If you passed by Chris Arsenault’s home, in Medford, New York, and saw the 300 cats living there, you’d probably consider the 58-year-old retired train conductor a crazy cat person, but that’s only because you don’t know his history with them.

In the summer of 2006, about two months after Arsenault lost his son Eric, 24, in a motorcycle accident, the train conductor found a colony of young cats by some train tracks, in Long Island. There were over two dozen kittens, and Chris knew just by looking at them that if he left them there they would die. So he took them all home, doctored them back to health, fed them and gave them a home. They in turn helped the mourning father deal with the pain of losing his son.

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At first first sight, Alla Lebedeva farm doesn’t seem very different fro all the other in Prigorodny, a small village in western Siberia. But then you notice one of her fluffy Siberian cats, and then another, and another and you being to realize why this place is popularly known as Koshlandia, or ‘land of cats’.

59-year-old Alla and her husband Sergey got their first cat in 2003, a beautiful Siberian feline called Babushka. A year later, she gave birth to five kittens and before long cats pretty much took over the whole farm. When people ask how many cats live in Koshlandia, Alla simply says ‘a million, maybe more’. Some sleep in the henhouse, some in the shed, others are chilling on the fence around the farm or on the roof of the farmhouse. They’re pretty much everywhere, and that’s just how Alla and Sergey like it. In fact, they are so proud of their cat paradise that they always take photos of the cats and post them on social media.

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Lauren and Will Powers, of Ferndale, Michigan, don’t need to dust their home like the rest of us. Their cat, Cygnus, does it for them just by walking around the place and wagging his incredibly long and fluffy tail.

Cygnus Regulus Powers was recently featured in the 2018 Guinness Book of Records for having the “longest tail on a domestic cat”. The official measurement put his tail at a whopping 44.66 cm (17.58 inches) from the base of his butt to the end of the “meat” of his tail, but it must have been done a while ago, because in June of last year, his owner Will Powers told Love Meow that Cygnus’ tail already measured 18.4 inches (24 inches, if you count the fluff). And considering that the cute Main Coon was only about a year old at the time, his tail must be considerably longer now.

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They say you can’t judge a book by its covers, and that definitely applies Shamo, a gray cat at the Rencontrer Mignon animal shelter, in Tokyo, but people are apparently finding it hard to look past her perpetually grumpy face.

Rescued from the city animal care center, over a year ago, so she could have a better chance of being adopted, Shamo has been having trouble finding a forever home mainly due to her permanent scowl. However, her deceptively angry look is apparently just a facade, as her profile page on the shelter website and her Twitter account clearly state that she is a gentle creature with an endearing personality.

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Ever since she moved to Jerusalem from Toronto, in the 1980s, Tova Saul has dedicated her life to looking after the street cats of Israel. She prowls the streets of the Old City carrying bags of food for the felines, provides medical attention to any injured animals she finds by either taking them to the vet, or welcoming them into her home, and takes females to be spayed in hopes of slowing down the rate at which the street cat population of Jerusalem has been growing for several decades. Some call her the “Cat Lady of Jerusalem”, but she is more of an unofficial chief caretaker of the stray cats in the Israeli city.

The Mediterranean basin in general is home to a lot of cats, due to the favorable climate – the weather is generally warm and winters are very mild. It is estimated that there are currently over two million street cats in Israel today, and about 100,000 of them are in Jerusalem. It wasn’t always like this. though. Up until the 1930s, the cat population was small, but under the British Mandate, felines were brought in to deal with the rat problem, and they thrived. They’ve been multiplying at such an accelerated rate that, a couple of years ago, the Israeli minister of agriculture suggested that all male or female cats be deported to another receptive country. That has yet to happen, but it gives you an idea of how authorities intend on dealing with the problem. That’s definitely not how Tova Saul sees things. She believes that compassion and responsibility are key to finding a viable solution to this issue.

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Cally Loridas, the owner of a pet grooming salon in Victoria, Australia, may have just sparked the latest trend in feline fashion – colored acrylic claw sheaths that keep your beloved pet from scratching the furniture.

Cat owners from all over Victoria have been pouring in at Cally’s Scratch & Sniffs Pet Grooming Salon, in Cheltenham, after word got out that she was applying stylish silicone nails that not only look good but have a very practical purpose. They keep the cats from scratching at the furniture, or your leg, whatever the case may be, without impeding their movement in any way. The fake nails come in 40 different colors and are guaranteed to give cat owners 6 to 8 weeks of scratch-free time with their pet.

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Taking nine pet cats on daily strolls through the city is kind of unusual, but having them sit in a baby stroller while you’re pushing them around is bound to catch some eyeballs. So it’s no surprise that the Cat Man of Kyushu attracts attention wherever he goes.

Masahiko Suga, a 55-year-old retired electronics company worker, first made headlines back in 2014, when photos of him walking nine beautiful cats in a baby stroller on the streets of Tokyo went viral. Japan is no stranger to weird sights, some of them involving cats, but this was new, even for them, so everyone took out their cameras and smartphones and started snapping photos. They made the rounds online for months, and Masahiko earned the nickname the Cat Man.

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Winter in the Turkish town of Terkirdag has been particularly cold this year, but a local cat lover has come up with an ingenious solution that allows stray cats in her neighborhood to escape the chill – installing a tiny metal ladder leading up into her cozy apartment.

Sebnem Ilhan couldn’t just sit by and let the stray cats freeze to death, so she decided to open up her home to them. But since inviting them in through the front door wasn’t going to work, she had to come up with a more practical solution. The window seemed like the best choice, but even though her apartment is on the ground floor of an apartment building, the window is still to high for cats to jump on to. So she had a tiny metal ladder made that the strays could climb to reach her window.

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The authors of a Class IV textbook in India recently came under fire, after it was revealed that in a lesson on the importance of breathing they were literally encouraging the kids to do an experiment involving suffocating a cat.

It sounds hard to believe that a school textbook for environmental studies could teach children as young as 9 years old to kill an animal as an experiment, but it’s sadly true. Twitter user Lola Kuttiamma shared photos of the book passages concerning the absurd experiment, and people understandably were outraged about it. “Living things breathe”, the textbook explains. “No living thing can live without air for more than a few minutes. “You can do an experiment. Take two wooden boxes. Make holes on lid of one box. Put a small kitten in each box. Close the Boxes. After some time open the boxes. What do you see? The kitten in the box with no holes has died.”

Wow, is that educational or what? And they’re not even suggesting using adult cats, but cute little kittens. Not that grown cats would have made it any more acceptable, but kittens just make it sound even crueler. And if you thought things couldn’t possibly get worse, you were wrong. The textbook, entitled “Our Green World: Environment Studies”, also features a couple of pictograms, with one kitten alive and well in the box with holes in it, and the other, well, dead.

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Temperature-controlled rooms, king-size beds, a dreamy playground and gourmet chow are just some of the things felines can enjoy at Catzonia, the world’s first five-star hotel for cats.

Located in Damansara, just outside Malaysia’s capital city of Kuala Lumpur, Catzonia was set up to offer pampered felines a lavish holiday whenever they need a break from their daily routine, or when their loving masters are away and can’t offer them the attention they deserve. Featuring a total of 35 rooms split into four categories, Catzonia is manned by a crew of feline lovers who promise to play with the guests, groom them and generally make sure their stay is as comfortable as possible.

“We believe that cats need holidays too,” the Catzonia Hotel website states. “They always prefer to be treated as a boss. It means the environment must be felt like home, always being cuddled and hugged, and most importantly they don’t want to feel lonely.”

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A young tattoo artist in Yekaterinburg, Russia, has been getting a lot of criticism on social media after a video of him inking his pet Sphynx cat recently went viral. To make matters worse, the owner admitted that this was not the animal’s first tattoo, and probably not the last.

The owner of the hairless cat admits that he is basically forcing the animal to share his passion for tattoos. “Of course, I feel sorry for tattooing her, because it’s not something she wants,” he says in the video. But apparently the temptation to turn the Sphynx into a walking, meowing work of art is too great. Bes already sports a large tattoo on her back, featuring a woman, a deck of cards, a prison tower and a cigarette, and in this video her owner adds a star as well.

The Yekaterinburg artist said that tattoos are a bit harder to do because the cat’s skin is a bit different than a human’s, but added that he doesn’t believe the procedure is harmful for the cat. “This isn’t her first tattoo,” he says. “She just goes under and doesn’t feel a thing. She always wakes up fine from the anesthesia and behave normally after that.”

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A number of people looking to buy hairless Sphynx cats for cheap fell victim to a scammer who meticulously shaves regular kittens to make them look exactly like the exotic breed.

Genuine Sphynx cats usually sell for $1,000 or more, so when Shayla Bastarache, from Alberta, Canada, saw an ad for a Sphynx kitten for just $650, last month, she thought it was too good a deal to pass up. There was no photo attached to the ad, but the price was so enticing that she agreed to meet the seller in a gas station parking lot an hour north of Calgary, at night. She handed him the money and received two hairless kittens, one for herself and one for a friend. Bastarache says she only realized that she had been scammed two weeks later, when both felines grew a thick coat and were revealed to be regular house cats. The cat lover, who owns two genuine Sphynx cats – for one of which she had paid $1,500 – said she was amazed by how thoroughly the animals had been shaved. “I don’t know how she did it,” Bastarche told reporters.

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Created by crossing a wild Caracal and an Abyssinian cat, the Caracat is currently the world’s rarest and most expensive cat breed. It numbers only 30 specimens, and owning one costs 1.5 million Russian rubles, or $23,400.

Wild Caracals have long been revered for their exotic beauty and elegance. In ancient Egypt they were often embalmed and buried with pharaohs and depicted in intricate murals, while in China, emperors gave them away as special gifts. Even today, cat lovers are fascinated with this majestic feline and some companies sell them as domestic pets. But pure-breed Caracals can sometimes become aggressive, even if they have lived among humans for generations, which is why the Caracat was created, in 2007.

Caracats can grow up to 50 centimeters (19.7 inches) in height and weigh up to 15 kilograms (33 lbs). First generation Caracats have the distinctive black-tufted ears and long sharp claws of Caracals and screech instead of meowing. These traits fade away from the second generation, but some owners prefer to declaw them for safety, which most breeders don’t agree with, for ethical reasons.

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The Syrian city of Aleppo is probably the most dangerous place to be living in right now, but while many of its residents have left their homes to escape the war, one man has remained behind to care for the hundreds of abandoned and stray cats.

Known as “the cat man of Aleppo”, Mohammad Alaa Jaleel has been taking care to stray felines ever since people planning to leave the city started leaving their pets in his care, knowing he loved cats. As the fighting and bombing intensified, more and more frightened animals started approaching him for food and protection, and he was always more than happy to provide them with both.  Mohammed says he started taking care of about 20 to 30 cats, but the number of feline refugees at his walled sanctuary has now swollen to over one hundred.

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Cat lovers of the world, rejoice! You finally have the chance to understand what your pet is saying thanks to a smart collar that can interpret feline meows and translate it into human speech. Aptly named ‘Catterbox’, the collar supposedly has a digital sensor that detects meows, and uses a special program to decipher the meaning behind them.

Developed by London ad agency adam&eveDDB, for Temptations cat treats, the invention comes preloaded with a dictionary of cat purrs, meows, and several other sounds to make the interpretation as accurate as possible. “We’re fascinated by cats, so we set out on a mission to get to know them better,” said Pete Simmons, global brand director of Temptations.

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