Friday, August 10, 2012

It's 3am - Do You Know Where Your Kitty Is?

Kerrie Anne Loyd, a researcher in Athens, Georgia*, had the brilliant idea to slap a small video camera on housecats to see what the hell they actually do all day (spoiler alert: it's 99% napping). This was mainly to assess their affect on the environment, especially songbirds. Shockingly (listen up, Franzen), birds were a minority of their kills. What did the kitties really like? Reptiles.  You can watch a presentation of her research HERE. It's worth watching the first minute just to see how excited she gets when she says "kittycams!" Even better, her enthusiasm for the word extends throughout the presentation!

Most shocking (not to dog lovers) is that ~10% of the cats "cheated" on their owners and sought food and affection from other households**. Other activities included fighting off opossums and dogs, eating road kill***, and drinking sewer water! I was especially excited to see the "Playing with a Skank" video, until I looked more closely and saw that it was a skink, not a skank. Sigh.

You can see the photos (like the one I borrowed above) and videos HERE. Personally, I really enjoyed the following videos:
As usual, I was alerted to this by the Grey Lady, specifically, this article.
* Or "Jaw-ja", to the locals
** For those of you who like to say that women are like cats, feel free to keep this in mind
*** You stay classy, Mittens
**** Anthropomorphism alert!

1 comment:

Phil and Micha said...

What I really love about your posts, JT, is that I can't check unknown words in a regular translator, I have to look up the urban dictionary ;)