Cat, Cat

It can be trained to obey simple commands. Individual cats have also been known to learn on their own to manipulate simple mechanisms, such as doorknob and toilet handles.

Cat World (2008). Cat World Records: Heaviest Cat. Retrieved on 2008-07-30 from http://www.cat-world.com.au/CatRecords.htm.

Cats also have free-floating clavicle bones, which allows them to pass their body through any space into which they can fit their heads.

Cats also turn their ears back when they are playing, or to listen to a sound coming from behind them. The angle of cats' ears is an important clue to their mood.

It is also possible to make a cooperative cat extend its claws by carefully pressing both the top and bottom of the paw. However, the curved claws may become entangled in carpet or thick fabric, which may cause injury if the cat is unable to free itself.

The fifth front claw (the dewclaw) is proximal to the other claws. More proximally, there is a protrusion which appears to be a sixth "finger". This special feature of the front paws, on the inside of the wrists, is the carpal pad, also found on the paws of big cats and dogs. It has no function in normal walking, but is thought to be an anti-skidding device used while jumping.

As a result, cats tend to become quiet and passive when gripped there. This behavior also extends into adulthood, when a male will grab the female by the scruff to immobilize her while he mounts, and to prevent her from running away as mating takes place.

Often (much like a small child) a cat will lie with its head and front paws over a person's shoulder, and its back legs and rump supported under the person's arm.

For comparison, humans have a normal temperature of approximately 36.8 C (98.6 F). A domestic cat's normal heart rate ranges from 140 to 220 beats per minute, and is largely dependent on how excited the cat is. For a cat at rest, the average heart rate usually is between 150 and 180 bpm, about twice that of a human (average 80 bpm).

One theory suggests this behavior helps cats regurgitate if their digestion is upset; another is that it introduces fiber or trace minerals into the diet. In this context, caution is recommended for cat owners because some houseplants are harmful to cats. The Cat Fanciers' Association has a full list of plants harmful to cats.

However, some of these products fail to provide all the nutrients that cats require.

Toxicity in cats ingesting relatively large amounts of onions or garlic has also been reported.

For example, the leaves of the Easter Lily can cause permanent and life-threatening kidney damage to cats, and Philodendron are also poisonous to cats.

Outside these neutral areas, territory holders usually aggressive chase away stranger cats, at first by staring, hissing, and growling, and if that does not work, by short but noisy and violent attacks. Despite cohabitation in colonies, cats do not have a social survival strategy, or a pack mentality. This mainly means that an individual cat takes care of all basic needs on its own (e.g., finding food, and defending itself), and thus cats are always lone hunters.

The tail is a particularly important social signal in cats, with a raised tail acting as a friendly greeting. Tail raising also indicates the cat's position in the group's social hierarchy, with dominant individuals raising their tails less often than subordinate animals.

In the domestic environment, older cats may show aggressiveness towards newly-arrived kittens, which may include biting and scratching; this type of behavior is known as Feline Asocial Aggression.

Cats will also throw themselves to the ground in a defensive posture to rake with their powerful hind legs.

It is probably related to hunting instincts, including the common practice of kittens hunting their mother's and each other's tails. If string is ingested, however, it can become caught in the cats stomach or intestines, causing illness, or in extreme cases, death. Due to possible complications caused by ingesting a string, string play is sometimes replaced with a laser pointer's dot, which some cats will chase. While caution is called for, there are no documented cases of feline eye damage from a laser pointer, and the combination of precision needed and low energy involved make it a remote risk. A common compromise is to use the laser pointer to draw the cat to a prepositioned toy so the cat gets a reward at the end of the chase. A regular flashlight with a well-focused light spot has been commonly used in such play for decades, preceding the availability of consumer laser pointers.

Another possibility is that presenting the kill might be a relic of a kitten's behavior of demonstrating for its mother's approval that it has developed the necessary skill for hunting. Indoor cats will often retain their hunting instinct and deliver small household items to their owners, such as watches, pens, pencils, and other objects they can carry in their mouths.

This hybridization poses a danger to the survival of the wildcat population, particularly in Scotland and Hungary.

Cats can be surgically sterilized (spayed or castrated) as early as 7 weeks to limit unwanted reproduction.

The cat's tongue has sharp backwards-facing hooks, or papillae, which contain keratin.

Many cats also enjoy grooming humans or other cats. Sometimes the act of grooming another cat is initiated as an assertion of superior position in the pecking order of a group (dominance grooming).

Hairballs can be prevented with certain cat foods and remedies that ease elimination of the hair, and regular grooming of the coat with a comb or stiff brush.

It always rights itself in the same way, provided it has the time to do so, during a fall. The height required for this to occur in most cats (safely) is around 90 cm (3 feet). Cats without a tail also have this ability, since a cat mostly moves its hind legs and relies on conservation of angular momentum to set up for landing, and the tail is in fact little used for this feat.

For instance, they enjoy heat and solar exposure, often sleeping in a sunny area during the heat of the day, as part of a general preference for warm temperatures. Where humans start to feel uncomfortable when their skin temperature passes about 44.5 C (112 F), in contrast cats do not start to show signs of discomfort until their skin reaches about 52 C (126 F). Cats' feces are usually dry, and cats prefer to bury them in sandy places. Urine is highly concentrated, which allows the cat to retain as much fluid as possible.

Although certain breeds such as the Norwegian Forest Cat and Maine Coon have developed heavier coats of fur than other cats, they have little resistance against moist cold (e.g., fog, rain, and snow) and struggle to maintain their 39 C (102 F) body temperature when wet. In direct relation to that fact, most cats dislike immersion in water. One major exception is the Turkish Van breed which has an unusual fondness for water.

Native species there, for example, the Kakapo and the Bettong, tend to be more ecologically vulnerable and behaviorally "naive" to predation by feral cats.

Some organizations in Australia are now making the effort to create fenced islands of habitat for endangered species that are free of feral cats and foxes.

It has been suggested that, ethologically, the human keeper of a cat functions as a sort of surrogate for the cat's mother, and that adult domestic cats live their lives in a kind of extended kittenhood, Cat Guide: Adolescence and Sexual Maturity Animal Planet a form of behavioral neoteny.

Individual cats have been known to learn to manipulate simple mechanisms, like sink faucets, by themselves or after prompting/encouraging. With effort and patience on the part of an owner, the average cat can usually be trained to at least obey simple commands such as "get off the furniture" or "come to dinner". In general though, the seeming intractability of the ordinary house cat to training has long inspired the simile 'like herding cats', as a general expression to describe any situation with a stubborn or uncooperative learner. Some cats can also be trained to walk outside on a leash, although this is usually the most successful with cats whose owners start training them at an early age.

Scratching posts made of sisal rope or corrugated cardboard are also commonly found. Some indoor cats, however, especially those that were taken as kittens from feral colonies, may not understand the concept of a scratching post, and as a result will ignore it.

Cats are also repelled by citrus scents, and a citrus-scented product may also help stop unwanted furniture destruction. Pet supply stores also sell bitter apple spray, which cats do not like and will generally avoid.

Declawing is most commonly only performed on the front feet. A related procedure is tendonectomy, which involves cutting a tendon needed for cats to extend their claws.

Additionally, declawing may be performed on vicious cats, cats that frequently fight with other pets, or cats that are too efficient at predation of animals.

This arrangement serves the same purpose as a toilet for humans. It should be cleaned daily and changed often, depending on the number of cats in a household and the type of litter; if it is not kept clean, a cat may be fastidious enough to find other locations in the house for urination or defecation. This may also happen for other reasons; for instance, if a cat becomes constipated and defecation is uncomfortable, it may associate the discomfort with the litter box and avoid it in favor of another location. A litterbox is recommended for indoor-outdoor cats as well.

When training is complete, the cat uses the toilet by squatting on the toilet seat over the bowl.

The owners and breeders of show cats compete to see whose animal bears the closest resemblance to the "ideal" definition and standard of the breed (see selective breeding). Because of common crossbreeding in populated areas, many cats are simply identified as belonging to the homogeneous breeds of domestic longhair and domestic shorthair, depending on their type of fur. In the United Kingdom and Australia, non-purebred cats are referred in slang as moggies (derived from "Maggie", short for Margaret, reputed to have been a common name for cows and calves in 18th century England and latter applied to housecats during the Victorian era).

There are several other terms for amounts of white between these two extremes, such as Harlequin or jellicle cat . Bicolor cats can have as their primary (non-white) color black, red, any dilution thereof, and tortoiseshell (see below for definition).

The "mackerel" or "striped" tabby is a series of vertical stripes down the cat's side (resembling the fish). This pattern broken into spots is referred to as a "spotted" tabby. Finally, the tabby markings may look like a series of ticks on the fur, thus the "ticked" tabby, which is almost exclusively associated with the Abyssinian breed of cats. The worldwide evolution of the cat means that certain types of tabby are associated with certain countries; for instance, blotched tabbies are quite rare outside NW Europe, where they are the most common type.

Additionally, the cat may have white spots in its fur, which make it a "tortoiseshell and white" cat or, if there is a significant amount of white in the fur and the red and black colors form a patchwork rather than a mottled aspect, the cat will be called a "calico." All calicos are tortoiseshell (as they carry both black and red), but not all tortoiseshells are calicos (which requires a significant amount of white in the fur and patching rather than mottling of the colors). The calico is also sometimes called a "tricolor cat." The Japanese refer to this pattern as mi-ke (meaning "triple fur"), while the Dutch call these cats lapjeskat (meaning "patches cat"). A true tricolor must consist of three colors: a reddish color, dark or light; white; and one other color, typically a brown, black, or blue.

They are often killed by dogs, coyotes, and automobiles. However, there are thousands of volunteers and organizations that trap these unadoptable feral felines, neutering them, immunize the cats against rabies and feline leukemia, and treat them with long-lasting flea products. Before release back into their feral colonies, the attending veterinarian often nips the tip off one ear to mark the feral as neutered and inoculated, since these cats will more than likely find themselves trapped again. Volunteers continue to feed and give care to these cats throughout their lives, and not only is their lifespan greatly increased, but behavior and nuisance problems, due to competition for food, are also greatly reduced.

Part of this stems from humane concern for the cats, and part stems from concerns about cat predation on endangered species. The amount of ecological damage done by indoor/outdoor cats depends on local conditions. As suggested above, the most severe effect occurs to island ecologies. Environmental concerns may be minimal in most of the UK where cats are an established species and few to none of the local prey species are endangered. Pet owners can contact veterinarians, ecological organizations, and universities for opinions about whether local conditions are suitable for outdoor cats. Additional concerns include potential dangers from larger predators and infectious diseases. Coyotes kill large numbers of housecats in the Southwestern United States, even in urban zones. FELV (feline leukemia), FIV (feline immunodeficiency virus), or rabies may be present in the area. If faced with conflicting evidence, the safe choice is to keep a cat indoors.

A study in 1992 found that in the USA, 12,893 (29.4%) of pets, 26.9% of dogs and 32.6% of cats were sterilized.

The male progenitor of a cat, especially a pedigreed cat, is its "sire", and its female progenitor is its "dam". An immature cat is called a "kitten" (which is also an alternative name for young rats, rabbits, hedgehogs, beavers, squirrels and skunks). In medieval Britain, the word kitten was interchangeable with the word catling . A cat whose ancestry is formally registered is called a pedigreed cat, purebred cat, or a show cat (although not all show cats are pedigreed or purebred). In strict terms, a purebred cat is one whose ancestry contains only individuals of the same breed. A pedigreed cat is one whose ancestry is recorded, but may have ancestors of different breeds (almost exclusively new breeds; cat registries are very strict about which breeds can be mated together). Cats of unrecorded mixed ancestry are referred to as domestic longhairs and domestic shorthairs or commonly as random-bred, moggies, mongrels, mutt-cats or alley cats. The ratio of pedigree/purebred cats to random-bred cats varies from country to country. However, generally speaking, purebreds are less than ten percent of the total Feline population.

The first domesticated cats may have saved early Egyptians from many rodent infestations and likewise, Bast developed from the adoration for her feline companions. She was the daughter of the sun god Ra and played significant role in Ancient Egyptian religion. It has been speculated that cats resident in Kenya's Islands in the Lamu Archipelago may be the last living direct descendants of the cats of ancient Egypt.

In Japan, the Maneki Neko is a cat that is a symbol of "good fortune". Although there are no sacred species in Islam, it is said by some writers that Muhammad had a favorite cat, Muezza.

Source: Wikipedia > Cat