News Briefs for the Week of December 23, 2002
By Marcella Durand for Cat Facts
- Indoor Cats Live Longer
How does a longer-lived kitty, combined with lower veterinary bills, sound to you? Well, it's simple-all you have to do is keep your cat inside. According to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), cats are the pets most likely to die prematurely from poison, animal attacks, cars, human abuse, and transmissible diseases-all of which can be prevented by keeping kitty safely indoors. In fact, the estimated average life span of a free-roaming cat is less than three years, compared to 12 to 15 years for an indoor cat.
To spread the word about the many benefits of keeping kitty indoors, the HSUS has started the Safe Cats Campaign. The campaign offers useful tips on how to adjust outdoor cats to life inside and how to create an entertaining indoor environment, such as providing pots of "cat grass." Interested individuals, animal shelters and veterinarians can purchase kits containing brochures, booklets and copies of a public service announcement narrated by Montel Williams. For more information, visit www.safecats.org or call the HSUS at (202) 452-1100.
- Socks's Homecoming
Some say there's no place like home, but for this kitty, home could have been a little bit overwhelming. For the first time in almost a decade, Socks the cat, the former First Feline of the Clinton Administration, went back to Arkansas, where he was the grand marshal for the annual Little Rock Christmas parade on Saturday, December 7th. Jackye Parker, the principal of an elementary school named after former President Bill Clinton, held Socks as he led the parade in a vintage 1967 Ford Mustang convertible owned by Clinton.
Stray cat Socks was adopted by Chelsea Clinton in 1991 when her father was still the governor of Arkansas, and was later given away by the Clintons to former White House secretary Betty Currie, who accompanied Socks on his big homecoming.
Perhaps Socks' high-profile visit will also raise consciousness about the sorry state of Arkansas's animal cruelty laws. A recent initiative to make extreme animal cruelty a felony was defeated this November. According to Citizens for a Humane Arkansas (www.humanearkansas.com), the current Arkansas anti-cruelty law is one of the weakest in the nation.
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