Cat Person

My drawings as a six-year-old are festooned with flying cats, and my first book – a volume of poems put together with folded sheets and a construction-paper cover – was called Rhyming Cats, and had an illustration of a cat playing with a ball. This cat looked like a sausage with ears and whiskers, but it was early days in my design career. I feel like I really know what I’m feeding my cat and can rest assured he’s getting all the nutrients he needs to live a healthy life. I put a lot of care into the food I put into my body so why should I feel any different about the food my cat eats?

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He kept coming back to her initial dismissal of the movie, making jokes that glanced off it and watching her closely to see how she responded. He teased her about her highbrow taste, and said how hard it was to impress her because of all the film classes she’d taken, even though he knew she’d taken only one summer class in film. He joked about how she and the other employees at the artsy theatre probably sat around and made fun of the people who went to the mainstream theatre, where they didn’t even serve wine, and some of the movies were in IMAX 3-D. While she was home over break, they texted nearly non-stop, not only jokes but little updates about their days.

Maybe, she thought, her texting “lol r u serious” had hurt him, had intimidated him and made him feel uncomfortable around her. The thought of this possible vulnerability touched her, and she felt kinder toward him than she had all night. Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines. Our experienced adoption counselors will help you choose a cat likely to be a good fit for your family.

Perhaps the best-known element of cats’ hunting behavior, which is commonly misunderstood and often appalls cat owners because it looks like torture, is that cats often appear to “play” with prey by releasing it after capture. This cat and mouse behavior is due to an instinctive imperative to ensure that the prey is weak enough to be killed without endangering the cat. Serious damage is rare, as the fights are usually short in duration, with the loser running away with little more than a few scratches to the face and ears. However, fights for mating rights are typically more severe and injuries may include deep puncture wounds and lacerations.

Outside these neutral areas, territory holders usually chase away stranger cats, at first by staring, hissing, and growling and, if that does not work, by short but noisy and violent attacks. Despite this colonial organization, cats do not have a social survival strategy or a pack mentality, and always hunt alone. Female domestic cats can have kittens from spring to late autumn, with litter sizes often ranging from two to five kittens. Domestic cats are bred and shown at events as registered pedigreed cats, a hobby known as cat fancy. The domestic cats that you know and love today date back to the Fertile Crescent, a wildcat from the Middle East. Some sources say that these wild animals existed up to 100,000 years ago, but they became domesticated as more farmers arose.

Over 350 institutions across the country have used the CAT for course, program, and general education assessment. NSF support also helped establish the Center for Assessment and Improvement of Learning to distribute the CAT and provide training, consultation, and statistical support to users. A Siberian cat, the breed of Margaret Atwood’s next companion. We needed a way to have high quality food in a variety of flavors delivered regularly, as our cat gets bored of eating the same flavors.

Several natural behaviors and characteristics of wildcats may have pre-adapted them for domestication as pets. These traits include their small size, social nature, obvious body language, love of play and relatively high intelligence. Captive Leopardus cats may also display affectionate behavior toward humans, but were not domesticated. House cats often mate with feral cats, producing hybrids such as the Kellas cat in Scotland. Hybridisation between domestic and other Felinae species is also possible. Public attitudes towards feral cats vary widely, from seeing them as free-ranging pets to regarding them as vermin.

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Feral cats are domestic cats that were born in or have reverted to a wild state. They are unfamiliar with and wary of humans and roam freely in urban and rural areas. The numbers of feral cats is not known, but estimates of the United States feral population range from twenty-five to sixty million. Feral cats may live alone, but most are found in large colonies, which occupy a specific territory and are usually associated with a source of food. Famous feral cat colonies are found in Rome around the Colosseum and Forum Romanum, with cats at some of these sites being fed and given medical attention by volunteers. During domestication, cats have undergone only minor changes in anatomy and behavior, and they are still capable of surviving in the wild.

I expect this had meant a trip to the Humane Society and a swift death, but I never knew. Nowadays there would be a family consultation and much empathetic explaining, no doubt, though the cat would have been done away with anyway. As it was, this was a tragedy, a thunderbolt from Zeus; and like a thunderbolt from Zeus, there was no sense in questioning it. How could I have been so heartlessly severed from my animal daemon in this way? From kitten to mature cat, our pets go through various stages of life.

It is often required that a cat must be healthy and vaccinated in order to participate in a cat show. Both pedigreed and non-purebred companion (“moggy”) cats are admissible, although the rules differ depending on the organization. Competing cats are compared to the applicable breed standard, and assessed for temperament.