short takes

[cellio]

Seen in a .sig file: "What did cured ham actually have?"

Ambiguous spam of the day: "Indulge your Java passion". Oh, they meant coffee.

Understaffed, but no budget for hiring? Try Primate Programming Inc. "Humans and higher primates share approximately 97% of their DNA in common. Recent research in primate programming suggests computing is a task that most higher primates can easily perform. Visual Basic 6.0 was the preferred IDE for the majority of experiment primate subjects."

I happened to notice the feeding instructions on a package of cat food recently. They started "For average adult cats (6-8 pounds)...". Since when is 6-8 pounds average? (Granted, they didn't say "healthy".) I know a lot more 10-pound adult cats than 4-pound ones. In fact, I don't think I've ever met an adult cat under 5 pounds. What do these guys think the standard deviation is?

Speaking of cat food, I found this prominently displayed on a package of cat treats: "tuna is the #1 ingredient!" Well sure, but ingredients order doesn't really tell you anything about absolute volume, only relative volume. To make tuna beat grain, all you have to do is separately list flour, corn meal, barley, etc etc. Makers of kids' breakfast cereal do this sort of thing to prevent sugar from being the first ingredient. (Sugar, corn syrup, succrose, marshmallows (consisting of...), etc.) So why stop with tuna? Throw in enough assorted junk and you can advertise caviar or filet mignon as your #1 ingredient!

I got a call from a surveyor a couple days ago. I enjoy trying to figure out who's sponsoring the survey based on the questions. This one asked about the types of charitable organizations I support, then zeroed in on animal-related charities (scripted, not prompted by what I said), then asked specific questions about two organizations (after claiming that those two had been randomly selected from a list). So I think either the ASPCA or HSUS was trying to see how they're doing and whether the public thinks they're interchangable. The decoy was that early on they asked for strength of reaction (positive or negative) to a bunch of organizations, ranging from these to PETA and WWF. They were completely uninterested in reasons for strong reactions, though, and their questions didn't capture them for me. (HSUS no longer gets my money because they persist in sending me trinkets, WWF doesn't get anything from me because they're spammers, and PETA is IMO wacko. ASPCA is ok.) Well, whoever they were, good luck interpreting the best data I could supply for the questions they actually asked...

Comments

Cats & Orgs

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

My cats, all six of them average just under 11 lbs. This includes the three outside cats, who live on hunting a great deal of the time. (We put food out, but not huge amounts.) Two of my cats are barn rescue cats: one is 10, and one is 12. Two are lovingly cared for kittens of friends' cats. One weighs 10, the other 11. The two other ones, who have always been outdoor kitties but were not feral, weigh 10.5 and 10.6.

When we have them in at the vet, in a clump, he always declares them healthy and not overweight. I think the cat food people are working off the same kind of 1950's data that the baby food and baby clothing people do -- a 4-6# newborn was common in 1950 -- now the average has gone up to more like 7.5, because of better prenatal care and nutrition.

Oh, and PETA: definitely more than wacko. Letting 2000 cage-raised minks out to live on their own on the English Countryside shows a significant lack of common sense, as well as no compassion whatsoever for the chickens and ducks owned by local farmer. Perhaps Farm animals don't count, only circus, lab, clothing, medical, and food stock.

Average Cat

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I noticed that recently too, and wondered about it. Most folks seem to agree that Perrine (about 6 pounds) is a small cat. (When she was starvation-kitty, she was a tiny cat.) I'm used to seeing 10-12 pound cats, and those are the ones that don't look fat -- their skeletons are larger than Perrine's. (Okay, I have seen a fat cat in that range before, but I'm talking about the healthy-looking ones.)

Do my friends have unusually large cats, or are the pet food companies out of touch? I do recall being told that a 5-pound adult cat was an animal In Serious Trouble starvation-wise, by someone I'd expect to know.

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

Our cat Mathilde is on the petite side, around 6-8 pounds. She was the runt of the litter, but by no means is she underfed. There is always food available and she eats what she wants. As a caveat, she is not fixed -- neutering causes weight gain, from what I can gather.

Our new male kitty, Max, is a bruiser -- ten pounds if he's an ounce, probably more, which is why we named him Felix Maximus. He's not fixed either, but if my previous cat Pepper is anything to go by, he won't gain any weight post-neutering. At least I hope not; my lap isn't big enough. He gets all he wants to eat, too; both cats have feeders.

Cats & feeding

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

My vet prefers feeding at will - and prefers dry food, for dental hygiene reasons -- because that way, supposedly, cats don't overeat.

My big hunter, outside, weighed 15 lbs when he was living inside, and weighs just about 11 now. He's very sleek and muscular, and the vet says he's in fine shape.

However, I had a Maine Coon in Massachusetts. Whew. 27 lbs. A small dog, clearly.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

My cat is small (~6lbs), but I think she was the runt of the litter. I feed her free choice and even after being spayed she didn't gain much weight. Most of the adult cats I've seen have been at least 8lbs+.