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Paws & Claws

Jill Bowen has practiced veterinary medicine in England and Texas. She lives in Blacksburg now, and answers local pet owners' questions every week in The Roanoke Times and roanoke.com.

Recent columns

• Cats may become aggressive to get what they want
• Research pet rabbits' needs before adopting for Easter
• Obesity is dangerous to pets' overall health
• Spay kittens before considering hyperesthesia syndrome

Q Now is your chance to settle an ongoing discussion between my dog-owning husband and his cat-owning spouse. Who are smarter: dogs or cats? Obviously, we both think that our pet is the best.

A The world is divided into dog people and cat people. Both are quite determined that their chosen pet is the best. Recently, some canine-behavior researchers devised some tests to try to evaluate the brain power of dogs. Not to be outdone, some feline research workers did the same thing for cats.

Dogs were domesticated long before cats, and the bond between dogs and their owners is more like that of a parent and child than the bond between cats and their owners. Cats always show a certain independent streak.

Dogs and cats probably have the same degree of basic intelligence. But we often think dogs are smarter because most are so eager to please their owners and want to be with them all the time, while cats comply only if it suits them. Both cats and dogs can be trained to understand basic commands, both verbal and by gesture. It just takes more patience to train cats, and they have to have a reason to obey a command, while dogs are more likely to show blind obedience.

Cats see better in low-light situations than either people or dogs, while dogs are better than people. Cats' hearing is also more acute than that of dogs. Cats' sense of smell is only a little less acute than that of dogs, so dogs are increasingly used as "sniffer" dogs in places such as airports for items such as explosives, drugs and fruit. Few, if any, cats can be persuaded to use this ability for our benefit.

While cats are a source of great joy to their owners, other than helping to rid an area of rodents, they do not provide as great a benefit to mankind as a whole. Dogs can be used for herding, hunting, as service dogs, sniffer dogs, as well as being great companions to their owners. Researchers in several institutes came to the conclusion that dogs outsmarted cats by a nose, but only because cats are less compliant.

In the words of Rudyard Kipling: "The cat that walked by himself."

Q I have a wound on my hand that my doctor says has a MRSA infection. I have a totally indoor, middle-age cat. Could he have given me this infection?

A It is possible that your cat could be the source of the infection, but not very likely. It is much more likely that you were exposed to the bacteria somewhere in the community.

In people, the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus is everywhere and lives happily on people, mostly without causing any problems. Occasionally the bacteria can cause problems ranging from simple skin infections such as impetigo to a life-threatening disease seen most often in people with a depressed immune response.

Antibiotics in the penicillin family have been most effective against this bacteria. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a special strain of the bacteria that has developed a resistance to penicillin and related antibiotics. MRSA is often resistant to other antibiotics, making treatment difficult.

MRSA is a significant risk in hospitals and nursing homes where the bacteria is spread on health-care workers' hands. Thorough hand washing, using soap and paper towels, is the best preventative. Avoid multiuse hand towels.

It is possible for dogs and cats to act as passive carriers of MRSA, just as people do. They can also develop clinical cases of MRSA, especially if they are debilitated or immunosuppressed. If your cat appears well and has not been in contact with other cats recently, he is an unlikely source of your infection. You are much more likely to have picked it up from another person.