Category: Tips, Tricks and Techniques

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10 Ways to Increase Your Cat’s Lifespan

Here are 10 evidence-based ways to help your cat live a longer, healthier life:

1. Keep Your Cat Indoors

Indoor cats are generally protected from many dangers, including traffic, predators, toxins, diseases, and injuries. Many indoor cats live significantly longer than outdoor cats. The average indoor cat lives 17 years. The average outdoor cat lives 2 years.

2. Feed a Balanced, High-Quality Diet

Choose nutritionally complete cat food appropriate for your cat’s age and health needs. Good nutrition supports everything from immune function to organ health. Cats are not designed to eat cereal. Their intestines are too short. They do much better with real meat.

3. Prevent Obesity

Excess weight increases the risk of diabetes, arthritis, heart disease, and other health problems. Measure food portions and avoid excessive treats.

4. Schedule Regular Veterinary Checkups

Annual exams, and often twice-yearly exams for senior cats, can catch health issues early when they are easier and less expensive to treat.

5. Keep Vaccinations Current

Vaccinations help protect cats from potentially serious infectious diseases, especially if they have any exposure to other animals.

6. Provide Fresh Water

Adequate hydration supports kidney function and overall health. Many cats drink more readily from fountains or multiple water stations.

7. Spay or Neuter Your Cat

Spaying and neutering can reduce certain cancers and reproductive diseases while also decreasing behaviors that can lead to injury or disease exposure.

8. Encourage Daily Exercise

Interactive toys, climbing structures, and play sessions help maintain a healthy weight and support cardiovascular and mental health.

9. Protect Dental Health

Dental disease is common in cats and can contribute to pain, infection, and systemic health problems. Regular dental care can make a meaningful difference.

10. Reduce Stress

Cats thrive on routine and a sense of security. Providing hiding places, vertical spaces, predictable schedules, and a calm environment can support both physical and mental well-being.

Bonus Tip

Learn your cat’s normal habits. Changes in appetite, thirst, weight, grooming, activity level, or litter box use are often among the earliest signs that something may be wrong. Detecting problems early can add both years to your cat’s life and quality to those years.

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The Insidious Collar

Most dog owners don’t realize the harm a dog collar can cause. Veterinarians have reported dogs with tracheal collapse in varying degrees up to death, permanent pain injuries due to spinal problems, epilepsy, and even broken teeth and legs, all from dog collars.

We suspect this may true of cats that are leashed also.

So what can you do?

1. Replace the collar with a harness, as shown above.

2. Don’t yank your cat’s leash as a training technique or punishment. Evidently a training coach at a Petco store accidentally killed one of his student dogs by doing this.

3. Make sure the harness fits correctly. You should be able to slip a thumb under the harness, but not your whole hand.

4. If your cat stays in at night, remove the harness for the cat’s comfort and health.



Cat Harnesses available on Amazon

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Cat Trivia

Cat’s spend two-thirds of their lives sleeping. Then, a third of their waking hours are spent grooming.

Cat litter did not exist until 1947.

Cats are never mentioned in the Bible.

The oldest cat on record lived just short of 36 years.

Just over one out of every five homes in the United States, at 21 percent, has a cat.

The modern cat has been existence for about 12 million years.

Approximately one in five cats is lacking the gene that causes them to react to catnip.

Radiator anti-freeze, which can leak from cars is attractive to cats (and dogs), but it is highly toxic.

A mouser in Scotland killed 28,899 mice in her career.

A cat’s top speed which can be maintained for only a few seconds is 31 miles per hour (50 kph). They can maintain this speed for only a short time because they have very inadequate cooling systems. We can sweat, but all they can do is pant, or rest.

Cats have at least 60 million olfactory cells to detect odors. Humans have no more than 20 million olfactory cells.

A cat has an additional sensor in the roof of its mouth called the Jacobson’s organ that assists in detecting smells.

As you know geese gather in flocks, and lions in prides. What’s the technical name for a group of cats? A clowder. A group of kittens is a kindle.

Slow-motion video has proven that a cat will curl its tongue backward when drinking, forming a scoop on the underside of the tongue.

Not all cats are the same when it comes to human allergies, such as what former US President Bill Clinton suffered from. A human who is allergic to one cat, may be perfectly fine with another. Female cats tend to activate allergies less than male cats. A litter can easily have up to eight kittens. The record is 14 brothers and sisters in one litter.

A cat in Texas had 420 kittens.

If cats were criminals, you could identify them by their noseprints, which are as unique as human fingerprints.

A reader, Darryl, has sent the following information:

There is a very well documented case of a kitten that climbed the Matterhorn. A climber (it may have been Sir Edward Whymper) came across this apparently stray kitten when he started his climb and it followed him all the way to the summit.

You mentioned spraying perfume on cats to get them used to each other, and that reminds me of something people used to do here in England (including my mother). If people with a cat moved to another house, the first thing they’d do at their new home was to put butter on the cat’s front paws. This was supposed to prevent the cat from trying to return to its previous home, something that results in a lot of cats getting lost. I think the idea behind the practice was that as the cat licked the butter off, it would decide that a taste like this was worth staying around for.

Perhaps you could also mention the function of the reflecting layer that makes cats’ eyes glow at night. This layer – called the tapetum – is made of guanine crystals and it captures the light that’s already gone through the cat’s receptor cells and sends them back, giving the cells a ‘double dose’ of the light, which is why cats see so well in dim light.

April sent this idea along:

We have two cats in our house, and recently one of the cats has been urinating in the corner of a particular bedroom (even though we have two cat litter boxes in the house). We have found that putting a bowl of food in the corner eliminates the cat’s bad habit, since most animals won’t urinate near the same place they eat from.

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Surprising Truth About Cat Food

When you learn the surprising truth about commercial cat food, you’ll probably want to change your cat’s diet immediately.

Let’s start with some simple observations. When cats eat grass, what happens? Right, they regurgitate it.

The grass they eat doesn’t get digested. In fact they can’t digest grass. They aren’t designed appropriately. The intestine of animals who do eat grass is quite long. The intestine of a cat is very short. The cat is specially made to eat meat.

If you fed nothing but grass to your cat, and if the cat could actually keep it in, the cat wouldn’t be able to get enough nutrition.

That’s why they eat small animals. That’s what they are designed to eat. That’s where they get their nutrition. An outdoor cat eats mice, gofers, and the occasional bird, and they do just fine. They have done fine for thousands of years.

So it would be silly to feed them anything like grass, wouldn’t it?

Yet, most commercial dry cat food is composed mostly of grains like grass. Oh, it doesn’t look like grass, because the grains are ground up, and colored to look like meat. Then an artificial odor is added so the grain-based food smells attractive to cats.

Many older housecats suffer from arthritis, and urinary tract problems. Many cats of all ages suffer from intestinal problems, generally diarrhea. In time, many, maybe even most, die from these diseases. Guess what? These are the cats that eat dry commercial cat food.

If you simply switch to real meat, simulating a cat’s actual diet, these diseases are exceptionally rare.

Unfortunately, many commercial canned cat foods do not contain as much meat as you might like. And dog foods are often even worse, because dogs can get away with less protein than cats need. For best results, read the labels and try to find the most real cat food you can. If you have the time, the best bet is to make your own cat food from whole chickens and other small creatures.

But what about the cat’s teeth? Have you been led to believe that they need the dry food to keep their teeth clean? Have you ever wondered how a single bite or two on each morsel of dry food can actually clean a cat’s teeth? As you know, the cat doesn’t really chew the food up. The dry food doesn’t really do much for the cat’s teeth at all. Nature takes care of that. The cat’s teeth are designed to eat the way they do. The cat’s saliva has anti-bacterial qualities. The teeth don’t need any special attention beyond what nature already provides.

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Mouser

On farms, in food processing plants and even just in homes, cats can provide the important function of keeping rodent populations under control.

A mouse can have eight babies. Assuming four of them are female, and knowing that a mouse can give birth 60 days after being born itself, after 18 months, a pair of mice can become 4.5 million.

If it weren’t for cats, perhaps we’d be overrun.

A mouser in Scotland killed 28,899 mice in her career.

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Unexpected Poison

In the same way that chocolate is poisonous to dogs, there are certain things that can harm cats.

One major toxin is automotive radiator anti-freeze. It’s hard to imagine that a cat would want to drink that smelly green fluid, but they do, and it is very not-good for them.

There are also some seemingly innocuous common houseplants that are quite toxic. Keep lillies, jade plant, philodendron, elephant ear, asparagus fern and cyclamen away from your kitty.

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Reading Tails

Can you read cats’ tails?

When their tail is straight up, it often indicates anticipation.

Straight back and stiff can indicate danger.

Arched and puffed up means great danger.

Their tails will quiver when they are happy to be near you. But if you annoy them, their tails will twitch.

Wagging can mean indecision. When a cat is facing a decision, like when you have opened the door for a kitty on a cold evening and the cat just stands in the doorway trying to decide whether to have an adventure or stay in the warm house, you’ll see wagging.

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Docile Kittycat

When a mother cat picks up a kitten by the scruff of the neck, the kitten goes limp. It’s an instinct that keeps the kitten from wiggling or trying to get away, when the mother has to make an important move. As it turns out, the instinct lives on in adult cats. You can utilize this when you want your cat to cooperate with you in some way. All you do is grab the loose skin at the back of the cat’s neck and lift up slightly. You don’t have to pick the cat up entirely by the back of the neck. In fact this might hurt an adult cat. By lifting slightly, you put the non-wiggle instinct into effect, then you can put your other hand under the cat to carry the cat or reposition the cat.

I am not sure yet – I haven’t experimented with my own cat enough – but I think there is another component to this instinct. I think it makes the cat more loving or accepting. On the few times I have tried it with my own kitty, he has become quite mellow, and purred louder as if knowing he is being especially cared for.

Interestingly, you can pull up on a cat’s neck when you want it to sit down. Just pull up for a moment then let the cat down – the cat’s feet will almost crumple and the cat will lower all the way down.