A kitten and his best friend, a puppy, are warming hearts with a video of them showing their love for each other.
Who says cats and dogs have to be enemies?
Bo, a 5-month-old Beagle puppy, drapes a paw around his best feline bud, 10-month-old Jasper, in this video showing that cats and dogs getting along is not a sign of the apocalypse, contrary to what Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters all those years ago.
Lisa Plummer of South Bend, Indiana is the pet mom to the adorable duo.
“Bo loves his cat siblings so much,” Plummer wrote, adding the little ones sometimes “drive me crazy with their constant chaos.”
“This sweet moment melted my heart,” she wrote, “and made me want to take back all the bad things I’ve said about them.”
A puppy with cat-like features has taken the internet by storm. He’s a happy little dude.
The cat-dog of Vietnam. The derpiest fuzzball. Good boy.
Those are just some of the names lavished on Dúi, a young puppy whose half-canine, half-feline looks are turning heads across the globe.
Dúi hails from “a mountain province in Vietnam,” owners Hai Anh and Tuan told Metro UK. The Hanoi-based owners bought the now 2 1/2-month-old puppy and saw him rise to instant viral fame thanks to his unique looks.
Dúi is a mixed-breed dog, half Dingo Indochina (as opposed to the Australian variety) and half Bac Ha, a breed indigenous to the area.
‘He is a happy and sweet pup, he loves to play with other dogs, even big dogs and so sweet with humans,” Tuan told the newspaper.
Looking at these photos, happy seems like an understatement!
Chinese authorities threaten pets as Coronavirus fears grow.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a government with no respect for any kind of life — human or animal — would threaten the mass extermination of cats and dogs.
It’s par for the course in China, where authorities in dozens of cities and provinces are urging people to “deal with” their pets in the wake of the Coronavirus threat — or the government will, media reports say.
The warnings have been issued in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Coronavirus, as well as Shanxi, Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong, Hebei and Shanghai, according to the Humane Society International.
Yet there’s no evidence the virus has been transmitted by domesticated pets like cats and dogs, and no evidence those animals can catch it from humans, experts say.
In Wuhan, residents have been told to keep their pets indoors, and warned that any cats or dogs spotted outdoors will be “killed and buried on the spot,” the UK’s Metro reported.
But experts say it’s the government’s fault that the virus jumped from wild animals to humans in the first place. China has refused to shut down so-called “wet markets,” where live animals are sold next to the carcasses of recently-slaughtered animals, despite the fact that SARS and other viruses originated from those markets.
A Chinese wet market. Credit: Nikkei
Officials believe the Coronavirus originated at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, one of many “wet markets” described as “filthy, crowded places where animals are displayed alive in small cages” and “are often slaughtered on site.”
China has been “mired in long-held beliefs about the benefits of eating exotic and often endangered animals for good health,” the Humane Society said in a statement, referring to traditional Chinese “medicine” and other folk practices that use animal parts in ineffective and dangerous tonics and elixirs.
In addition to creating the circumstances for viruses to jump from wild animals to humans, the illegal wildlife trade has pushed animals like tigers and pangolins to the brink of extinction.
“Chinese society is boiling with anger at wildlife policy failures,” said the Humane Society International’s China policy specialist, Peter Li. “Social media is full of posts condemning the refusal to shut down the wildlife markets. This is the worst Chinese New Year in China’s recent history.”
The doggist lobby is creating fake news about cats. Those scoundrels shall be dealt with.
Buddy would like the public to know that vile anti-cat lies have been printed in the Charlotte Observer.
The newspaper alleges a burglar broke into a cat cafe called Gatos and Beans on Oct. 6 “and the cats did what cats do: absolutely nothing.”
The burglar smashed his way in by hurling a rock through a window while the cats “sat and watched,” the newspaper claimed.
As many as a dozen felines were inside Alabama’s first cat cafe at the time of the crime, with names like Velvet and Miss Tilly. None broke a nail during the ordeal, but were stressed out and needed a “snuggle” in the days that followed, the shop posted on Facebook.
Did absolutely nothing? Sat and watched?! Didn’t break a nail?!? Needed a snuggle?!?!?
These are outrageous lies perpetrated by a newspaper that clearly takes money from pro-dog lobby, which has a vested interest in making cats look bad.
Buddy rejects the insinuation that cats lay around and do nothing all day. A typical cat’s day is highly regimented and filled with activities such as eating, sleeping, grooming, sleeping, eating and sleeping, punctuated by energy-consuming bursts of important activity such as laser dot hunting and box-sitting.
“If you’re going to burgle, do it quietly. Some people are trying to sleep around here.”
If the burglar had broken in during a reasonable time, the kitties would have totally mauled him and held him down until the police arrived. Unfortunately, it appears the burglar was privy to the cats’ schedule and timed his break-in to coincide with Fourteenth Nap.
Buddy would like to remind everyone that cats are just as competent and badass as dogs when it comes to guarding and defending human abodes. Now if you’ll excuse him, it’s nap time.
“I am in box. I can see human, but human can’t see me!”
“Study finds dogs are more than twice as smart as cats,” the clickbait headline reads:
A study gives dog owners solid scientific evidence that dogs really are smarter than cats.
A study led by Vanderbilt University counted for the first time the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex of the brains of cats and dogs and found that dogs have more than twice as many neurons as cats.
The research found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons while cats have about 250 million. These neurons are the brain cells associated with thinking, planning and complex behavior, which are all considered hallmarks of intelligence.
That’s from a story published Aug. 30 on Local12.com, the website of a Cincinatti-area news station.
So what’s wrong with the story?
It’s dishonest: The study was conducted in 2017, but the Local12 story presents it as news in August of 2019.
It quotes the study’s lead author, giving the impression a reporter from Local12 spoke to her. That did not happen. The quotes were copied and pasted from the press release that originally announced the study two years ago.
It misinterprets the study’s results: Neither neuron count nor brain size — relative or absolute — are reliable indicators of intelligence.
This is what passes for news in 2019: Old, recycled content presented as new information, slapped together by a web producer who didn’t bother to read more than the study’s abstract.
It’s all about traffic and designing pieces of content ready-made for Facebook feeds.
But what about the central claim, that the number of neurons in an animal’s brain correlates to intelligence?
If that were true, we’d be living on a planet dominated not by humans, but by elephants: Earth’s largest terrestrial animal has some 260 billion neurons compared to an average of 100 billion for humans.
“Hear that, son? We have more neurons than humans!”
Research suggests the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, as opposed to the entire brain, may be a better indicator of intelligence. Indeed, that’s what the study focuses on. The cerebral cortex is associated with higher cognitive functions. As you’d expect, humans have unusually high neuron counts in that region of the brain.
But by that measurement, humans aren’t at the top either.
If neuron density in the cerebral cortex was the primary indicator of intelligence, the long-finned pilot whale would reign supreme, and other types of whales and dolphins would rival humans.
Not only do pilot whales have twice as many cortical neurons as humans, their brains have much more surface area, which scientists once believed corresponded to intelligence.
“Actually we are the Earth’s smartest creatures according to cortical neuron count. Suck it!”
So if we’re keeping score, intelligence is not determined by:
The number of neurons in the brain
The number of neurons in the cerebral cortex
Brain size
Brain size relative to body mass
Brain surface area
Brain “folds”
At one time or another, each of those things was thought of as the way to measure smarts. So if none of those things are true markers of intelligence, what is?
That’s the million-dollar question. We don’t have an answer, which is why scientists conduct this kind of research in the first place.
Contrary to what the article claims, cortical neuron count does not provide “solid scientific evidence that dogs really are smarter than cats.”
But that doesn’t make for a clickable, shareable headline, does it?
In truth, we can’t even define what “more intelligent” really means because each species sees the world differently, and has different priorities to enable it to survive and thrive.
When we measure intelligence, we measure it on a human scale, according to how we humans see the world. That’s hardly an impartial way of evaluating the intelligence of animals with much different needs and ways of seeing the world, and it doesn’t yield many useful insights.
Keeping that in mind is particularly important when it comes to studying cats, who have their own agendas and priorities. Dogs are eager to please and obedient. Cats only listen when it suits them.
That doesn’t mean one is smarter than the other, it simply means they’re different
Pain In The Bud 