic qualities as the years passed.
What is absolutely clear is that Wain saw something in cats that others didn’t see until he showed it to them with his pencils. He was credited with a major shift in attitude toward cats and the normalization of keeping cats as pets rather than as mousers. Although cats enjoyed companion animal status in various other cultures earlier in human history, the idea of keeping a feline as a pet was novel in Victorian England.
The shift in public attitude was treated humorously — as much of the subject matter is — by the film, with a bewildered Wain accepting the presidency of the Cat Society of England at a fete in his honor, then explaining his theory that tabby markings were the result of electricity flowing through fur.
The subject of electricity comes up again and again in the film, bringing to mind Tesla and another famous British eccentric, Alan Turing, who was also played by Cumberbatch in the 2014 biopic The Imitation Game. Not coincidentally, both movies show that service to crown and country mattered little when British eccentrics were deemed too odd to tolerate. Like Wain, Turing — a war hero who famously cracked the legendary German Enigma cryptography machine — found himself on the wrong side of the UK’s mental institutions when he was convicted of indecency in 1952 after admitting to police, during an interview in an unrelated investigation, that he’d once had a relationship with another man.
Turing was subsequently placed on synthetic estrogen and drugs prescribed to “cure” his mental condition, which had the opposite effect: Turing, a shadow of his former self, his genius blunted by chemicals, committed suicide by eating an apple he’d laced with cyanide in 1954.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain finds humor in both the light and dark moments of its subject’s life, and it’s a credit to the film’s writers, director and actors that lighthearted moments don’t spoil the more serious narrative themes. For his part, Wain was a man who endured a lot of suffering in his life, and if there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that no matter what life throws at us, spending time with cats makes things more bearable.
A man ended his relationship with his girlfriend after she tried to get rid of his cat.
Reddit’s “Am I The Asshole?” is described as a “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument that’s been bothering you.” It’s also a goldmine for people who wish they could read an advice columnist’s slush pile.
On Tuesday, a user asked the community if he’s “the asshole” for kicking his girlfriend out of his home after she tried to get rid of the kitty by “pick[ing] him up and put[ting] him outside to wander off.” Here’s the full post:
According to the OP, his cat didn’t do anything to prompt his girlfriend from booting the little guy.
“She knows he can’t survive outside… She didn’t seem to have any regrets about her actions and no, she never lived with cats before,” the poster added in response to follow-up questions from the community. “She said she couldn’t stand cats and that she couldn’t live with one.”
A few users pointed out that kicking a house cat with no survival skills out of a home is not only dangerous, but kicking a black cat out on or near Halloween could have tragic consequences. As for the original poster, he says he’s placed Raven in the temporary care of a friend until his girlfriend moves out, as he’s worried she might try to hurt the cat — or throw him out again — out of spite.
Others said he was doing the right thing even if Raven wasn’t in danger.
“If she thinks it’s acceptable to do that with something as important as a pet, then she thinks she can do that with any aspect of your life she doesn’t like,” one user wrote. “The cat is important, but almost irrelevant in the scope of red flags she’s throwing out.”
For whatever reason, even though women are more likely to be cat caretakers than men — and men are statistically more likely to take their relationship frustration out on pets, especially cats — the last few viral stories about relationship conflicts over cats have implicated women. Obviously if the situation had been reversed, the boyfriend should have been thrown out, or the girlfriend should have left with her cat. Gender isn’t the issue here: The issue is jerks who take their frustrations out on innocent animals.
Owl Kitty’s human puts his beloved feline into an iconic scene from 1993’s Jurassic Park.
Owl Kitty’s human has put his house panther into The Matrix, John Wick, Home Alone, Titanic — and now the original Jurassic Park as a stand-in for the terrifying tyrannosaurus rex.
Despite standing at least 20 feet tall and weighing several tons, Jurassic Owl Kitty is a kindler, gentler threat to Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum and the kids. Kitty just wants to rub up against the Jeep and purr, and perhaps score some cat food, not eat people like that evil dinosaur.
Plus we can now confirm that, even if they were twice the size of African elephants, cats would still be cute:
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