A lot of Facts about Cats

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The first commercially cloned pet was a cat named "Little Nicky." He cost his owner $50,000, making him one of the most expensive cats ever.

A cat usually has about 12 whiskers on each side of its face.

A cat's eyesight is both better and worse than humans.

 It is better because cats can see in much dimmer light and they have a wider peripheral view. It's worse because they don't see colour, as well as humans, do. 

Scientists believe grass appears red to cats.

Spanish-Jewish folklore recounts that Adam's first wife, Lilith, became a black vampire cat, sucking the blood from sleeping babies. This may be the root of the superstition that a cat will smother a sleeping baby or suck out the child's breath.

Perhaps the most famous comic cat is the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. With the ability to disappear, this mysterious character embodies the magic and sorcery historically associated with cats.

The smallest wildcat today is the Black-footed cat. 

The females are less than 20 inches (50 cm) long and can weigh as little as 2.5 lbs (1.2 kg).

On average, cats spend 2/3 of every day sleeping. That means a nine-year-old cat has been awake for only three years of its life.

In the original Italian version of Cinderella, the benevolent fairy godmother figure was a cat.

The little tufts of hair in a cat's ear that help keeps out dirt direct sounds into the ear, and insulate the ears are called "ear furnishings."

The ability of a cat to find its way home is called "psi-traveling." Experts think cats either use the angle of the sunlight to find their way or that cats have magnetized cells in their brains that act as compasses.

Isaac Newton invented the cat flap. Newton was experimenting in a pitch-black room. Spithead, one of his cats, kept opening the door and wrecking his experiment. The cat flap kept both Newton and Spithead happy.

The world's rarest coffee, Kopi Luwak, comes from Indonesia where a wildcat known as the luwak lives. The cat eats coffee berries and the coffee beans inside pass through the stomach. The beans are harvested from the cat's dung heaps and then cleaned and roasted. Kopi Luwak sells for about $500 for a 450 g (1 lb) bag.

A cat's jaw can't move sideways, so a cat can't chew large chunks of food.

Cats don't actually meow at each other, just at humans. Cats typically will spit, purr, and hiss at other cats.

Like humans, cats tend to favour one paw over another, female cats tend to be right pawed, while male cats are more often left pawed. 

Interestingly, while 90% of humans are right-handed, the remaining 10% of lefties also tend to be male.

A cat's back is extremely flexible because it has up to 53 loosely fitting vertebrae. Humans only have 34.

All cats have claws, and all except the cheetah sheath them when at rest.

Two members of the cat family are distinct from all others: the clouded leopard and the cheetah. The clouded leopard does not roar like other big cats, nor does it groom or rest like small cats. The cheetah is unique because it is a running cat; all others are leaping cats. They are leaping cats because they slowly stalk their prey and then leap on it.

A cat lover is called an Ailurophilia (Greek: cat+lover).

In Japan, cats are thought to have the power to turn into super spirits when they die. This may be because according to the Buddhist religion, the body of the cat is the temporary resting place of very spiritual people.