The cat's meow

I've noticed The Guardian has been running quite a few articles with a bit of an anti-cat bias in recent months. Lots of people have pets, so it comes as no surprise that news services like to publish articles that feature them. They probably have people on staff who write nothing else other than articles about pets, desperately trying to engage us by telling us something we didn't know about our moggies, pooches etc. So far this year there has been quite a lot of articles written using the recession as an angle. First there were stories about cash-strapped pet owners abandoning their animals, or having to put them down. This was followed up by articles giving advice on how to cut the cost of owning pets. Every so often there is the obligatory hero dog article and recently the anti-cat article has crept up and pounced on us like... well like... cats on poor mices. We have had features about their bird killing habits. Another trying to tell us that cats aren't all that clever after all. They have been compared to our MPs; we need them but be wary of trusting them. And this week they've focused on scientific studies suggesting that cats deliberately use a sound in their cries for attention that mimics a high-frequency element that occurs in the sound of a baby crying, which we are hard-wired to respond to. To disguise this the cat purrs at the same time. Here is the article. The BBC ran a similar article the day before.