Did you know?

It's a wet, miserable Sunday morning, so I thought I'd lighten things a little with some odd facts about cats. Some things you might know, some you might not........ Feel free to add your own too!!

I always thought that all ginger cats were males, and I've come across lots of other people who think that too. Then one day I came across a gorgeous ginger cat that the owner called Sally - clearly a girl's name. I was convinced that they'd got it wrong, but no, it was definitely a girl. Then I learnt that although the vast majority are in fact toms, about 10% are female. Strangely though, among all the the ginger cats I've had the pleasure to look after, the majority have been female.....

Cats can have a bit of a reputation for being promiscuous, and it appears it's well founded. It's entirely possible for a litter of kittens to have more than one father!! It's all to do with a cat's reproductive system - works very differently to ours. So if a female is un-neutered and on heat, she'll attract all the un-neutered toms for miles. Now if you see a litter of kittens all with very different markings and even appearances, you'll know that they've probably got different fathers. A note of seriousness here though.... There are so many unwanted kittens, that frequently, and very tragically, meet a very sad end. To help ensure that this doesn't happen, we need to be certain that all our pets are neutered.

People tend to think that their cat is getting into old age by the time they're 11 or 12, but they can live for a lot longer. A well cared for and well nourished cat can live well into its late teens and sometimes even early 20s. Just as we as a human race are now living longer than ever before, the same is true for the animals in our lives. My sister recently lost her cat at the age of 21, and I'm now often meeting people who have cats of around this age. It's said that the oldest reliably recorded cat was a female tabby who lived until she was 34!!

Beware!! We tend to think that cats only purr when they are happy. Well, that's not quite true - they can also purr when in pain or fear. Vets and animal behaviourists are still not 100% sure exactly what purring is all about, and how it's produced, but it's well worth being aware that it doesn't always happen when they're happy! Our domestic cats purr at about 26 cycles per second - that's about the same frequency as an idling diesel engine.

If you have a cat in your family, you'll probably have noticed that they see, hear and smell things that we've no idea about. They can hear frequencies up to about 65 kHz. To put that in perspective, humans only hear up to about 20 kHz. You might have noticed that if you cat sees something it's not come across before, as well as going for a look, and perhaps touching it, it will sniff it. This is probably the most important sense for a cat, and it gets a great deal of its information from its sense of smell. Cats' sense of smell is around 14 times stronger than ours.

Lots of other interesting Did You Know stuff about cats on Wikipedia - www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Cats/Did_you_know*