18 October 2017 - FACTS ABOUT DOMESTIC CATS

FACTS ABOUT 

DOMESTIC CATS

G'day folks,

Many of you will enjoy this post. The domestic cat is a small, typically furry, carnivorous mammal. They are often called house cats when kept as indoor pets or simply cats when there is no need to distinguish them from other felids and felines.

Like their wild relatives, domestic cats are natural hunters able to stalk prey and pounce with sharp claws and teeth.

Quick Facts

• Type: Mammal
• Diet: Carnivore
• Life span: Up to 20 years
• Size: 71 cm
• Weight: 2.3 to 9 kg
• Habitat: Urban and suburban areas
• Range: Worldwide
• Scientific name: Felis catus

   Cats have been shown to have their own individual personalities.

  Cats enjoy acute hearing and can detect an extremely broad range of frequencies. They can detect frequencies from 55 Hz up to 79 kHz, a range of 10.5 octaves, which includes higher pitched sounds than humans and even dogs can hear.

  They are particularly effective hunters at night, when their light-reflecting eyes allow them to see much better than their prey.

  Cats communicate by marking trees, fence posts, or furniture with their claws or their urine. These scent posts inform others of a cat’s home range.

  Most cats are nimble and agile, and their long tails aid their outstanding balance. The flexible tail has as many as 28 vertebrae.

  Cats have a mobile backbone that allows them to rotate the front half of the spine through an angle of 180 degrees in relation to their back half.

• The front paws are capable of a wide range of tasks from opening doors to pouncing on prey.
• The cat’s tongue has backwards-facing spines about 500 micrometres long, which are called papillae. These are quite rigid, as they contain keratin. These spines allow cats to groom themselves by licking their fur, with the rows of papillae acting like a hairbrush. Some cats, particularly longhaired cats, occasionally regurgitate hairballs of fur that have collected in their stomachs from grooming. These clumps of fur are usually sausage-shaped and about two to three centimeters long.

• Cats conserve energy by sleeping more than most animals, especially as they grow older. The daily duration of sleep varies, usually 12–16 hours, with 13–14 being the average. Some cats can sleep as much as 20 hours in a 24-hour period.
• During sleep cats experience short periods of rapid eye movement sleep accompanied by muscle twitches, which suggests that they are dreaming.
• Every time a cat awakes, it automatically stretches to flex every muscle and sinew to its fullest extent and restore circulation.

   Domestic cats use many vocalizations for communication, including purring, trilling, hissing, growling, snarling and several different forms of meowing. 

  Their types of body language, including position of ears and tail, relaxation of whole body, and kneading of paws, are all indicators of mood. The tail and ears are particularly important social signals in cats, with a raised tail acting as a friendly greeting. Tail raising also indicates the cat’s position in the group’s social heirarchy,  with dominant individuals raising their tails less often than subordinate animals. Nose-touching is also a common greeting and may be followed by social grooming,  which is solicited by one of the cats raising and tilting its head. 

  Cats are generally affectionate animals and love being spoiled and petted, when they will roll and purr appreciatively. Thoroughly contented cats will happily sleep alongside their owners, where they enjoy the feeling of warmth and security. 

  It has been scientifically proven that owning cats is good for our health and can decrease the occurrence of high blood pressure and related illnesses.

Clancy's comment: They say you never own a cat. It owns you. And, if you want to find a cat in a house, just leave an open box out. Just sayin' ...

I'm ....

4 July 2014 - CATS

CATS

G'day folks,

Do you like cats? Do you own one? Well, here is some background on them.

The history of our modern day cat (Felis silvestris catus) begins with her descent from one of five separate wild cats: the Sardinian wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), the European wildcat (F. s. silvestris), the Central Asian wildcat (F.s. ornata), the subsaharan African wildcat (F.s. cafra and the Chinese desert cat (F.s. bieti). Each of these species is a distinctive subspecies of F. silvestris. Genetic analysis suggests that all domestic cats derive from at least five founder cats from the Fertile Crescent region, from whence they (or rather their descendants) were transported around the world.

How do you make a domestic cat?

There are two difficulties inherent in determining when and how the cat was domesticated: one is that, unlike many other species, domesticated cats can and do interbreed with their feral cousins; the other is that the primary indicator of cat domestication is their sociability, and we all know how far that goes. Domestic cats are identified archaeologically by their relatively small size (compared to feral cats), by their presence outside of their normal range, and if they are given burials or have collars or the like.

According to cat researcher Sarah Hartwell, one theory of domestication promulgated by archaeologist J.A. Baldwin is that wild cats were first attracted to human settlements by the small rodents who themselves came to feed on agricultural stores. Humans may have simply tolerated or actively encouraged the cats to hang around and essentially guard those stores.

Cat History and Archaeology

 The oldest archaeological evidence for domesticated cats was found on the Greek island of Cyprus, where several animal species including cats were introduced by 7500 BC. Further, at the Neolithic site of Shillourokambos, a purposeful cat burial was found next to a human burial, dated between 9500-9200 years before the present. The archaeological deposits of Shillourokambos also included the sculpted head of what looks like a combined human-cat being.

The next is 6th millennium BC Haçilar, Turkey, where female figurines carrying cats or catlike figures in their arms have been discovered. There is some debate about the identification of these creatures as cats. Haçilar is well outside the normal distribution of F. s. lybica.

Cats in Egypt

 Up until very recently, most sources believed that domesticated cats became widespread after the Egyptian civilization took its part in the process. One recent paper argues that a cat skeleton discovered in a predynastic tomb (ca. 3700 BC) at Hierakonpolis may be evidence for domestication. The cat, apparently a young male, had a broken left humerus and right femur, both of which had healed prior to the cat's death and burial. Reanalysis of this cat has identified the species as Felis chaus, not F. silvestris, however. 

Cat with a pizza collar.

The first illustration of a cat with a collar appears on an Egyptian tomb in Saqqara, dated to the 5th dynasty (Old Kingdom, ca 2500-2350 BC). By the 12th dynasty (Middle Kingdom, ca 1976-1793 BC), cats are definitely domesticated, and the animals appear frequently in Egyptian art paintings and mummies.

The feline goddesses Mafdet, Mehit and Bastet all date to the Early Dynastic period (although Bastet is not associated with domesticated cats until later). Cats are the most frequently mummified animal in Egypt.

 Molecular Evidence for Cat Domestication

 

A recent study suggests that cats were domesticated at the same time as that of wheat and barley in the Fertile Crescent region, that is about 10,000 years ago. Time will tell--the only archaeological data supporting that is at Shillourokambos in Cyprus. This exciting news is definitely not as far-fetched as it might be, given the role of the cat as the hunter of grain-eating rodents. It's one of those arguments about who may have been more domesticated in this relationship--the cat or the human?

Clancy's comment: I still say that cats would have to be the laziest animals I've ever seen. Also, they say that you don't own a cat, it owns you.  And, if you ever want to find  a cat in your home, leave an empty box and you will soon find the cat in the box. Don't believe me? Look below ...

I'm ...

Think about this!