We try to remain behind the scenes and keep our standards as slack as Cedar’s leash should be (ahem), but we’ve recently been alerted to the need to clarify our mission.

This is a dog blog. It is not a cat blog for two important reasons:

  1. Cat does not rhyme with blog,

    and
  2. This.
Read the full text . We had to double check that it was Scientific American and not The Onion.

We are well aware of the dangers of polarized and binary thinking, yet we implore readers to give this research their scrutiny. While it starts out with a “no shit”…

It turns out that cats have a mischievous and somewhat dark reputation in neuroscience. There is research to suggest that a cat’s proximity to other mammals can cause them to behave strangely.

Jack Turban, “Are Cats Responsible for ‘Cat Ladies’? Scientific American, May 23, 2017.

it turns like a cat’s tail accidentally-on-purpose across your face to an “oh shit” …

This feline power has been attributed to a protozoan that lives in their stool, called Toxoplasma gondii (or Toxo for short).

JACK TURBAN, “ARE CATS RESPONSIBLE FOR ‘CAT LADIES’? SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, MAY 23, 2017.

Turban likely has some cat-loving friends. He shies away from saying flat out that cats can make one crazy, but he does cite some vexing correlations between Toxo, schizophrenia, and psychosis.

We’re not going to mince words here. Cats are sure as hell responsible for cat ladies and probably plenty of cat dudes, too. They know exactly what they’re doing. As a wise friend reminds us, “There’s no ‘I’ in teamwork, but there is a cat in scat.”

(For the sake of unifying our readers, we’ll leave aside for now the emerging theory that cats are Republicans and dogs larger than handbags are Democrats.)

Enjoy your dog blog, please (especially the rhyme, because, well, the reason often eludes us…like that @#$%ing cat).

Back to our irregularly scheduled programming sooner or later. Maybe. – Eds.

Cedar doing her part to sustain her blog.