Cat Facts & Trivia: What's True, and What Isn't

• They hear an octave and a half above a dog. A cat's range runs from 48 Hz to 85 kHz at 70 dB — more than four times the top of human hearing, and one of the broadest ranges measured in any mammal.
• Sweetness does not exist for them. Cats cannot taste sugar, and it is not a preference: Tas1r2, one of the two genes needed to assemble a sweet receptor, is a broken pseudogene that is never expressed. The same deletion turns up in tiger and cheetah, so this is a trait of the whole cat family rather than a quirk of the house cat.
• A cat larynx purrs after it has been disconnected. In 2023 researchers found that excised larynges self-oscillate at 25–30 Hz with no nerve supply and no muscle activity at all. The authors are careful: their data do not fully reject the older active-muscle-contraction idea, but they do show muscle contraction is not necessary to make the sound.
• The purr has hardware. Cat vocal folds carry dense connective-tissue masses up to 4 mm across, embedded in the tissue — pads that let an animal this small reach frequencies this low.
• Two wildcat populations built the domestic cat. Ancient DNA shows the Near Eastern and the Egyptian populations of Felis silvestris lybica both fed into the gene pool, at different points in history.
• Breeding for looks came late. A coat-colour variant only reaches high frequency after the Middle Ages, which the authors read as evidence that deliberate breeding of cats began later than for most other domesticated animals.
• Crossbred cats outlive purebreds by about eighteen months. Across 4,009 recorded deaths in English veterinary practice, median lifespan was 14.0 years overall: 14.0 for crossbreds against 12.5 for purebreds.
• Roughly 80% of white cats with two blue eyes go deaf, and it begins early — the cochlea starts degenerating at about four days old.
• A calico male is almost a genetic accident. Calico and tortoiseshell coats need two X chromosomes, so nearly every one is female. The rare males are XXY, and sterile.
• Cats respond to their own name — but that is not the same as understanding it. In habituation experiments they reacted measurably more to their name than to four ordinary nouns or to four housemates' names. What that demonstrates is discrimination between sounds, not comprehension that the sound refers to them.
• The catnip roll is insect repellent. Rolling smears the iridoid nepetalactol onto the cat's face and head, where it repels the mosquito Aedes albopictus. The reaction is opioid-mediated, which is why it looks like intoxication.
• Taurine deficiency was killing cats until 1987. That year researchers showed taurine-deficient cats develop dilated cardiomyopathy which reverses on supplementation. Commercial cat food has been fortified ever since.
• On islands, removing them works fast. After cats were eradicated from Little Barrier Island, New Zealand, the stitchbird went from under 500 birds to 3,000 within a few years. Feral cats are implicated in the decline of at least six island-endemic bird species in New Zealand and about 70 local insular bird populations.

"One cat wiped out an entire species." The lighthouse keeper's cat, Tibbles, is supposed to have single-handedly ended the Stephens Island wren. It is the most repeated cat story there is, and archival research undid it: cats became established as a breeding population on the island in 1894 and multiplied quickly, the wren's disappearance stretched over roughly five years rather than one, and those same cats exterminated several other species before they were removed. There was never one culprit.

"Cats always land on their feet, so a fall does not really hurt them." The righting reflex is real and survival is genuinely high — 96.5% of 119 cats survived falls in one clinical series. What that number hides is the condition of the survivors: 46.2% had limb fractures, thoracic trauma was diagnosed in 33.6%, pneumothorax in 20% and pulmonary contusions in 13.4%. The average fall was four storeys.

"A saucer of milk is a treat." Most adult cats stop producing enough lactase after weaning. Cornell's Feline Health Center advises against dairy outright. The storybook cat lapping cream is a picture of an animal about to have a bad night.

"The Egyptians domesticated the cat." Egypt matters, but it came second. The relationship begins in the Neolithic Near East — the Cyprus burial is 9,500 years old, thousands of years before Egyptian cat imagery — and ancient DNA puts the Egyptian lineage's great expansion later, in the Classical period, spreading along trade routes. Egypt was the cat's publicist, not its inventor.

"A purring cat is a happy cat." Purring is also a lever. Karen McComb's team at Sussex found that cats soliciting food embed a high-frequency, cry-like component inside the low purr. Listeners — including people who had never owned a cat — rated those purrs as more urgent and less pleasant. Remove the embedded cry digitally and the urgency drops. A purr is a request about as often as it is a review.

Felix the Cat arrived in the 1919 short Feline Follies and became animation's first genuine star; Tom and Jerry followed in 1940. Live action gave us Holly Golightly's ginger tom — named only "Cat" — in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and Jones, the ship's cat who outlasts most of the crew in Alien (1979).

Disney's The Aristocats (1970) and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats (West End, 1981, plus a 2019 film adaptation widely treated as a catastrophe) mark the two extremes of cats on stage and screen. Sanrio launched Hello Kitty in 1974, Jim Davis began Garfield in 1978, and Meowth joined Pokémon in 1996. Puss in Boots swaggered into Shrek 2 (2004) and headlined Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022).

Then there is the internet, which cats arguably built: the lolcats of I Can Has Cheezburger (2007), Keyboard Cat, Nyan Cat (2011), Grumpy Cat (2012). In games, Stray (2022) put players inside a stray cat picking its way through a robot city.

Félicette, a Parisian stray, became the only cat ever to survive spaceflight on 18 October 1963, launched on a French Véronique rocket with electrodes implanted in her skull. A bronze memorial now stands at the International Space University in Strasbourg.

Creme Puff (3 August 1967 – 6 August 2005) of Austin, Texas, holds the Guinness World Records title of oldest cat ever at 38 years and 3 days. Her owner, Jake Perry, had also owned the previous record holder.

Tama, a calico, was appointed stationmaster of Kishi Station on Japan's Kishigawa Line and is credited with rescuing the line financially; she died on 22 June 2015, aged 16. Larry has been Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street since February 2011. Tardar Sauce — Grumpy Cat — went viral in 2012 and died in 2019, aged seven.