[CAT] Shakespeare, unconvinced

[CAT] "A man tried to smuggle heroin into Britain using cats"

Metro.co.uk's Amy Willis reports.

A man who tried to use pet cats to smuggle £1.2 million worth of heroin into the UK has been jailed for seven-and-a-half years.

Scott Parker, 43, used a pet transportation business as a cover for smuggling the high-purity drug, stashing it inside the crates used to carry the animals.

The discovery was made when staff at Heathrow Animal Reception Centre noticed that the pens were unusually heavy.

When they were examined, officers found compartments concealing packages – which contained a total of nine kilos of the Class A drug – in their bases.

Parker had no idea his haul had been discovered and was arrested on November 21 last year as he waited to collect the cats following the flight from Johannesburg, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.

Happily, the cats are fine.

[CAT] "Study shows the paw-sitive effects of watching cat videos"

At The Conversation, Jessica Gall Myrick considers the case for the cat video.

According to ReelSEO.com, a website about video marketing, there are more than two million cat videos on YouTube. People have watched these videos more than 25 billion times, which equates to an average of 12,000 views per cat video.

The statistics speak for themselves, but they don’t tell the whole story.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a dog lover with a cat allergy, but the staggering amount of cat media available to internet users came as a surprise to me. With numbers like that, I couldn’t help but wonder: who, exactly, is so drawn to this type of content? And what effects do cat-related media have on viewers?

These were the overarching question that spurred my initial quest to gather empirical data on the internet cat phenomenon. I scoured academic databases to see what the literature could tell me, but found no existing data about why people watched so many cat videos online, or what effects these videos might have on us.

So I decided to find out myself.