Romfilatelia introduces the philatelic issue Cats into the postal network, a reason for joy both for the pet lovers and for the stamp collectors. Romfilatelia introduces the philatelic issue Cats into the postal network, a reason for joy both for the pet lovers and for the stamp collectors.
Cats are clean and very neat animals. Cats have been good company for people for over 7,000 years. The old Egyptians used to believe that the goddess Bast reincarnates into cats, and in China there is a belief that cats keep bad spirits away from the house. In the ancient Egypt, the punishment for killing a cat was death. Cats were brought to Greece and Rome by the migratory populations from the Northern Africa and Western Asia.
At the beginning of the 19th century, raising cats and, especially, purebred cats, became a common concern.
A cat can live up to 15-20 years, but this happens rather rarely.
A cat can jump up to a distance equal to its height multiplied by seven. Also, a cat can run with a speed of almost 14 km/hour.
A cat´s body is very flexible and its skeleton has 230 bones.
Its senses are highly developed.
Its eyesight is well adapted for hunting, especially at night, when it has both “binocular” vision, which allows the cat to estimate distances, and wide peripheral vision.
It has a very sensitive hearing. The cat can perceive a broad range of frequencies, including the range of ultrasounds. Yet, it has difficulties in perceiving low frequency sounds, a fact which might explain the reason why cats are more attracted to feminine voices than to men´s voices.
Cats have a highly developed sense of smell; it plays an essential role in finding food or potential partners.
Its taste is very specialized. It perceives very vaguely the sweet taste, but it can perceive even the smallest variations in the water´s taste. According to the scientists, a 15-year-old cat has spent 10 years of its life sleeping (a cat sleeps around 16 hours a day).
The heaviest cat in the history weighted almost 21 kilograms.
The International Cat Breeders Association confirms that there are around 500 million household pet cats in the world.
Issue date: 2006-01-20
