11 Curiosities about the feline universe and our love for cats

“The cat tries to stay on your lap even when you get up. Until the last minute he hopes that your conscience will wake up and you will feel again.” The phrase sums up feline nature well.

O awesome.club collected surprising facts about cats that will not only surprise you, but will also show you that, as the character Alf, from the series O ETeimoso (who, at the same time, loved and hated cats) says, life without expensive cats would be boring and depressing.

Cats don’t have their own language. Possibly, in some cases, it seems that your “meow” means something, but in reality, it is just a way to attract attention. Initially, meowing was a way for kittens to call their mothers and adults did not meow.

But modern domestic cats have ‘concluded’ that sounds can help get their owner’s attention. Note, however, that domestic cats do not meow to communicate with each other.

Researcher Nickolay Lamm proved in a study that cats see better than us in the dark. But that competitive edge comes at a price: they don’t do well with color. Another disadvantage of felines is the difficulty of shifting focus from near to far and vice versa. Wild cats, which need hunting, see better from afar, while domestic cats see better up close. For illustrative purposes, we’ll look at the same image with both the human’s (top) and the cat’s (bottom) eyes.

Cats don’t have a more active schedule. Instead, they sleep and wake up all the time, just according to their personality type. Therefore, if your cat believes that 3:00 am is a good time for incredible adventures, it is not because it is a nocturnal animal, but simply because it felt like ‘going for a night’ that day.

meet a Felis silvestris lybica or desert cat. For 130,000 years, this wild race lived in the deserts of what is now Libya. Approximately 10,000 years ago, in the Middle East, 5 representatives of the species were domesticated and gave rise to pet cats.

The life expectancy of cats is 14 years on average for house-raised cats. The street ones do not usually live more than 2 years. But there are some incredibly long-lived cats like Creme Puff, who lived to be 38 and went into the record books. To make an analogy between human and cat life, check out the table below:

It’s not that cats necessarily want to come in; they need to control the territory. If the door is closed, then behind it is something unknown that potentially hides a multitude of dangers. But with the door open you can see everything and still sit in silence in the first room. “Thank you human for opening the door for me, now go back to your seat.”

The Persians adopted a feline-strategy quite unusual in their wars against the Egyptians. They used cats as living shields. As the Egyptians considered the kittens sacred, they didn’t have the courage to attack them.

During other wars, cats were used as air quality detectors; for example, in the trench, they could warn in advance of an approaching gas attack.

But the simplest and no less important function was, in some conflicts, psychological help to soldiers. The cats evoked home, comfort and the hope of returning to peaceful times.

It’s a very common image: cats smell food and decide if it’s worth eating or not. It seems that the animal is very demanding, but this is not so. What happens is that the cat cannot see what is located right in front of its nose (see the point above the vision), so it needs to assess what food is in front of it and what temperature it is — the ideal is 38ºC to 39ºC, close to that of the feline body

Have you noticed that people during sleep move their eyes? Sometimes they talk or even make gestures. If we measure the activity of the brain during sleep, it is possible to see that it works intensely. Such measurements were also made with cats: the brain works with almost the same intensity. In addition, kittens move their ears and whiskers during sleep and can also make sounds. All this goes to show that our feline friends can also have dreams. Let’s even try to guess what they are:

You must have seen a cat making the kneading movement with its paws, whether on the carpet, the owner or any surface.

Turns out it’s a reflective movement that comes from childhood; it’s how kittens massage their mother’s abdomen to regulate milk flow. When they mature, they behave like this in pleasant moments when they feel protected and comfortable.

So if your cat is massaging you with its paws, it means it loves you! If he wrinkles your furry blanket, it means you like him. The logic is clear.

The famous zoologist John Bradshaw’s book on the peculiarities of the worldview of cats, cat sense answered a question that every cat maniac has in mind: what do cats think of us? What happens is that cats treat humans as if they were something between a surrogate mother and a big cat. In addition, for them, we are a very dumb feline, since our behavior seems strange and quite illogical: we do not hunt, we obey what they want and play silly games. We are, therefore, great mothers who take care of them, but who have cognitive disabilities.

We would like to end this post with a short story by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, which illustrates the point of view of cats: