OBJECTIVES To address the lack of up-to-date published data, the present study evaluates the PCR-based prevalence of Cryptosporidium species infection and molecular characteristics of isolates among household cats and pet shop kittens in Japan. METHODS A total of 357 and 329 fresh faecal samples were collected from household cats and pet shop kittens, respectively, with or without clinical si...

OBJECTIVE To determine reproductive capacity of naturally breeding free-roaming domestic cats and kitten survival rate. DESIGN Prospective cohort and retrospective cross-sectional study. ANIMALS 2,332 female cats brought to a trap-neuter-return clinic for neutering and 71 female cats and 171 kittens comprising 50 litters from a cohort study of feral cats in managed colonies. PROCEDURE Dat...

The percentage of adult cats euthanized in animal shelters is greater than that of kittens because adult cats are less likely to be adopted. This study aimed to provide evidence to inform the design of strategies to encourage adult cat adoptions. One such strategy is to discount adoption prices, but there are concerns that this may result in poor adoption outcomes. We surveyed 382 cat adopters ...

The precedence effect (PE) is a perceptual phenomenon that reflects listeners' ability to suppress echoes in reverberant environments. The PE is not present at birth and appears only several months postnatal. Recent physiological studies have demonstrated correlates of the PE in the central nucleus of the inferior colliculus (ICC) of adult animals. The present study extended the same techniques...

This paper presents some simulation results of the evolution of 2D visual pattern recognizers to be implemented very shortly on real hardware, namely the \CAM-Brain Machine" (CBM), an FPGA based piece of evolvable hardware which implements a genetic algorithm (GA) to evolve a 3D cellular automata (CA) based neural network circuit module, of approximately 1,000 neurons, in about a second, i.e. a...

This paper presents some simulation results of the evolution of 2D visual pattern recognizers to be implemented very shortly on real hardware, namely the \CAM-Brain Machine" (CBM), an FPGA based piece of evolvable hardware which implements a genetic algorithm (GA) to evolve a 3D cellular automata (CA) based neural network circuit module , of approximately 1,000 neurons, in about a second, i.e. ...

The ability of the growing kitten to digest protein, fat, carbohydrate, dry-matter and energy were assessed. Kittens were divided into two groups; one group was fed a wet diet, the other a dry diet. Both groups were allowed ad libitum access to food. Apparent digestibility of the two diets, and kitten bodyweights were measured over a 24-week period. There were no significant differences in mean...