Clowders and Kindles

Sorry that I've been MIA for a few weeks. I've been quite busy with some pre-summer preparations. I will admit that lately, most of my learning has been merely situational for me and wouldn't do much good for others to read about. I did have one situation that came up and proved to be quite educational. My husband and I are going on vacation for a week and a half and I needed to board my cat. Now, me being the over protective "cat mom" that I am, I was not happy at the prospect of leaving poor puss in a small cage for 10 days. Logically, I knew that he would be just fine and even quite happy because he enjoys spending time in his travel cage at home. 


So after I had made a reservation for him at the vet, I started looking into different ways to keep him calm and happy while he was there. While searching, I came across some very interesting facts about cats. Now if you are a dog person, I apologize. This post won't be all that interesting to you. Perhaps I'll do a post about dogs later. But now I present, the top 10 most interesting facts I found on the Internet about cats*.


1. We will start off with the basics. A group of cats is called a clowder and a group of kittens is called a kindle. (Yeah, just like the Amazon e-reader. If anyone has an idea where the connection of those two came from, please let me know.)

2. "According to National Geographic there may be more tigers being kept as pets in the USA than there are remaining in their wild habitats in Asia." This fact was imparted to me by Stephen Fry's BBC show "QI: Quite Interesting." If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend looking it up on youtube. 

3. The pattern of dots on a cats nose functions just like a human finger print. No two cats have the same nose print.

4. Cats can make over 100 different vocal sounds, while dogs can only make about 10. Interestingly, cats will only "meow" at humans, they won't "meow" at other cats. (From dailyrandomfacts)

5. When cats are sleeping, they are still alert to incoming stimuli. That's why they twitch when you touch their tail or ears while they are asleep.

This is one of my favorite pictures I have of my cat. 

He's all grown up now though.

6. Sir Issac Newton invented the cat door. He actually had one door for a mother cat and a smaller door for her kittens, not realizing that the kittens would just follow their mother through the larger door. Oops. (From Wikipedia)

7. While most people know that cats were seen as sacred by the Egyptians, few probably know that evidence leads scientists to believe that the last few remaining ancestors of the Egyptians' cats are living  on Kenya's Islands in the Lamu Archipelago.

A statue thought to be a representation of the

Egyptian goddess, Bastet.

8. The first cat in space was a French cat named Felicette (French for "Astrocat".) She went up in 1963 and happily, she made it back to Earth alive.

I imagine it went something like this.

9. Cats and humans have identical emotion centers in their brains. Cats are also highly receptive to human emotions based on tone of voice. (Even if they look like they are ignoring you.)

10. Ailurophobia is the irrational fear of cats.

I've never really been scared of cats, but this episode of  "Friends"

 made me think twice about that.

So there you have it, cat facts. I did have a few more technical facts that I picked up, but they wouldn't have fit very well into my list format. Also, I'm not sure that the origin of the word "puss" would be interesting to anyone but me. 

Hopefully there won't be such a long hiatus before my next post. Happy learning!

*A majority of this information came from PetMD.com. I will note if another source was used.