Cougar Mountain Zoo, Issaquah, Washington, October, 2011, Taj, a 370-lb. Bengal Tiger responds to toddler pressing her hands on the glass of his cage with obvious feline gestures of affection.
At zoos, one sometimes sees a side of large, dangerous animals which is essentially identical to the behavior of your pet at home. One day, at the Chicago Zoo, I watched with amazement as a White Rhino the size of a delivery van manifested recognizable ecstacy while a teenage zookeeper stroked her back with a large push broom.
Pretty cut and dry. I mean, I think we can all agree that the yellow cat clearly preferred the odor of Clorox’s Fresh Step over Arm & Hammer’s Super Scoop, right?
But in a lawsuit that I predict will lead one or more of the lawyers involved in the case to consider a career change, Arm & Hammer has filed a federal lawsuit against Clorox alleging false claims that cats prefer Fresh Step over Super Scoop. Arm & Hammer says “independently conducted research” proves otherwise.
Specifically, the Arm & Hammer complaint charges that
“The Clorox advertisements are unambiguous that the judges of whether Fresh Step is superior at eliminating odors are cats, not people,” the suit says.
“But cats do not talk, and it is widely understood in the scientific community that cat perception of malodor is materially different than human perception,” the company argues. “It is not possible scientifically to determine whether cats view one substance to be more or less malodorous than another substance.”
Arm & Hammer adds that “cats will not reject Super Scoop to any meaningful degree and will do so no more frequently than they will reject Fresh Step.”
A small white kitten climbed up sales representative Steve Johnson’s tire while he was stopped at a Piggly Wiggly in Evansville, Indiana. The stowaway rode more than 1400 miles in the engine compartment in the course of a week, until Johnson stopped for an oil change in Madison, Wisconsin and his passenger, a little dehydrated, but otherwise none the worse for wear, was discovered.
1) My email account was hijacked by a spammer who mysteriously somehow acquired my password, so the hosting service closed it down. It’s back up and back under my control (with a new password), but if you received an email recently from me asking you to invest my $30 million dollars of ill-gotten Nigerian diamonds, I recommend passing up the deal.
2) NYM’s host server went down in a major way with every file corrupted (fortunately, backups did exist). Possibly a cyber attack from disgruntled overseas readers. There has not yet been time to identify the cause.
3) Xena, baddest of the Maine coon cats, who knows no fear, was found this morning perched in one of the 10’ ( 3m.) high little windows just below the gambrel ceiling of my third floor office. Her route included the top of some four drawer filing cabinets and the frame of my wife’s late mother’s oil portrait hanging high on the wall. She also knocked out the wireless modem on her way up. Take my advice: avoid owning coon cats!
