Real meals in real homes, from the Toronto Star (that’s in Canada).

Featuring a real doctor; a 54-year-old anesthesiologist who works in the sterile confines of a hospital where he’s also the operating room medical director.

Dr. Kevin Shine planned to show me how an “obligate carnivore” and his diabetic vegetarian wife get along on the food front.

He may or may not have realized that the most unusual thing about mealtime in his Oakville home is how involved the family’s cats Angel, Katanya, Sasha and Sam are.

The feline foursome eats on the spacious granite island in the kitchen. Their food bowls and automatic water dispenser are kept there so Rusty and Tino, two Cavalier King Charles spaniels, don’t get “a constant feast” (pic from Toronto Star).

The cats freely roam the countertop, even as Kevin’s wife Cheryl chops veggies for her spaghetti sauce on one end and lays out buns and salad fixings on the other.

A curious Katanya gives one crusty Italian roll a thoughtful lick.

“I’ll eat that one,” says Kevin with a shrug, explaining how this adored cat needed unusual jaw surgery to survive. “Katanya thinks she’s a person. She sits with us. She eats with us.”

The Shines don’t usually eat in the dining room, but they decide to do that tonight. They warn that the cats may sit on the table and sample the meal.

Their oldest daughter Elyse, 26, is at veterinary school in Edinburgh. The younger two live at home. Rebecca, 23, is a research coordinator at York University and hopes to do graduate studies in psychology. Connie, 20, is studying culinary nutrition at George Brown College.

An anesthesiologist, a vet student, a chef student and a possible shrink, and they’ve never heard of zoonoses.

“We are most entertaining and live in a very modest house full of cats and dogs as well so be warned!”

The modest home features a 16-foot dining table and seats 22 people.

It was a come-and-meet-a- real-live Canadian event when I first met Amy in Kansas in 2005, and when I first told her that sleeping with her dog was a microbiological risk.

I also told her French food was overrated and she shouldn’t eat rare hamburgers.

She asked me out on a date.

In a study to be published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, veterinary scientists say sleeping with your pets increases the chances of contracting everything from parasites to the plague.

Andrew Schneider of AOL News reports most U.S. households have pets, and more than half of those cats and dogs are allowed to sleep in their owner's beds.

Personal note: our dogs do not sleep in the bed, but the cats do, primarily in the winter when it’s too cold to go outside; in the summer we are of no use and the cats can disappear for days.

Drs. Bruno Chomel, a professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, and Ben Sun, chief veterinarian for California's Department of Health, say they wanted to raise the attention of people, as sleeping with a pet is becoming quite common, and there are risks associated with it, even if it is not very frequent.

The authors found that "the risk for transmission of zoonotic agents by close contact between pets and their owners through bed sharing, kissing or licking is real and has even been documented for life-threatening infections such as plague, internal parasites" and other serious diseases.

This study and several others show that disease from cats is far more prevalent, and often more serious.

The number of cats snuggling up with their owner is far greater, which may explain the larger number of people acquiring feline-spawned diseases, Chomel explained.

Sharing our resting hours with our pets may be a source of psychological comfort, but because pets can bring a wide range of zoonotic pathogens into our environment, sharing is also associated with risks, the authors of the current study reported.

• A 9-year-old boy from Arizona got the plague because he slept with his flea-infested cat.
• A 48-year-old man and his wife repeatedly contracted MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which their physicians eventually attributed to their dog. The animal "routinely slept in their bed and frequently licked their face," the California experts reported.
• A Japanese woman contacted meningitis after kissing her pet's face.
• A study published last August in the journal Pediatrics tracked an outbreak of salmonella in 79 people between 2006 and 2008 that was caused by contaminated meat in dry cat and dog food.

Half of the victims were children, who CDC investigators said "might also have played with the pet food and then put their hands -- or the food itself -- in their mouths."

Depends on the state, according to Brian Palmer of Slate Magazine.

When police in Western New York pulled over Gary Korkuc for blowing off a stop sign on Sunday, they found a live cat in his trunk, covered in cooking oil, peppers, and salt. Korkuc told authorities that his pet feline was "possessive, greedy, and wasteful" and that he intended to cook and eat it. Korkuc has been charged with animal cruelty. …

Few states have specific laws barring the use of pets for food. The ones that do typically ban the slaughter or sale of dog and cat meat. The state of New York expressly prohibits "any person to slaughter or butcher domesticated dog (canis familiaris) or domesticated cat (felis catus or domesticus) to create food, meat or meat products for human or animal consumption." It's not clear whether the eating itself is outlawed or only the butchery. If you managed to buy dog or cat flesh from someone else who broke the anti-slaughter law, you might be OK. The law also doesn't cover ferrets, gerbils, parakeets, or other less familiar pet species. (Although the general anti-cruelty law might protect exotics.)

California's anti-pet-eating law has a broader reach. It bars possession of the carcass, so having bought your cat steaks from someone else wouldn't be a useful alibi. The California law also protects "any animal traditionally or commonly kept as a pet or companion," rather than just Fido and Fluffy. The statute is somewhat untested, though, so no one really knows which animals are included.

Pigs are not, even though they are commonly kept as pets, because they are farm animals. Horses are specifically covered by a different section of the code. There's no precedent on iguanas, goldfish, or boa constrictors. …

Authorities won't have any trouble prosecuting Korkuc, the Western New Yorker who was marinating his cat in the trunk. Whether or not he really intended to eat his feline, keeping a companion animal in a motor vehicle without proper ventilation is illegal. Rubbing the cat with chili-infused oil, while not specifically addressed, is also a violation of the state's general cruelty law, which prohibits torture.
 

What better way to celebrate World Cat Day on Feb. 17 (tomorrow, who knew?) than to suggest recipes to prepare the other white meat for deliciousness.

ANSA.it is reporting that the co-host of a popular Italian daytime cooking show was suspended on Monday for extolling the delights of cat meat during an episode last week.

Beppe Bigazzi, a food expert on La Prova del Cuoco (The Cooks' Challenge), enraged animal rights experts around the country when he gave advice on preparing ''tender, white cat meat'' in a portion of the show usually reserved for advice about nutrition.

The Italian Animal Protection Agency said they were ''satisfied'' with the timeliness of Bigazzi's suspension in view of World Cat Day on February 17.

While cat meat is illegal in Italy, it is a popular winter dish throughout China and much of Southeast Asia.