Cat Scan

Two things you never want to say to a cat parent:

a) Wouldn't you really rather have a dog?

b) Do you have any pictures of your cat handy that you can show me?

This whole smart phone thing (I think it's here to stay) makes it all the easier, of course. When Tabby or Felix is doing something unbearably cute (which happens every 15 minutes) you don't need to go running to the drawer where you keep the Kodak camera. Your phone will do just fine, so snap to it!

And now, there's another reason to! We ailurophiles will be helping our beloved companions by using a app called Tably, which was developed by an animal health technology company, Sylvester.ai,  of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  The Tably app uses the phone's camera to tell whether a feline is feeling pain.

What it does, it checks out Katy Purry's ear and head position, eye-narrowing, muzzle tension, and how whiskers change. The app will detect any distress. The journal Scientific Reports reported in 2019 that there is a thing called the FGS - the Feline Grimace Scale - which is "a valid and reliable tool for acute pain assessment in cats."

So is "whether or not the cat in question is currently gnawing on your thumb."

Miche Priest is Sylvester.ai's leader on this venture, and she says, "It helps human cat owners know if their cat is in pain or not," said. "We were able to train a machine using machine learning and a series of images."

Meantime,  Alice Potter from British animal charity the RSPCA, says we should be checking out Skimbleshanks's entire body, including the tail, for clues as to their well-being.

"Cats that are worried or scared will hold that tail really tight and tense to them. And then aside from that, there's also just thinking about their behavior in terms of are they eating, drinking, toileting, sleeping like they usually do?"

And another sure sign: if Sushi Sioux is using her tail rhythmically to beat out a tom-tom drum pattern on your chest, she is not happy.