Louisiana – Pain In The Bud

With Bird Flu Spreading, It’s Probably A Good Idea To Keep Your Cats Inside

So far there are no cases of cats infecting humans, but a new study published Tuesday warns the virus easily mutates in infected felines.

Health officials have identified at least five cases of domestic cats infected with H5 bird flu in California, and they’re warning of multiple vectors of transmission now that both outdoor and indoor cats have been infected.

Two cats were infected after drinking raw milk from a dairy farm in Fresno, California, according to the Los Angeles Department of Public Health. That’s also how a dozen barn cats died in April after drinking raw milk from infected cows on a Texas dairy farm, the CDC said.

But three other cats who tested positive for bird flu were indoor-only, lived in the same home, and did not consume raw milk, authorities said. They’re looking into the possibility that the felines were infected through raw meat or by hunting mice.

So now it’s not only confirmed that cats are vulnerable to highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI H5N1, but that they can be infected in different ways.

To be clear, it’s not a cause for panic and it doesn’t mean people should isolate from their cats, but it does mean we should be smart and considerate when it comes to protecting our pets and reducing the possibility that they can be infected.

Because millions of felines live with humans, the fear is that they can pass the virus onto us. So far there have been no confirmed cases, but a study published on Tuesday confirmed that the virus can easily mutate in cats. That means the more domestic cats are infected, the greater chance the virus mutates in a way that allows it to “bridge” to humans.

At least two people — one in Wisconsin and one in Louisiana — have tested positive for the virus and were hospitalized this week. One worked on a farm and the other may have consumed raw milk. In the meantime, health officials are monitoring the people whose three cats were infected, and they’re urging people to take precautions.

“To avoid the spread of disease, including H5 bird flu, we strongly encourage residents and their pets to avoid raw dairy and undercooked meat products, limit contact with sick or dead animals, report sick or dead birds, and keep pets or poultry away from wild animals and birds,” said Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

Recent News Stories Claim People Have Spotted A Type Of Cat That Doesn’t Exist

It’s easy to mistake house cats for larger wildcats when photos and videos are blurry and lack familiar items to establish a sense of scale. The same phenomenon is responsible for UFO sightings and cryptid creatures like the Loch Ness Monster.

Recently several reports have been making a big deal about blurry videos of black cats, claiming they’re “black mountain lions” or “black panthers” roaming in places like Missouri and Louisiana.

The footage of the first video was shot in Missouri, where pumas once ranged, were extirpated in the 20th century, and have returned in small numbers in recent decades. Like most photos and videos of cryptid or unidentified animals, this one is blurry, taken from a distance, and lacks any object near the animal to provide a sense of scale. The second video is simply a black house cat with her kitten in rural Louisiana.

Our brains are pattern recognition machines and when the information we’re looking for — be it spatial, detail or contextual data — isn’t present, our minds tend to fill in the gaps. That’s the reason why we see faces in clouds, creatures in shadows, men on the moon and the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches. (The technical term for “perception imposing meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus” is “pareidolia,” from the Greek for “instead of” and “image.”)

Compounding the problem is the fact that the word “panther” is one of the most confusing of felid descriptors, a word that vaguely refers to physically large cats but doesn’t refer to any particular species, coat pattern or color.

Photo by adrian vieriu on Pexels.com

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Photo by Caleb Falkenhagen on Pexels.com

Big cats can be voids too, like this stunning black jaguar in Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Above: A jaguar, a leopard, a puma (mountain lion) and a melanistic jaguar. Although jaguars and leopards look nearly identical, jaguars are stocker with thicker limbs and have blotches inside their rosettes, while leopards do not.

The word panther can refer to a puma, a jaguar or a leopard, but only the latter two species can have melanistic (black) coats.

Contrary to popular belief, even a black cat’s fur is not entirely black — you can still see the rosettes and spots of their coat patterns up close and in certain light conditions.

blackjaguar — This jaguar’s rosettes and spots are visible in direct light. Jaguars in the wild are rarely seen so close or in “perfect” conditions, making it difficult to see coat markings of melanistic members of the species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

However, jaguars don’t range in Missouri, leopards are not native to the Americas, and if someone indeed spotted one of the very rare pumas in Missouri, it could not be black because melanistic pumas do not exist.

Mountain lions (Puma concolor in taxonomic nomenclature) are physically large and are the second-biggest cats by size and weight in the western hemisphere after jaguars, but they are not technically “big cats” because they are not part of the pantherinae subfamily. Pumas cannot roar like big cats, but they’re capable of the classic wildcat “scream,” and they can even meow like small cats.

By process of elimination — and the cat’s physical shape — we can conclude the Missouri video shows a house cat that looks larger because there’s nothing nearby to give us a sense of scale.

Grilled cheese Virgin Mary — This piece of a grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 on eBay in 2004 because bidders believed the Virgin Mary’s face miraculously appeared on it. Credit: eBay

It may seem unlikely that someone confuses a house cat, which weighs an average of 10 pounds, with a puma, which weighs on average more than 100 pounds, with the largest males pushing 220 pounds.

But it happens all the time even in close encounters, like the incident this summer in which a man riding a dirt bike swore he was ambushed by a puma only for DNA to establish beyond doubt that his attacker was a domestic kitty. For what it’s worth, he still swears it was a mountain lion.

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Do You Live In A Cat Or Dog State?

The US is evenly split between 25 cat states and 25 dog states.

I spent a weekend dog-sitting for the first time ever in the spring of 2 B.B. (Before Buddy), rising early to walk my brother’s Chihuahua-terrier before work.

The Manhattan of 7 am is a different world: Everywhere I looked, bleary-eyed New Yorkers clutched leads, yawning as dogs of all shapes and sizes pulled them along. I never knew there were so many dog-friendly apartments, let alone so many people willing to share cramped spaces with dogs of all sizes. Seven-pound Cosmo was one thing, Greate Danes and Dobermans quite another.

You’d think New York City, with its sky-high population density, would be a cat town. It isn’t. Neither is New York State as a whole.

Sadly, Buddy and I live in a state dominated by dog-lovers, one of 25 including California, Texas, Florida, Virginia and both Carolinas. Although cats are the most popular pets in 25 states as well, feline strongholds tend to be in places with lower population density, from Oregon and Washington in the west to Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi in the south, to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maine in the east.

The information was compiled by market research firm Time2Play, which surveyed more than 3,000 Americans. The team also asked respondents whether they posted photos and videos of their pets online. Even though cats remain the undisputed masters of digital space, almost 57 percent of dog people showed off their pooches online, while only 43 percent of cat servants did.

Bud and I have been thinking about moving someplace warmer for years, but of course the king’s needs come first. Maybe we’ll settle in Louisiana or Nevada, where Buddy can establish a new realm for himself.

Do you live in a cat or dog state?