PETS BEHAVIOUR

A new study should have cat owners purring with delight. It suggests they are somehow partly protected from the ravages of heart disease.

"Over a 20-year period, people who never owned a cat faced a 40-per-cent greater risk of death due to heart attack than previous or current cat owners," said the lead researcher, Adnan Qureshi, a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Qureshi, who presented the findings at a medical conference in New Orleans yesterday, is at a loss to explain his study, which involved 4,435 volunteers.

"The best theory we can come up with is that ... cat ownership leads to reduced stress levels which, in turn, lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease" he suggested. On the other hand, it is possible that cats don't directly shield people from heart attacks. Instead, cat owners as a group may share specific personality traits that reduce their chances of suffering from heart disease at an early age.

The study also produced another surprising and perplexing result: Dog owners did not have the same level of protection against heart disease as their cat-owning counterparts.

"When we started the study, we thought we would find it [a lower heart-attack risk] in both groups," Dr. Qureshi confided. After all, taking a dog for a walk should be good for your heart.

He speculated that personality differences between the two types of pet owners might account for the unexpected conclusions.

Or, the results may be related to how long people own their pets. Cats tend to live twice as long as dogs. That could mean cat owners have longer exposure to the potentially positive influences of their feline companions.

She was trembling with fear, shivering with cold, and all of four months old when I found her last week, wandering around the streets by herself in the middle of the night.

Now, with eight pets already -- the majority of whom came from bad situations -- I needed another dog like I needed a sharp pencil jabbed in my eye, but there was no way my conscience would allow me to leave her to fend for herself on a freezing February night.

Poppy, as I've named her, wasn't wearing a collar, and I don't hold out much hope of finding her owner, because at this time of year abandoned Christmas pets turn up in the rescue shelters in their droves.

In the first month of 2008, 67 young dogs were handed in to the Ashtown Pound in Dublin, while a further 148 were picked up from the streets. And according to Orla Aungier of the DSPCA, the situation really comes to a head around Easter every year, when the post-Christmas novelty of owning a dog has well and truly worn off.

I don't cry easily, but I was moved to tears by the recent article by Niamh Horan about how we euthanised 14,000 unwanted dogs last year, which was accompanied by the pitiful sight of a group of beautiful animals lying dead in a twisted heap on a bloody concrete floor, an image that is now seared on my brain for life.

I knew from the moment I found her that Poppy would end up becoming a permanent addition, because I couldn't bear the possibility of her ending up like that. And the ones arriving at the shelters are the lucky ones, relatively speaking, because being euthanised is at least a humane ending for these dogs. The rest are dumped somewhere and abandoned to their fate -- possibly to freeze or starve to death, while others will be killed or injured by cars.