You Want To Know What??? Answering Our Readers' Strangest Questions

Hi, I'm Dr. Karyn! Read my introduction to learn more about me and meet my five hilarious cats: Clutch, Cyril, Alex, Zelda, and Zazzles.

When we write articles for the Catster website, we take a huge amount of inspiration from what our readers and people generally searching the internet want to know about cats. There are some obvious topics, like How Much Water Does a Cat Need? Why Is My Cat Lethargic? or How Can I Stop My Cat Peeing On the Bed? Then there are some slightly more unusual topics that have caused me to raise an eyebrow on more than one occasion.

If you’ve spent a fair amount of time on the internet, you know that people are almost endlessly curious, which makes our job of finding topics to write about just that much easier. Search for the oddest question you can come up with, and chances are good that you’ll find other people out there wondering about the same thing. Our goal is to help you, our readers, find answers to those burning questions – even when they’re a bit strange!

The same applies to our friends at Dogster.com, and I have been amused to have seen, and sometimes contributed to, articles such as Do Dogs Orgasm? and Dog Penis Behavior - Everything You Wanted to Know, the latter featuring images of my own dog, Kodah!

Not to be outdone, the inquisitive minds of ailurophiles have led us to some absolute doozies. They say that curiosity killed the cat, and maybe that’s true, but it has also proven to be quite entertaining!

The Curious Case of ….

Some of my favorite unusual articles to date include:

• Do Cats Revenge Poop?

• Where Do Cats Pee From?

• Can Cats and Dogs Mate?

• Why Does My Cat Fart When I Pick Him Up?

The very abbreviated answers being

• not really

• their urethra - the penis is tucked away most of the time, and the female’s urethra shares an opening with the vagina.

• no

and

• diet, handling, illness, or fright

I’m afraid that if you want to know more details, you’ll need to check out the articles.

I’m Not Laughing!

You might be thinking that I’m making fun of those who have asked these questions, or having a laugh at their expense, but that’s not the case. Well…maybe there has been some chuckling! But the main reason I find these topics so bemusing is that they are things I would never have thought about until they came across my desk. But enough people want to know the answers that they are ‘commonly searched questions.’ What does this tell me?

I think we often make assumptions about how much detail most people know about their pet’s bodies, which shouldn’t be all that surprising given how little some people know about their own anatomy! What these and so many other questions tell me is that people want to know as much as they can about their cat, and thanks to the power of the internet, those answers can be found in a matter of seconds.

Wondering ‘where do cats pee from’ might sound silly at first, but when you compare their urogenital anatomy to ours, or even that of a dog, it’s not such an unreasonable question to ask. How many of you have actually seen a feline penis?

With so many different designer breeds and dogs that look more feline than canine, is it really so absurd to wonder if the two could interbreed?

Every Day’s a School Day

If there is one thing that a career in veterinary medicine has taught me, it’s that there is always more to learn, and that is never more obvious than when someone asks you a question you would never have thought to ask yourself. You could spend your life reading, watching, and researching, but you can’t learn about something you didn’t know existed, and that’s why I love answering your questions.

Sure, the majority of subjects I cover when writing and fact-checking information are things my veterinary education and experience have taught me, but every now and then, I will need to do my own research about a topic I didn’t know I didn’t know until someone asked the question.

So keep asking those questions. Be curious. Keep learning.

Better to ask the question and be informed than assume the answer and be wrong. And I promise not to laugh at the weird, the outlandish, or the slightly freaky topics that come my way.

Unless it’s about doggy orgasms. 😆