New Zealand Conservative

From the Daily Mail, No scaredy cats here! Video shows dramatic moment Tara the fearless feline saves autistic boy, 4, from attack by neighbor’s dog : An astonishing video has shown the moment that a family’s cat came to the rescue of their four-year-old son after he was viciously attacked by a neighbor’s dog. Jeremy Triantafilo was sitting on his bicycle outside his family’s home in Bakersfield, California on Tuesday when the dog escaped its home through an open gate and crept up on him from behind. Surveillance footage, which Jeremy’s father uploaded to YouTube, shows the dog grabbing the boy’s leg and pulling him to the ground before violently shaking him with his teeth clamped tight. Then suddenly, an unlikely hero bounds towards him – the family’s cat, Tara. The video shows the fearless feline jumping on the dog with enough force to push him away from the boy . Tara then chases the dog away from the driveway with its leg between its tail. It’s quite spectacular,...

From yesterday's Dominion Post, a swipe at Gareth Morgan and the potential consequence of his dreams of a bird utopia - being overrun by rats and mice: Of greater, more immediate concern to me as a cat owner is the inspiration Gareth Morgan is giving to cat hating sadists. A couple of Sundays ago, a woman wrote into the Sunday Star Times a horrible story of her grandfather having successfully used a gin-trap to deter cats from his garden, and how when recommending the method to her friend on the Kapiti Coast, the friend was keen to try the same remedy and now no longer has her garden visited by cats. Here's the letter: Feline solution MY FRIEND has a pristine lawn and landscaped garden at her home on Wellington's Kapiti Coast. She complains of neighbour's cats invading her property, fighting, copulating, urinating, defacating, vomiting and digging up recently sewn plants. Her pleas for a solution to the council and SPCA have been to no avail as they don...

Back when Asterix was a 4 month old kitten, she caught this rat. The picture doesn't really do it justice as to how big the thing was, especially when it was sitting upright in my kitchen hissing at everyone.After I had finished panicking, my son and I drove it outside with brooms, with Asterix helping it along by giving it a number of whacks on the head every once in a while.  How she managed to get it inside, I don't know. The rat probably survived, however, as it ran down the side of the house and escaped down the drain.   I talked to a rodent exterminator a few weeks later about it, and he said drains were a good method of travel for rats, and here I'd been thinking it had gone to it's death and drowned. Since growing up to being an almost 4 year old cat, Asterix over the years has caught and killed a number of rats.  Some, she has part eaten.  In Autumn, she catches a lot of mice and hardly comes in for food, because she'll eat the mice she catches....

Another great cat video, there is a hint of fear in the women's voice at the start but the baby really enjoys this incident.