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In case you missed it, the July edition of Kitty Bytes, our newsletter, is out!

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Dr Karen McComb of the University of Sussex published an interesting study this week. According to her team’s work, cats use a special kind of purr to “entice” their human caregivers into action, namely providing said cats with food and/or attention.

According to the researches, that sound is combined of a purr and a quiet cry at the back of it. It sounds like a purr, but triggers an emotional response in humans akin to that felt towards a baby’s cry. Dr McComb claims this is a learned behavior found among some cats and not others. According to the study, it is more likely to appear in a one-on-one relationship between a human and a feline.

So, has your cat learned how to push your secret baby button yet? Visit us on the forums and let us know there too! You can read more on this study on the BBC website and Discovery Channel’s website.

Edited to add: We now have a thread about this very topic going on the forums- click to read and join the discussion.

We have a brand new article for you to read on the site:

Cats and the Zen of Remodeling

Sandra Murphy shares from her extensive personal experience and comes up with some extremely useful and important tips for any cat owners about to embark on the remodeling journey.

We’ve had complaints come into the forum about a site prentending to sell “kitty beef”, as in cat meat:

http://www.thecatsite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=198843

Here’s how I can tell this website a hoax:

1. The title of the site uses the word “Kitty”. Not feline, not cat, but Kitty. This is a direct shot at cat lovers.

2. The site is a quickly put together replica of another site pretending to sell “puppy beef”. The very first page opens with “Welcome to Puppy Beef” and there are numerous mentions of “dog meat” where it should be saying “cat”. I guess someone wasn’t proofreading well enough…

3. More quirks through out the site. For example, the recipe page only contains one recipe and that one includes the F word in one of the ingredients. Hardly the mark of a professional company site.

4. While there is a list of “cuts” and products” – they all lead to the same page. It’s a fancy menu design with little behind it.

5. The “About US” page is signed by a “Yuen Xi – President, Puppy Beef and Kitty Beef International Meats.” The domain name is owned by an American person, Frank from Atlanta, Georgia.

6. Above all – no direct contact details, no order form, just a mysterious invitation to register with the site for more information…

Please note that the site in question contains some graphic material which can be hard for us cat lovers to look at, specifically pictures of what appears to be actual cat meat sold in a Far East market. This is why we wil not be linking to it directly from this post or from the forums.

Pass along this post if you see other concerned cat lovers. Like the infamous Bonsai kitten website, this is yet another incident trying to yank our proverbial chains and upsetting us into spreading its web address across the net. Instead of doing that, send your friend the link to this post:

http://thecatsite.com/blog/162/kitty-beef-hoax.html

Do you tweet on twitter.com? We now have an official account for TheCatSite.com on Twitter! Follow us for daily updates, tips and cat tweets!

Also, Kitty Bytes is back online! Time for me to start working on this month’s update and newsletter…

I’m afraid that our newsletter Kitty Bytes’ website is temporarily unavailable. Domain registrar issues (don’t ask, you really don’t want to hear the entire saga). The good news is that it looks like things will be sorted out in a few days. So, for now I’m keeping my claws retracted and my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to launch KB as planned in a week’s time.