9. The fact that cats are real gourmets is often not given sufficient attention. For this reason, most animals are condemned to monotonous fare. As worked out by the National Academy of Sciences, the nutrition needs of cats are in fact supplied by dry and canned cat food. But who wants to live from canned food alone? It is true that legal regulations pertaining to cat food are very strict on the whole, and cats can live on canned food alone. True cat lovers, however, regularly present their darlings with fresh treats. Fresh fish, fresh meat (naturally not pork!), and particularly fresh liver gladden the heart of every cat. But even cats, who are among the choosiest creatures of the world, have widely varying tastes. Like human beings, they have individual likes and dislikes, swear by certain delicacies, and reject others for the most unfathomable reasons. And, like human beings, incorrect nutrition is also very harmful for them.
Warning: giving raw meat to cats can cost them their lives. Raw meat and innards can be infested with parasites or bacterial pathogens like salmonella. This is also true for beef, which has been found increasingly to contain a virus that is fatal to cats. Unlike prepared cat food, which is always sterile, raw meat and innards must be cooked. By the way, an exclusive meat diet is deficient in calcium. A deficiency of this mineral weakens the skeleton because the body absorbs the calcium deposited in the bones. The addition of qualitatively inferior protein (in meat waste and table scraps, for example) can make cats die in droves. Lacking the amino acids necessary for life, the animal wastes away, acquires a dull, shaggy coat, and gradually displays symptoms ranging from apathy to lack of appetite.
The yeast thiamine, which uncooked freshwater fish contain, destroys vitamin B1, which is essential for cats. If given alone, this fare soon causes typical signs of deficiency (for example, lack of appetite, nausea, cramps). Freshwater fish must therefore be cooked so that the B1 vitamin remains intact.
A further warning: if cats supplement their food with vegetables (they can even eat grass), they still remain carnivores, and must be fed as such. The continual attempts of vegetarians to put their cats on a meatless diet is a sadistic mistake. A purely vegetarian diet causes cats to become seriously ill and die a slow and painful death. Desmond Morris, a qualified expert on cats, thus criticizes a recently published book with vegetarian recipes for cats as a clear case of animal cruelty.
10. Before the cat became a favored house pet, its popularity with human beings was based on its ability to catch rodents. Cats have shown that they are more than equal to this task ever since Homo sapiens began storing grain reserves. On a country farm, a few well-cared-for cats are enough to rule out any undesired increase in the rodent population. Before cats intervened, the human race had no protection against such pests. The champion "mouser" is purportedly a tabby cat that lived in a factory in Lancaster, England, and liquidated about twenty-two thousand mice in his twenty-three-year-long life. That amounts to three mice daily, a respectable amount for a cat that received something "extra" from its human owner. Even more successful, however, was a female tabby that fed herself in White-City-Stadium on a diet of rats. Within a mere six years, she had caught 12,480 of these unlikable critters, an average of five to six daily. It is understandable why the ancient Egyptians did everything they could to domesticate cats, and why they punished the killing of a cat with death.
11. The astounding ability of cats to survive free falls from great heights without harm has stirred the admiration of humans since time immemorial, and fueled the legend that cats have nine lives. Attested to by two New York veterinarians, the record is held by a cat that plummeted from the thirty-second floor of a skyscraper (more than 450 feet) and survived with only a few small injuries, necessitating a hospital stay of a mere two days.
Compared to other animals (including human beings), the body surface of cats is rather large with respect to their mass. The result is that they attain their (very low) speed of descent early, so that the impact of landing is slighter. Moreover, as descendants of predators, cats are furnished with an excellent stereoscopic vision, which enables them to "adjust" their fall so that they land on all fours, evenly distributing the impact of landing. But even in midnight cats make use of a born reflex: right at the moment at which they reach the maximum speed of descent, the original tension of the leg musculature yields to muscular relaxation. The cat then resembles a natural parachute that uses the braking effect of air and, with all four paws extended, sails downward.
12. A serious error is committed if this typical, feline gesture is regarded as an act of repressive "macho" violence. It cannot be said enough that the female cat holds all the cards in sexual affairs. In love it is always the female who inflicts "violence against toms”, no matter how much the latter exert themselves in conquering their queen. In the case of a neck bite, this is not an aggressive act, but a desperate, psychological trick used by male cats to protect themselves from the
