What is a cat?

The Felidae family includes everything from tigers, lions, cougars, ocelots, and lynxes to the domestic cats we keep in our homes. House cats are the smallest feline family members, but otherwise they share many characteristics with their larger, wild relatives.

They have a wide variety of fur patterns, retractable claws, flexible bodies, rough tongues, sensitive whiskers, and large eyes with good night vision

Cats use their long tails to maintain balance, allowing them to walk on various narrowsurfaces, like the tops of doors or fences. Their tail movements can also communicate different emotions, such as interest, friendliness, and fear. Cats are one of the most popular pets on the planet, but unlike dogs, humans haven’t had a large hand in selectively breeding the species. Instead, we developed a relationship with cats over thousands of years thanks to our need to stop rodents from eating our food and cats’ natural desire to catch and eat rodents.

Cats are popular largely thanks to their interesting personalities, which are both independent yet needy and affectionate yet aloof. .

Cats are popular largely thanks to their interesting personalities, which are both independent yet needy and affectionate yet aloof. These characteristics could be a product of our naturally developed relationship—while dogs have been selectively bred to love and trust us, cats have been left to their own devices and likely still see themselves as independent but view humans as a potential source of food and shelter.

However, as much as we love cats, their success as a species does have consequences for other animals. There are around double the amount of feral cats as there are house cats worldwide, and as animals that can breed throughout much of or all of the year and produce multiple young at once, their population an grow very quickly.