When cats aren't so LOL

And now, some health news:

Turns out, cat owners have measurably fewer heart attacks than non-cat owners. That's the gist of a new report presented at the American Stroke Association's conference last month. It's a serious study about a serious issue that Jeannine Stein wrote up in a seriously good story.

And yet you can't help thinking that cat owners thrive because felines are so damned funny. (Can you say damned in the LAT if you're not quoting "MacBeth"?)  Is it all the feeding and grooming and stroking that makes cat owners healthier, or could it be the joking and the mocking?

Case in point, one of the Web's goofiest  (and most popular) sites, Lolcats. Web address is "Icanhascheezburger," which gives you a sense of what's there. So does one of the many photos that cat lovers create and post, like the one just below.

This being planet Earth, however, where every action has an equal and opposite reaction (thanks, Sir Isaac!) there's also a study that says pet owners get more urinary tract infections than non-pet owners.

I suppose it's wrong to call the Minneapolis-based researchers a bunch of spoil sports -- they're just reporting what they saw. Which is that E. coli from pets (close to twice as many dogs as cats) can get transferred from animal to human, which can give the human a UTI. Not something to LOL about.

-- Veronique de Turenne