Love your cat? Have it neutered or spayed

It's surely a lesson the French animal welfare organisation Société protectrice des animaux (SPA) could learn from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to All Animals (SPCA).

screenshot from SPCA video

It's not enough to neuter male cats and dogs or spay females once they land in a refuge for whatever particular reason.

Rather the message has to be drummed home in every way possible to pet owners who somehow still don't seem to be aware of just how important it is to have an animal neutered or spayed.

To that end, the SPCA's Montréal section has released a simple 30-second spot reminding, in this particular case, the need there is to neuter Tom cats.

It features Sultan with accompanying text demonstrating in feline terms at least, what a total sex machine he is - or at least has been allowed to become.

It's amusing, instructive and would surely work just as well in France.




So, time to spread the word - not only to the converted but also those who insist on...well doing absolutely nothing.

Pass it on.

A purrfectly ridiculous Christmas present for your cat

All right so it's obviously a marketing strategy; encourage pet owners - in this case those who have cats - to cough up hard-earned centimes for something that's packaged especially for Christmas.

But isn't an Advent Calendar for your furry four-legged friend taking things just a little too far?

An Advent Calendar for your cat

This one's currently available in a major chain of supermarkets throughout France, but of course they're not just in the shops.

Try a simple search on the Net and you'll come across any number of sites reminding us for example that, "Christmas is also for our family pets and this excellent Advent Calendar is a great way to share the excitement of the countdown to the festive season with your feline friends."

Puh-lease.

Goodwill to all creatures great and small all year round and not just during the festive season.

Nothing wrong in that.

But really.

An Advent Calendar to, "provide a little delicacy for your feline every day until Christmas."

Bah humbug!

Que pensez-vous?

Animal cruelty - decision delayed on French teens who set fire to a cat

There are plenty of videos that go viral on the Net showing the horrors of what man can do to animals.

Thankfully a search for the one at the centre of this tale brings up nothing, even though the event was recorded on a mobile 'phone and then posted on the Net.

Sadly though, there are plenty of other examples of similar behaviour; each of them surely equally inexplicable to anyone with even a couple of neurones between their ears.

(source Wikipedia, Author - derivative work: howcheng)

In 2006 two adolescents from the south of France had reportedly spent the night drinking and were "looking for something to do".

The pair, according to a report which appeared at the time in the regional newspaper, Midi Libre, decided to relieve their boredom by locking a cat in a cage, dousing it with petrol before setting light to it and watching it die.

"A sordid story," says the animal charity Fondation 30 millions d'amis on it website after the first of the defendants, now 22 years old, appeared in a court in the southern French city of Nîmes earlier this month.

The Fondation was just one of several animal welfare organisations to file a civil suit against the pair. Others included Respectons, the Fondation Brigitte Bardot and the Société protectrice des animaux (SPA).

Speaking on behalf of Respectons, lawyer Frédérique Ortega outlined what made this case especially, in her terms, "barbaric".

"Beyond the acts themselves, the cruelty of these young people also lay in the fact that they made all the arrangements to disseminate these terrible images," she said.

The court has delayed making a ruling in the case against the 22-year -old until April.

A date has not yet been set to hear the case against the other defendant, who was a minor at the time, and will be appear before a juvenile court.

The maximum penalty for such acts of cruelty to animals, according to the 30 millions d'amis website, is a two-year prison sentence and a €30,000 fine.

In 2009 the case of "Mambo" the dog who survived after being set alight resulted in a 22-year-old woman being handed down a one-year prison sentence with six months suspended and a €6,000 fine.

Her 17-year-old companion received an 18-month probationary sentence

Assette the French cat who survived 18 days without food or water

Cats proverbially have nine lives don't they?

Well a French moggy called Assette has certainly had a part in maintaining that superstition - and then some.

Her incredible story appears in Monday's edition of the regional daily Le Progrès and tells how she was locked inside a house for 18 days without food and water before being freed weak and skeletal, but alive.

Assette belongs to Violaine, the daughter of actor and director Michel Crespin, best known for his work with street theatre companies.

She (Assette) was spending the summer at Crespin's holiday home in the village or Château-Chalon in eastern France.

The director's neighbour was an elderly woman who had recently died and in early August her children emptied the house of its contents before putting it on the market for sale.

That is of course when Assette's period of involuntary captivity began, says the paper, because she managed to get herself locked inside what was now an abandoned house.

Crespin began to worry after not having seen Assette for several days and began looking for her. He put up posters and distributed leaflets describing the missing black cat with a distinctive broken tail, and he mobilised fellow villagers to help him in his search.

One neighbour suggested that perhaps the four-year-old moggy was locked inside the abandoned house, but a look through the windows and plenty of calling of her name yielded no response.

It was with a heavy heart that he had to inform his daughter that Assette had gone missing and was nowhere to be found.

Fast forward to September 5 and Violaine, who lives 70 kilometres away in the city of Besançon, was in Château-Chalon for its annual festival when she decided to collect some apples from the garden of the abandoned house.

Almost instinctively while there, she called out the name of her cat...only to be greeted by a miaowed response from within the house.

A quick call to the number on the "for sale" board posted outside the property, and after a couple of hours wait for someone to unlock the front door and out charged Assette, thin, hungry and thirsty but otherwise in fine fettle.

"We didn't know in what state we would find her," Crespin told the newspaper

"It's just incredible - 18 days with nothing to eat or drink."

And in a new leaflet he has distributed to fellow villagers he writes, "If you see Assette in the street, say hello to her. She deserves it."

Some consider black cats unlucky, others lucky. The author's (almost) black cat, Hiro. For photos of Assette, click here.