I’m not a thief. A convicted one, anyway.

I do have a habit of pilfering food from low lying tables, unmonitored plates and of course the kitty litter box. Does that make me a criminal? Hardly. It just makes me a dog.

If I were to upgrade to the big leagues in crime, I’d go after those huge meat lockers Rocky (the boxer with gloves not the boxer with drool) loved to train in.  A left and a right paw to the frozen carcass of a former milk maker precedes its journey back to my feeding lair. Ahhh…now that’s a movie I’d really like to see.

But we all start somewhere. Take for instance a couple of burglars in middle America. The Des Moines Register has their quick story.

Burglars broke into the Subway Sandwiches & Salad Shop at 2251 E. University Ave. in Des Moines on Saturday night or Sunday morning and took “a substantial amount of cold cut meats,” according to police.

Burglars also took bread and cookies and made some sandwiches for themselves before they left the building.

No money was taken. Investigators said burglars broke in through the drive-up window and removed a security cage.

Officers have no suspects. The value of the missing food items was not reported.

I know it isn’t an animal story, but hey, I write about stuff that’s funny to me. Now, back to my movie.  Maybe Sly will take Apollo Creed this time!

I know what you’re thinking. She’s a cat, of course annoying is the first thing that comes to mind.

But you see, I’ve spent years with her, providing advice on how to fit in and to be more like, you know, a dog. I’ve told her the benefits of being a loving, respectful and quiet member of the family all to no avail.

I suspect the problem is she’s not doing what I say, but rather what I do. I guess that’s partly why she’s the only cat I really respect, outside of Sylvester, and the reason we get along so well. The fact that half of my diet is now coming directly from her ass has nothing to do with my admiration for her, but I’ll admit, it doesn’t hurt her case.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a reason for her, and all cats to make annoying sounds. It’s the old squeaky wheel gets the grease story. LiveScience.com has the details of a study showing cats have a method to their madness.

If you’ve ever wondered who’s in control, you or your cat, a new study points to the obvious. It’s your cat.

Household cats exercise this control with a certain type of urgent-sounding, high-pitched meow, according to the findings.

This meow is actually a purr mixed with a high-pitched cry. While people usually think of cat purring as a sign of happiness, some cats make this purr-cry sound when they want to be fed. The study showed that humans find these mixed calls annoying and difficult to ignore.

Previous research has shown similarities between cat cries and human infant cries.

McComb suggests that the purr-cry may subtly take advantage of humans’ sensitivity to cries they associate with nurturing offspring. Also, including the cry within the purr could make the sound “less harmonic and thus more difficult to habituate to,” she said.

McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats’ normal purring, “but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans.”

As I was posting this entry a recurring thought kept going round and round in my head, “If a cat purr-cry’s in the forest, can anybody hear it?”

I used to love exercise. I couldn’t get enough of it so I was forced to escape my captors, errr parents, to get my fill. These days my needs are fulfilled by sauntering over to my food bowl, chief head scratcher or the family car. Even if I make it to the SUV, I wait for my father to lift me up and put me in. I figure there’s no reason to jump since I’m lazy.

Also lazy are a bunch of filthy little animals, sometimes known as children, inhabiting this world. Particularly in the UK. BBC News has the latest story on their creative ways to seek a sedentary lifestyle.

Children taking part in a study to measure how much exercise they do fooled researchers by attaching their pedometers to their pet dogs.

About 200 children in east London were given pedometers to automatically count how many steps they walked and ran.

Mile End Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine was surprised by the activity levels recorded in some obese children.

Professor Nicola Maffulli said: “Then we realised they were attaching the pedometers to their dogs’ collars.”

‘Extremely active’

The pilot study in Whitechapel required 11 and 12-year-olds to clip a pedometer to their waists, with researchers at the centre collecting the readings by satellite.

“But after a week we found there were some kids who were extremely active but still obese,” said Professor Maffulli.

It was “not unheard of” for participants in previous studies to manipulate the readings of pedometers, he added.

Researchers plan to extend the study to include more children in the borough.

That’s great news for dogs looking for exercise. Not so much for those of us in our golden years.

Housebreaking is easier to accomplish when accidents are prevented in the first place! Using a dog crate combined with a regular feeding and exercise schedule will make housebreaking go smoothly.

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