Your Cat January 2023

Here a priest is blessing a cat in a long-standing tradition. Each year, hundreds of people bring their pets to San Anton church in Madrid to have their animals blessed during the feast of San Antón, the patron saint of animals, which is celebrated in January. Saint Anthony was said to have lived in solitude with animals as companions and instinctively had animals around him. The pet blessing tradition dates back to medieval times and its objective was to collectively take care of the animals that lived in the streets of Madrid. This picture was taken from last year’s celebration when people were wearing face masks to protect each other. If you look out in the news, you may see images of pet blessings from the 2023 festival.…

As I write this, 2023 is not too far away. Heading into a new year is always a time for reflecting, to make it easier to look and move forward. With the surge in pet ownership due to covid and now a cost-of-living crisis, it is a challenging time for cats and owners. At Your Cat, we are trying to do everything we can to help. We’re providing hundreds of pages of expert advice on our website, we’ve launched Your Cat Good Causes which is pledging a percentage of subscription fees to feline projects in the UK, and we’re hopefully delivering content which you really enjoy and find value for money. As editor, my biggest hope is that you value being part of the Your Cat community. There are millions of…

WELFARE Battersea urges Government to prioritise animal welfare as legislation stalls one year on Battersea, along with other UK animal welfare organisations, and a cross-party group of MPs has teamed up to renew their pleas to Government as more than a year has passed since the Kept Animals Bill was debated in parliament. The bill proposes significant action to address some of the most pressing animal welfare issues of our time, including puppy smuggling and ear cropping of dogs overseas. Battersea MP Marsha de Cordova has sent an open letter, signed by 19 cross-party MPs, calling on the Government to push the bill over the line. The action is being supported by nine leading animal welfare organisations. The group joined together on 9 November — one year since the bill…

Big up black cats! I have just received the December issue of Your Cat through the post and I wanted to say something about rescues and Battersea Championing National Black cat Day. I know a lady who lives in Dagenham, Sharron Taylor, who also runs her own rescue cat charity from home, that adopted a beautiful black cat that had been abandoned by her neighbour while moving house and left the cat behind to fend for itself several years ago. The black cat, Olly, is now one of the household and quickly settled in with the others in the same home. I wanted to say how important it is to judge cats by their temperament not by colour. Black cats don’t choose their colour. Olly is a friendly confident boy.…

Yvonne Martin is a freelance journalist who specialises in health and well-being features. She is a lifelong cat-lover and lives with a shorthair tabby called Rita who has her own instagram account @ritascatworld Some cats have a lot to say for themselves, whether it’s a cheery chirrup after they burst through the cat flap or a more insistent meow when they want to be fed. It’s tempting to imagine that the various sounds our cats make are something akin to language and who among us has not tried to meow back at our pet in an attempt at conversation? But in fact, cats don’t audibly converse with each other and wouldn’t meow much at all if they weren’t living with us humans. Among undomesticated cats, it would largely be confined…

Your Cat Good Causes has donated MDC EeziCatch Cat Traps and carriers to independent cat rescues throughout the UK to help assist them with their essential Trap Neuter Return (TNR) programmes. We spoke to two of those rescues to find out more about their amazing work and how our donation is valuable to them. INCREDIBLE COMMITMENT Female cats over the age of four months can get pregnant. This is one of the reasons why feral cat populations can explode in numbers in such a short time. With an estimated 250,000 stray cats living in cities across the UK, independent cat rescues are reaching breaking point with all of the time, hard work, and effort their volunteers are putting into their Trap Neuter Return (TNR) programmes to bring feral populations under…