I love cats and they are exceptionally fine-tuned animals from their vision to sense of balance, sleekness, cleanliness and beauty etc.
Extraordinary cats Homing Instinct Birds do it, bees do it -- and so do salmon, rats, and cats. "It" is homing: finding your way back home even after traveling long distances over unfamiliar territory. Indeed, cat lore includes a legion of cats who have found that they can indeed go home again. In EXTRAORDINARY CATS, for instance, it's a cat named Sooty who finds his way back to an old home after his family in England moves more than 100 miles away. Cats are capable of many mysterious feats. But Sooty isn't the only cat to have accomplished this marvelous feat. For example, there is Pilsbury, the eight-year-old English cat who has made the eight-mile journey back to his former home 40 times. According to London newspapers, he makes the trip, which takes him across busy roads and through herds of cattle, at least once a week. Luckily, his owners always retrieve him. Then there is Tigger, the three-legged cat who has made the three-mile return trip to his old home more than 75 times. But perhaps the round-trip record is held by Ninja, the tomcat who moved with his owners from Utah to Washington State in 1996. He disappeared shortly after arriving in his new home, only to turn up at the old Utah address -- 850 miles away -- a year later. Just how these extraordinary cats home in on their old haunts isn't understood. But researchers do have some clues how other animals find their way. For salmon, it appears that the smell of their home waters are key. For birds and bees, navigating by the sun, stars, or moon appears to help. Other animals can orient themselves with the help of magnetized cells in the brain, which act like tiny compasses and help them decide which way is north. Sea creatures may even use the sounds that rumble through the oceans as guideposts. Do humans share cats' amazing direction-finding abilities? Researchers aren't sure. So far, studies haven't turned up any magnetized cells in our brains, though early navigators certainly learned to use the sun and the stars to steer by. "It is not yet clear exactly what kinds of unique navigational systems humans may have," Patricia Sharp, an expert in neuroanatomy at Yale University, told SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN recently. "I suspect that humans have similar systems -- but at present, there is no evidence to support that suspicion." In the meantime, then, perhaps we'd best just follow our cats.
I like dogs too but for different reasons. I know I'm bragging about cat's abilities but all animals have amazing qualities, just in case people assume I mean to discredit dogs.
Cats can survive a fall of 32 stories? Move up a floor. (joke) I like Chartreux cats as a breed best. Their fur looks like silk. http://cat-breeds.cats-central.com/images/chartreux3.jpg And they don't miaou, they make a chirrup sound.
My mother used to have a cat that fell down 5 stories from a balcony, some time later it was found uninjured.
some time later? What did it do, go bouncing down the lawn and they couldn't find it? Our cat got locked in a shed and was missing for well over a week. Finally we heard it. I can't believe it survived that long without food/water.
I'm not too sure what happened to the cat after the fall, it probably went into the nearby woods or something, it had never been outside. Later that week they found it.
That's the saying "Curiosity killed the cat" If you leave a door open to somewhere they can't usually get into, they can't resist having a nose around. Then when you come back to lock the door they keep quiet and hide. They also watch absolutely everything that is going on.
This comes from a well-known study carried out by 2 vets. They found that injuries increase up to a height of 7 storeys but, after that, steadily decrease with increasing height. The surviving cats don't exactly escape injury-free though:
