Cat Trivia. Another 5 Cool Facts About Cats

Even though many people might not find a cat’s mew particularly melodious, the range of vocalizations they can produce is exceptionally large: a cat can make more than 100 different sounds, whereas a dog – for instance – only makes around 10 or 15.

Additionally, cats have an incredible sense of hearing: where humans hear frequencies from 20 Hz to 20.000 Hz, cats hear from 48 Hz to 85.000 Hz, allowing them to detect even the highest-pitched and faintest sounds a small prey might make. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, they have 32 muscles in their ears that give them a remarkable auditory directionality to precisely locate the source of a sound (although most of the time they use this ability to intentionally ignore their humans).

As much as I’d love to say the first one is true, it’s actually the second one. In the wild, cats are solitary hunters: after they’ve hunted a prey, they usually eat small amounts of it several times a day. So, when they see the bottom of the bowl, they meow to satisfy this instinct to eat at intervals. Plus, wild cats often hide their food to make sure they have a constant supply, so leaving some food in the bowl is also a way to guarantee their next meal. When your cat meows, they’re just trying to keep their food supply stable and make sure they can eat small, frequent meals, just like their wild cousins.

If your cats are like mine and the most they’ve ever caught is a dry leaf or a limping fly, all these numbers probably seem implausible. But the truth is that the record-holder, Towser, caught about 28,899 mice over her 24 years of life. This tortoiseshell cat, tasked with guarding and maintaining a whiskey distillery in Scotland, catched three to four mice a day: a delight for the owners, though not so much for the neighborhood mice. Her fame and the affection of those who knew her were so great that when she passed away, the distillery owners decided to erect a statue in her honor and include her paw prints on one of their liqueurs, Fairlie’s Light Highland Liqueur.
 

It looks like Borges wasn’t too far off when he said, “God created the cat so that man could have the pleasure of caressing a tiger”. Our little feline friends share 95.6% of their DNA with tigers, snow leopards, or lions. Of course, genetic differences mean cats don’t share some of the extraordinary abilities of their bigger relatives, like surviving in low-oxygen environments (like the snow leopard) or the mutation that gives the Bengal tiger its coat, but they do share – among many other things – their ability to live on a strictly carnivorous diet and to sleep extraordinarily long naps.

It’s no news that cats have always been revered and admired, but what you might not know is that these two cat coat names come straight from two upscale and luxurious fabrics from ancient times.

According to the Merriam-Webster etymological dictionary, tabby comes from a silk taffeta made in Baghdad that had an irregular wavy finish. The place where that was produced was the city of  Al-‘Attābīya, whose name was later adopted as attabi in latin, later into French as tabis and finally English speakers modified it to the word tabby in 1600s.

And what about calico? It describes a cotton fabric made in Calicut, India. That fabric hadn’t been completely processed, so it was easier and cheaper to produce than whitened cotton fabrics and become popular in India since the 12^th century. During the 18th century, these fabrics became incredibly popular in Europe thanks to the East India Company, which led the British Parliament to forbid any fabric that could come from India or China, including calico fabric. Despite that, this kind of fabric kept being called calico (even if it was produced in UK).