Rabbits

[admin]

When I went to the pet store in a mall when I was little, I told my mom that rabbits look like cats. That one looks like one of the cats I had. I'll post a picture of a similar cat soon.

[Fruit of thy loins]

I heard about someone who kept a rabbit and a cat in the house.  They were reared up as young bunny/kitten together.  I would have thought that the cat would try and eat the rabbit.  But apparently it's not always that way in the animal world. 

[Fruit of thy loins]

Red squirrels are very beautiful.  But they get killed off by grey squirrels.  Why does Israel have so many cats?  Are they imported from somewhere?  I know that Egypt used to have many cats in ancient days.  Are cats native to Europe or were they introduced from the Middle East?

[Fruit of thy loins]

YM,

Does Israel have good laws preventing animal cruelty?  One thing going for Britain is that it has well-enforced anti-cruelty laws.  Some even say we treat our pets better than our children.

[Fruit of thy loins]

No. Some people in Israel think of cats as rodents. Some municipalities put out cat poison to slowly kill them over 12 hours with the help of "humane societies" such as the Israeli SPCA. They claim it is the humane way to do it. Most Israelis hate cats.

There is The Cat Welfare Society of Israel but they support sterilizing cats. Cutting the testicles off male cats is even against The Noahide Laws. I think sterilizing female cats is wrong for Jews but not for Gentiles.

I think the cats should be permitted to multiply in their natural environment. But I think they can also be taken as pets and I like how The Cat Welfare Society of Israel has a cat sanctuary, sort of like a zoo for cats. I went to their old headquarters to see it but they said they moved the sanctuary. So all I got to see was a veterinarians office so I took their magnet and brought it back to The United States and gave it to my mom for her refrigerator.

There aren't many street cats in Britain which is maybe one reason why people have a slightly higher view of them.  It's true that unneutered tomcats can be unpleasant.  Sterilization is routine among pets in Britain by the way.  Although some people are opposed to it, most people would never have pets unless they had them neutered.  Then there's all the cat shows and specialized breeders and fanciers.  The Anglo-Euro view of animals is slightly warped, but I know that e.g. in Greece there are lots of street cats too and people are less fond of them.  Generally speaking the more control people have over their animals the more they like them.  Plus the fact that pets are a kind of child-substitute.

[Fruit of thy loins]

I don't like the fancy breed of cats. I like the regular tabby and domestic short-haired cats.

The only male cat we had was white but it got hit by a car when it was a year and a few months old. We didn't remove its testicles because that is cruel. My mom said that if would have had its testicles removed, then it wouldn't have died because it always stayed out long periods of time looking for female cats. It got hit far from our house. Someone called us when they saw the number on the collar on its neck.

How upset were you at the time when you learned about your cat dying?  There is only one cat I really miss, the one I grew up with.  We got him 'by accident', he wandered into our house one day and stayed.  He was a ginger and white Maine Coon.  Maine Coons are usually expensive to buy but we got this one free.    He was absolutely gorgeous, a splendour to look upon.  As he grew old he became thin, frail, lost his eyesight, fell to pieces really.  But he was the same old cat I always used to know, as friendly as he always was.  In his advanced old age he still surprised us, for example one night we came downstairs to find he had knockered over a dish with left-over chicken onto the kitchen floor and ate the chicken.  He did this by smell because he was blind at this stage.  After him I have made a resolve to never get too attached to a pet again.

[Fruit of thy loins]

How did he die? Did he still have his testicles?

I think it is also cruel to lethally inject cats to kill them if they are sick. My female cats died of natural causes. One when it was 19 and I was 18 and the other when it was 15 when I was 19.

When the male cat and the 15 year old female cat died, I was in Israel. I was sad when the 19 year old died because I had her since I was a baby. My parents found her in a grocery store in Chinatown. She just wandered in so they took her home. Her name was Wanty, short for Wanton (As in wanton soup.) because  she was from Chinatown. She was black with grey stripes. There was a picture of a cat that looks like her in last week's Ask JTF. The 15 year old cat looks like the one I posted that looks like the rabbit in the beginning of this thread. The male one was all white. One of his eyes was blue and the other one was green. I also cried when it got hit by the car.

The old ones were sick so it was expected they would die but I didn't know that the 15 year old one was sick because my parents didn't tell me on the phone to Israel. The sick cats used to urinate on the floor when they were sick so now we don't have any rugs in the house because we had to throw them all away.

Yes, all of my family's cats have been, as we say, neutered.  It is a cultural thing I suppose.  But it's funny you mention sick cats urinating.  We had an old female cat who was very ill for a long time and she used to urinate sometimes even when she was sitting on someone.  I had that happen to me, it was beyond disgusting.  That was my earliest experience of cats, too.  As I was growing up we had her and another cat who had an antisocial personality.  So I grew up almost not liking cats until we got Hermie, the one I mentioned before.  He was like a little angel ushered into my life.  He used to wander far and wide and luckily  he never got harmed, even when he wandered the streets of London!  But for most of his life he was with us in the rural places we lived in.  (My flat is in a city but my family all live in rural locations now.) 

And yes, all of our cats got 'put down' by injection when they were very sick.

My family have new cats, and some dogs which I like (although they smell bad), and some of my family have rabbits, fish, and even gerbils/hamsters, which in my opinion are like little rats.  There is even someone who is married to my uncle who rides horses.