Sophia, we had to go through a home visit when we adopted Teddy. So, doesn't seem like overkill.

We had to deal with questions along the lines of making sure we knew the kind of responsibility we were getting into, could afford to support a cat in decent style, were looking for a pet as opposed to a working cat (e.g., a mouser). I suspect you'll get less of the first, more of whether your current cat and the new cat will get along.

I've tried something like what is advertised on TV, I think. I think the problem is that it has soaked down to the pad, so I really need to saturate the carpet AND pad. Also, in that area, there is no ventilation, so it just sort of gets stuck there, at the bottom of my stairs.

I suspect you'll get less of the first, more of whether your current cat

Current cat is gone because of my mauling. I think I may get questions about what I did to induce a cat to maul me!

I generally have just found my cats somewhere-- on the street or from a friend. So this adoption thing is new to me!

Yeah, once it gets into the carpet pad there isn't much you can do. One of the enzyme based things that are supposed to "eat" the organic matter might work, if you can really soak the spot. Unless that's what you've already tried.

Eta: Animal rescue people will priobably have dealt with animals that maul unprovoked - they should understand that you didn't do anything.

I generally have just found my cats somewhere-- on the street or from a friend.

An advatage of getting a cat on the street - the first one's always free!

The shelter I adopted my cat from said that they would call my landlord to verify I could have a cat and would do 1-2 home visits. They did none of the above.

I did have to fill out a long adoption form and have a 10 minute interview with a person at the shelter, but that was it.

Nature's Miracle is the most commonly available enzyme thingie.

A lot of fostering groups do home visits these days. Even 10 years ago, the county shelter actually DID call my references to make sure I wasn't planning on making cat soup or something. (Bewildered my poor references. I'd just moved here so no one knew me, except for this couple who were my dad's grad students way back in the day. So they get this call asking about my character and most of their memories of me are from when I was 10! )

Once I actually found a cat IN my apartment.

I had been away for a few days, my cat was with my mother, and when I came home, there was a cat in my apartment. I lived on the second floor with my own entrance. I was freaking out at the movement, though, because I thought it was a rat.

This cat went to live with a friend of mine and had kittens, which now belong to my mother.

Sophia: lock your doors!

Elephants and other species can experience emotions akin to those present in disturbed people. Writing in the June/July issue of Seed Magazine, GA Bradshaw recounts a the story of pair of "traumatized" elephants who witnessed the slaughter of their families being massacred and grew up to be mass murderers, indiscriminately killing rhinos and other animals. He goes on to discuss the burgeoning body of evidence for parallels to human psychology in many vertebrates and even some invertebrates, and tantalizingly asks whether this means that humans' "unique" and subtle psychologies aren't more common than we like to think.

Until a few years ago, making such inference and diagnosing elephants with PTSD would have been dismissed as anthropomorphism. But no longer. Elephant psychopathology, chimpanzee infanticide and other un-animal-like behaviors are part of a growing body of research that suggests science is building toward a radical paradigm shift. Streams of new data and theories, critically from neuroscience, are converging into a new, trans-species model of the psyche. Humans are being reinstated back into the species continuum that Darwin articulated, a continuum that includes laughing rats, octopuses with personalities, sheep who read emotions from the faces of their family members and tool-wielding crows.

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