CAT OWNERSHIP

People often assume that a child diagnosed with asthma will do worse with a cat in the house.

What cats need often doesnt jibe with the way we live our lives. Were gone all day, leaving them with no interaction, then come home and want to spend the evening petting and handling them.

When the Quaker meeting house where a couple married wouldnt allow a cocktail hour because of a no-alcohol rule, they decided on a kitten hour to keep the guests occupied while they had family pictures taken. Guests snuggled with six kittens from the Seattle Animal Shelter (with volunteers on the scene to make sure they werent over-handled) and were asked to donate to the shelter as wedding gifts.

Q. We just got our first kitten and are very excited. What is a cat's life expectancy?Melissa ReardonSunapee, New HampshireDear Ms. Reardon,A. The average...

So many house cats want what we cant safely give them: the great outdoors. Their natural instinct is to explore, yet cats allowed to roam outside face multiple risks, including preying wildlife, fast-moving cars, parasites, accidental poisonings, and disease. For instance, a cat can get feline leukemia or upper respiratory infections from tangling with a feral cat, or become poisoned from lapping up sweet-tasting anti-freeze or nibbling on chemically treated lawns.

Its a dilemma. You want to give your new kitten the best start in life, but so much of how she feels about people and the world in general is going to be imprinted on her brain between the ages of two and seven weeks, before she ever reaches your home. Thats because those critical weeks are considered a cats sensitive period of learning, when she picks up information about her world like a sponge. After that, her window of opportunity for learning begins to close. It never closes completely; but making new adjustments goes more slowly and doesnt come as effortlessly.

As were about to ring in the new year, many people also reminisce about the twelve months weve left behind, and how we could have done things differently. Thats probably when the various resolutions come into play - how life would be so much sweeter if we joined the gym and lost those nagging 10 extra pounds; how a weekly call to our aging parents would alleviate our guilt that we live on the other side of the country; how developing a new hobby would help make our lives feel more balanced and well- rounded.

Its always fun to see playful kittens when you are at an adoption shelter (or anywhere, for that matter!). They are fluffy, adorable and hard to resist - but we also know that they require a lot of energy to raise properly. Sometimes, its the older cat sitting quietly in her cage who is the best choice for your particular household.

Who really knows why - and the cats not talking - but most hairballs seem to end up perfectly placed on a bedroom rug to be stepped on first thing in the morning. This cold, slimy mystery wad is just one of the things cat owners need to get used to because, well, hairballs are normal. They are the common byproduct of grooming.

Recently, I was raking some leaves in my front yard when I heard a woman calling out, Dusty! Dusty! I soon realized it was my neighbor desperately calling for her elderly cat.

Car sickness affects a high percentage - perhaps as many as half - of all household cats in the U.S. In some cases, the disorder and its manifestations may be caused by a fleeting disturbance of a cats vestibular system - the complex array of nerves and other components, centered in an animals inner ear and lower brain, that governs his sense of balance and coordinates the movement of his head and eyes.

Thanks to breakthroughs in analytical genetics in addition to art, culture and literature, the oldest domestication of cats can be traced back to over 8,000 years ago. When grain farmers needed help controlling the rodent population in the region called the Fertile Crescent - a crescent-moon shaped area including parts of the Near and Middle East - they first tried utilizing the help of weasels. But weasels proved to be difficult to domesticate.