The Love Of Cats

A cat is a lion in a jungle of small bushes wrote St George Mivart, an authority on cats in the nineteenth century. It's not difficult to see the similarity of the pet cat to its bigger relative, the lion, when you watch a cat playing in the garden. Watching a cat as it stalks its prey, stealthily, silent, as it approaches its prey with sheer determination to kill it. When a cat is stalking its prey it focuses on it so intently that it seems to be unaware of anything else - oh yes, a determined cat is not to be messed around with!. The cat with its padded feet and huge muscle power, sharp claws and teeth, is built for the purpose of catching its prey.nnThe claws are sharper and more curved into strong hooks than in any other mammal, and by action of special muscles are withdrawn under sheath-like pads where they escape injury and wear and tear when not in use.nnThey have fantastic canines for tearing at their prey, and pre-molars rather like scissors for shearing off chunks of flesh small enough to swallow. In the cats eyes, the fibres of the iris, opening to the widest extreme, make the pupil expand to a full circle to admit the darkness of the night and they automatically and rapidly contract to shut off excess light during the day, whilst all the time allowing exact vision either in the dark and in bright light.nnThe cat therefore is a piece of precision mechanism from the lion right down to your little old domestic cat! nnAll cats can move on their toes very softly, rather than on the flat of their feet, and even at high speed powered by their fantastic muscles. Cats have extremely acute hearing apart from white cats with blue eyes. Cats hear sound far beyond the reach of human hearing and some people would suggest that a cat's hearing is better than a dog's hearing. Each ear contains twenty-seven muscles, and this enables the pinna, the part of the ear that we can see, to be turned in several directions to allow the cat o collect sound waves. Most cats enjoy music and it is not unusual to see a cat stepping on piano keys! They like some music and dislike others - just like us!n