One of the world’s fattest cats was “Tiger” a part-Persian who weighed over 42 pounds (19 kg), as much as a small child.
The picture above is not Tiger, but he may have looked something like that.
Fat Cat
Category: Pets
Siamese Cats
See also: Catversity, the free online cat university and entertainment sub-site.
There were no Siamese cats in the United States until 1878.
Siamese cats are subclassed by the color of their points. They are seal point, chocolate point, lilac point, and blue point.
How To Train Your Cat To Use a Human Toilet
You’ve probably heard of cats that use the toilet just like their people do. How do people train their cats to use a toilet? Some people will give you complex instructions involving special equipment. It is actually quite easy as long as you are patient, and requires nothing special. Follow these seven steps:Step 1: Move the litter pan into the bathroom.
Step 2: Move the litter pan closer and closer to the toilet, until it is right next to it.
Step 3: Raise the litter pan higher and higher on books or bricks until it is level with the toilet seat.
Step 4: Move the litter pan on top of the toilet seat.
Step 5: Replace the litter pan with a sheet of plastic taped to the toilet seat. Cover the middle of the plastic with kitty litter.
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Step 6: Retape plastic onto the seat such that it sags lower and lower into the bowl.
Step 7: Remove the plastic.
Of course, all these steps should be done gradually, getting your cat completely comfortable with each new situation before progressing to the next. It helps if you have two or more bathrooms in your house!
Why Are Cats Meticulous?
See also: Catversity, the free online cat university and entertainment sub-site.
Why are cats so meticulous about keeping clean? They lick off all blood and odor-causing matter to prevent attracting flies and large predators that would be interested in the odor of blood.
Cat Whiskers
See also: Catversity, the free online cat university and entertainment sub-site.
Cats’ whiskers have a function similar to curb feelers which were common on cars in the 1950’s. These were springy rods that stuck out a short distance from the lower parts of the cars, and would make a rubbing noise when they touched a curb. When a cat pokes its head into a small tunnel or opening in the bushes, the whiskers are used to gauge the dimensions. If the opening doesn’t rub the whiskers, the cat’s body will fit through.
Cats Will Not Walk on Aluminum Foil
See also: Catversity, the free online cat university and entertainment sub-site.
Cats will not walk on aluminum foil. This is good to know when you are trying to protect something that your cat would tend to walk on, such as a part-done jigsaw puzzle.
Cat and Tower of London
A man named Sir Henry Wyatt was sentenced to the Tower of London, at a time when prisoners generally starved to death. Sir Henry’s cat seemed to understand the situation because she snuck into the Tower, bringing him a freshly-killed pigeon, every day. When the king heard of this, he must have felt sad for the kitty, because he immediately set Sir Henry free.
Introducing a Second Cat
See also: Catversity, the free online cat university and entertainment sub-site.
If you have to introduce a second cat into your house, your first kitty cat may have trouble getting used to the new intruder. If you put a little perfume or essential oil on both cats, so that they will smell the same as each other, they tend to trust each other more.
The Cost of Cat Food
See also: Catversity, the free online cat university and entertainment sub-site.
Americans spend almost three billion dollars a year on food for their kitty-cats, yet, for comparison, America spends only 700 million dollars on drug prevention and treatment programs.
Cat Lifespans
See also: Catversity, the free online cat university and entertainment sub-site.
The average life of an indoor cat is 17 years. The average life of a cat that lives outdoors is 2 years.
Do Cats Pretend They Are People?
See also: Catversity, the free online cat university and entertainment sub-site.
Do cats pretend they are people? Consider Anya. She is full-grown, and just less than a year old. When her owner steps out of the shower and turns off the water, she steps into the wet bathtub, shakes her feet a little bit, and then just sits there facing the shower-head for about five minutes. What is she thinking? When Anya’s owners ask her to “do a somersault,” she usually complies. She will tip her head down to the rug, and then roll over. She seems to like to please her owner. One day her owner was fooling around with 360 degree pirouettes, like dancers do. Anya saw that, and then turned around exactly 360 degrees two separate times within a few minutes.
Cats and Dogs Quote
“In order to keep a true perspective on one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.” – Dereke Bruce
This quote is quite famous, showing up in a number of quotebases, but no one seems to know who Dereke Bruce is. If you look for him via Google, Yahoo or Amazon, nothing relevant comes up, other than this quote. Yours truly, your author, might be responsible for that. As you may know, I have been publishing insightful and fun trivia for years. I believe I found this quote in a 1980’s vintage Omni Magazine, and first published it in Almanac 1989. In the past several years, it has been picked up and repeated throughout the Internet.
Cat Eyes
Kittens are born with their eyes closed. Only after they have lived several days, do their eyes open for the first time. Scientists discovered that if they put blindfolds on the kittens for the first three days their eyes are open, they will be blind for life. (I know, bad experiment!) Evidently this time is important in the training of their brains’ sight interpretation capability. The blindfolded kittens’ eyes work fine, but their brains don’t know what to do with the pictures! Newborn kittens who lived in white boxes painted with horizontal black stripes could never learn to recognize vertical things during their entire lives. And those raised among vertical stripes could not see horizontal things.
Cats’ eyes are specially developed to see horizontal things much better. In ordinary lighting their irises open as vertical slits. Because the slits are narrow, focus on the horizontal plane is easy to maintain, but their ability to focus on objects vertically is reduced due to the relatively large opening vertically. Their retinas, like human retinas, analyze the picture before it is sent to the brain. The brain doesn’t just get a dot by dot representation, but rather an interpreted story from the retina. In the human eye, the signals of light hitting the retina pass through nine layers of synapses, with each layer potentially filtering or interpreting, before they make it to the optic nerve.
One fact relating to this interpretation is that a cat will see movement much more clearly than the detail of a still scene, as will a human. For instance, if your cat is not paying attention to you, wave your hand a little bit, and the cat will instantly look your way. All this makes sense for a cat’s survival. Their food moves in the grass and they have to see it right away. But the motionless grass and the rocks are of no significance. Most of a cat’s food moves across the ground – horizontally. This is why a cat can easily chase a ball that rolls on a table, but looses it when the ball falls to the floor. Watch a cat stalk a bird. They get closer, and closer, then suddenly the bird flies up into the air. Often the cat doesn’t even look up. To the cat, the bird simply vanished.
Mynah Birds
Mynah birds can be trained to say “hello” to people. There is one mynah that even says “hello” to photographs of people. He recognizes them even if they are wearing sunglasses.
Unusual 911 Call
In one large city a phone operator traced the source of an emergency phone call because the caller would not speak. The phone only emitted unusual noises. When the ambulance crew arrived at the scene, they found a basset hound who had dialed 911 in the process of chewing up the phone.
Cats and Beef
An American house cat eats more beef per year than an average person in Central America. Guess where much of the beef is grown? Right, in Central America.
Pets and Coronary Health
A study revealed that after a year, twenty-eight percent of severe coronary-care patients who did not own pets died, but only 5.6 percent of those who did own pets died. It seemed to make no difference whether their pets were horses, birds, dogs or cats.
Animals and Pain
When you see your rambunctious cat tear across the living room, fly through the dining room, then skid across the kitchen linoleum and smash into the fridge, you worry about her. But she gets up and walks away like nothing happened. How is this possible? If you smashed into kitchen appliances like that, you’d be jumping and yelling with pain. Camels, who are often hit hard by their drivers, seem to feel no pain. (I hope so.) Researchers have discovered that their brain chemistry is different. They actually feel less pain than humans. Perhaps this is why dogs can walk barefoot on gravel driveways without hopping and wincing.
Since we don’t know for sure, and since any pain purposely inflicted is too much, it is best to treat all animals kindly.
See also: The Insidious Dog Collar.
