Fun Facts About Cats: The Tiny Tiger Asleep on Your Couch

Your house cat shares about 95.6 percent of its DNA with a tiger. The stalking, the pouncing, the way it freezes solid before launching at a toy mouse, all of it is the same software running on smaller hardware.

That overlap is where the good fun facts about cats begin. Not the cute-poster version, but the interesting facts about cats that explain why this animal acts like a small predator that happens to live in your home. Here are the cat facts worth keeping.

What Cats Are Really Built For

A cat is a hunting machine first and a pet second. It is crepuscular, most active at dawn and dusk, which is exactly when its prey moves. That is also why your cat wants breakfast at 5 a.m. It is not being difficult. It is being a cat, running on the internal clock that turns up in roundups of strange things people just learned.

The body backs up the instinct:

• A cat can squeeze through any gap its head fits through, because it has no rigid collarbone.
• Cats walk on their toes, like a sprinter who never lets the heel touch down.
• The righting reflex lets a falling cat twist upright in midair, and a low terminal velocity helps them survive drops that would injure larger animals.

Then there's the purr. People assume it only means happiness. It does, sometimes. But cats also purr when injured or frightened, and the low-frequency vibration is thought to help heal bone and tissue. The purr is partly a self-repair system.

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Cat Facts About How They Talk

Cats are more vocally flexible than dogs in one specific way. A cat can make around 100 different sounds. A dog manages about 10, according to Purina.

Here's the twist. Adult cats barely meow at each other. The meow is aimed almost entirely at humans. Kittens meow at their mothers, then mostly grow out of it, except where we're concerned. PetMD notes that domestic cats essentially kept and fine-tuned the meow as a tool for managing their owners.

They read us in other ways too. The slow blink, where a cat looks at you and gently closes its eyes, is about as close as a cat gets to saying it trusts you. Owners have turned all of this into an entire online culture, which is part of why cursed and chaotic cat photos spread faster than almost any other pet content.

Interesting Facts About Cats and History

People have been obsessed with cats for a very long time. In ancient Egypt, cats were sacred enough that, according to the historian Herodotus writing around 440 BC, families would shave their eyebrows in mourning when the household cat died. Harming a cat, even by accident, could carry a death sentence.

A few more that land:

• A group of cats is a clowder. A group of kittens is a kindle.
• Around 40 percent of cats are clearly left-pawed or right-pawed, and the rest are ambidextrous.
• Some cats are polydactyl, born with extra toes. Ernest Hemingway's old house in Florida still keeps dozens of their descendants.

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Things About Cats That Sound Fake

The record holders are almost unbelievable. The oldest cat ever documented, a Texas cat named Creme Puff, reached 38 years and 3 days. In human terms that is well past a century.

Speed is another one. A house cat can hit roughly 30 mph in a short burst, fast enough to beat Usain Bolt over a short dash. The animal that sleeps sixteen hours a day is, when it decides to be, a sprinter.

The brains are there too. A cat's cerebral cortex holds about 250 million neurons, close to what a bear's much larger brain carries. They aren't slow. They're selective. That same independence is the thing that keeps cats off the most-affectionate-pet lists and squarely on the most photogenic ones.

Things You Didn't Know About Cat Eyes and Whiskers

A cat's night vision is built for hunting. It can see in light about six times dimmer than a human needs, thanks to a reflective layer behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum. That little mirror is also why cat eyes glow in a camera flash.

The whiskers are instruments, not decoration. They sit at roughly the width of the cat's own body and act as a built-in measuring tape, telling the cat whether it can fit through a gap before it commits. Cut them off and the cat loses a sense, which is why you never trim them.

A few more body facts that catch people off guard:

• A cat's tongue is covered in tiny backward-facing hooks made of keratin, which is why a lick feels like sandpaper and why grooming works like a comb.
• Cats can't taste sweetness at all. The gene for it is simply broken in the species.
• That headbutt, properly called bunting, is the cat marking you with scent glands as part of its territory. It's a compliment.

That last one reframes a lot of cat behavior. When a cat rubs its face along your leg, it isn't only being affectionate. It's filing you under "mine."

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Cat Facts About Sleep and Survival

Cats sleep a lot. The average house cat spends 12 to 16 hours a day asleep, which adds up to roughly two-thirds of its life. It isn't laziness. Cats are ambush hunters, built to conserve energy between short, explosive bursts of activity.

When they are awake, their bodies are tuned for the hunt in ways that sound exaggerated:

• A cat has about 32 muscles in each ear and can rotate them nearly 180 degrees to pinpoint a sound.
• Cats cannot taste sweetness at all. They lack the receptor for it, a quirk tied to their strict meat-eating diet. That carnivore biology is also why some human treats are toxic to them, and why you should never give a cat chocolate.
• Their flexible spine and free-floating collarbone are what power the famous righting reflex that lets them twist upright mid-fall.

The purr is stranger than it looks too. Cats purr at frequencies between roughly 25 and 150 hertz, a range some researchers think may help promote healing and bone density. Cats purr when content, but also when injured or stressed, which is part of why the purr still isn't fully understood.

One last fact about cats: the meow is mostly for us. Adult cats rarely meow at each other, relying instead on scent and body language. They developed the meow largely to communicate with humans, fine-tuning a sound we can't quite ignore. For all that fine-tuning, cats have been quietly causing chaos for ages, as these historical photos of cats make clear.

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Why Cats Still Win

Roughly a third of American households keep at least one cat, and people have shared their homes with them for around 10,000 years. The strange part is how little the cat actually changed in that time. It let us feed it, name it, and post it online, and it kept the tiger almost fully intact.

That's the real fun fact about cats. You didn't tame a small pet. You invited a small predator to live on your couch, and it agreed because the food is reliable.

More animal reads on Postize: fun facts about dogs and fun facts about sharks.