Blog Posts by Sarah D. Bunting

Lorcan and Jessi-cat, hanging out. (Photo by Cavendish Press)On a difficult news day that may have made you question your faith in humanity, we were delighted to spot a story that reaffirmed our faith in, well, felinity: an article in The Sun about a fluffy kitty named Jessi-cat who's helping her young owner to find his voice.
 
Lorcan Dillon is a 7-year-old from Davyhulme, Greater Manchester who suffers from an anxiety condition that makes it almost impossible for him to communicate or express emotion. But that all began to change when his mother, Jayne, brought home a cream-colored Birman cat named Jessi-cat a couple of years ago. (Birmans, not to be confused with Burmese, are semi-longhaired cats with distinctive sapphire eyes and pure white "gloves" on each paw.)

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Lorcan bonded strongly with Jessi-cat, and as a result, he's better able to show affection, Jayne told The Sun. "The bond between Lorcan and Jessi-cat is so touching as he's able to show physical affection to her which he doesn't

Bubble fail or cat fail?Kookamunga's Krazee Kitty Catnip Bubbles (about $5 at most retailers) didn't perplex us at all, not at first. The only thing that puzzled us here at Shine Pets HQ is that we'd never heard of such a product before. We just knew our cats would love it! We couldn't wait to try them!

Alas, the perplexion didn't take long to set in after we cracked the seal on the bubbles. The label promises "super concentrated," "pure potent enjoyment" – but that wasn't the reaction we saw amongst our four test subjects. Well, one irritated victim seemed "super concentrated" on running away from the bubbles, but that doesn't count.

Test Subject #1: Hobey

Hobey exists in a constant state of beleaguerment, and is older than most hills, but despite a Russian-novelist attitude and advanced age, he still has a kittenish streak, pouncing on a Cat Dancer and stalking the occasional leopard mousie. He's a nip enthusiast, so we thought he'd be the bubbles' biggest fan once he figured out what they contained.

…Nope.

Howard and Beth Ostrovsky Stern with Bianca at a North Shore Animal League fundraiser, 2007.Howard Stern and his wife, Beth Ostrovsky Stern, have lost their pet Bulldog, Bianca. The radio star and his wife both posted sad messages to Twitter on Tuesday night about the loss of the pooch, US Weekly reported; Howard called the day "tough," and said, "Thanks to all for all the kind messages. Give your dog a hug for me tonight." (We can only imagine; the dog passed away before Howard, a judge on "America's Got Talent," had to work the night's live show.)

Blackie the police dog reminds you, don't leave pets in the car. Or steal them. Thanks.Welcome back to "Paw & Order," the periodic Shine Pets round-up of the best and worst (by which we generally mean "dumbest and most hilarious") in pet-related crime stories.

Since last we met, and whapped our foreheads with our palms, tragedy struck the Chicago area when a pet piranha bit off a toddler's fingertip. The mystery here isn't that her parents chose to keep piranhas in a spot accessible to a toddler – and anyone who's spent time around toddlers knows, they will make almost anything "accessible" to themselves whether you like it or not – it's that, initially, "The mother believed the family’s pit bull had bitten the child." Police investigated further, and found "that piranhas, swimming in a fish tank near where the child had been playing, may have been responsible."

The toddler's father cut open a piranha and recovered the fingertip, at which time child and digit were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, and here's what we don't get. If Dad is quick-thinking enough to

We're surprised it took this long! The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN is sponsoring the Internet Cat Video Film Festival, a "carefully curated" selection of your favorite online-feline memes. The curtain goes up at dusk on August 30, 2012. The goal – besides laughter and oodles of cuteness? MNartists.org blogger Katie Czarniecki Hill challenges the forwarders of the world: "Let's transform this singular small screen viewing experience into a shared celebration with the larger-than-life projection of these silly clips out on the Open Field."

Hill issued the invitation way back on Memorial Day: come to the Center's Open Field, enjoy a show by Brian Laidlaw and the Family Trade, then giggle uncontrollably at cats on Roombas, in boxes, playing keyboards, and more. The event is "free, open to the public, and cat-friendly," Hill noted, although if you do plan to plus-one your feline, you may want to call ahead.

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Don't worry – you don't need a degree in landscape architecture, or even a ton of money. According to Gabrielle Fimbres's piece in the Arizona Daily Star, small investments of time, money, and planning can turn your yard (or a small area within it) from a poop-festooned and possibly hazardous waste of space that's not fun for your dog into a neat, fun mini dog park that improves the value of your home.

Fimbres interviewed experts Teresa Truelsen, marketing manager of the local chapter of the Humane Society, and Jason Isenberg, the owner and lead designer at Realm Environments and its subdivision, Petscapes, for inspiration. Among the advice Truelsen and Isenberg shared:

Planning is key. Even a little sketch "on the back of a napkin" is good, Isenberg says. Figure out the layout beforehand – how much yard you want to devote to your dog(s), where you'd place various elements like dog-safe plants, whether you need to do any leveling – and then draw up a budget.

So is safety. Isenberg notes

A study of more than 45,000 women in Denmark found that women infected with a parasite that's carried by cat poop run a higher risk of trying to kill themselves. We've made many jokes over the years about the smell and the hassle, but the cause of the elevated risk isn't figurative despair; it's an actual, real bug: T. gondii. The "T" stands for "toxoplasma" – no surprise, since most of us already know that the risk of toxoplasmosis means pregnant women shouldn't mess around with changing the litter.

Teodor Postolache of the University of Maryland's medical school is the senior author of the study, which appeared this week in the scientific journal "Archives of General Psychiatry," and he cautioned against correlating poop and suicide too strongly. "We can't say with certainty that T. gondii caused the women to try to kill themselves," Postolache noted. "But we did find a predictive association between the

The Fourth of July has so many awesome associations for humans: cookouts, trips to the beach, an excuse to bust out the red-white-and-blue clothing, and of course fireworks displays.

But what we hominids think of fondly as fun and exciting traditions, the dog is just hassled by. He's not allowed to belly up to the picnic table with his people, he's not really that big a fan of the goofy flag t-shirt he's forced to wear so you can get a cute Facebook photo…and he hate hate haaaaaates the fireworks.

But why?

The answer seems pretty obvious. …Well, it seems obvious to this sensitive-eared correspondent, who spent most of her childhood praying for rain on Independence Day so she wouldn't have to pretend to enjoy a fusillade of cringingly loud explosions. So, we can only imagine how it feels for dogs, whose hearing is much more receptive than ours (they have three times as many muscles devoted to it, and according to some sources, the range of frequencies a dog can hear is at least twice