How To Know If Cat Is Pregnant
How To Know If Cat Is Pregnant
The cat ( Felis silvestris catus ), also known as the domestic cat or housecat to distinguish it from other felines and felids, is a small carnivorous mammal that is valued by humans for its companionship and its ability to hunt vermin and household pests. Cats have been associated with humans for at least 9,500 years, and are currently the most popular pet in the world. Due to their close association with humans, cats are now found almost everywhere on Earth. This extreme adaptability and their worrying impacts on native animals has led to them being classed as an invasive species. Most of these problems are caused by the large number of feral cats worldwide, with a population of up to 60 million of these animals in the United States alone.
Cats are similar in size and anatomy to the other Felids, with light, flexible bodies and teeth adapted to killing small prey. A skilled predator, the cat hunts over 1,000 species for food, using its excellent eyesight and hearing. Unusually, cats have lost the ability to taste sugar and in some breeds show hereditary deafness. Despite being solitary hunters, cats are a social species and use a variety of vocalizations, pheromones and types of body language for communication. These include meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling, squeaking, chirping, clicking, and grunting. They are also bred and shown as registered pedigree pets. This hobby is known as cat fancy.
Until recently the cat was commonly believed to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt, where it was a cult animal. A study in 2007 found that the lines of descent of all house cats probably run through as few as five self-domesticating African Wildcats (Felis silvestris lybica) circa 8000 BC, in the Near East. The earliest direct evidence of cat domestication is a kitten that was buried with its owner 9,500 years ago in Cyprus.
Nomenclature and etymology
The word cat derives from Old English catt , which belongs to a group of related words in European languages, including Welsh cath , Spanish gato , Basque katu , Byzantine Greek kátia , Old Irish cat , German Katze , and Old Church Slavonic kotka . The ultimate source of all these terms is Late Latin catus, cattus, catta "domestic cat", as opposed to feles "European wildcat". It is unclear whether the Greek or the Latin came first, but they were undoubtedly borrowed from an Afro-Asiatic language akin to Nubian kadís and Berber kaddîska , both meaning "wildcat". This term was either cognate with or borrowed from Late Egyptian čaus "jungle cat, African wildcat" (later giving Coptic šau "tomcat"), itself from earlier Egyptian tešau "female cat" (vs. miew "tomcat"). The term puss (as in pussycat) may come from Dutch poes or from Low German Puuskatte , dialectal Swedish kattepus , or Norwegian pus , pusekatt , all of which primarily denote a woman and, by extension, a female cat.
A group of cats is referred to as a "clowder", a male cat is called a "tom" (or a "gib", if neutered), and a female is called a "molly" or "queen". The male progenitor of a cat, especially a pedigreed cat, is its "sire", and its female progenitor is its "dam". An immature cat is called a "kitten" (which is also an alternative name for young rats, rabbits, hedgehogs, beavers, squirrels and skunks). In medieval Britain, the word kitten was interchangeable with the word catling . A cat whose ancestry is formally registered is called a pedigreed cat, purebred cat, or a show cat. In strict terms, a purebred cat is one whose ancestry contains only individuals of the same breed. A pedigreed cat is one whose ancestry is recorded, but may have ancestors of different breeds. Cats of unrecorded mixed ancestry are referred to as domestic longhairs and domestic shorthairs or commonly as random-bred, moggies, mongrels, or mutt-cats.
Taxonomy and evolution
The Felids are a rapidly evolving family of mammals that share a common ancestor only 10-15 million years ago, and include in addition to the domestic cat, lions, tigers, cougars, and many others. Within this family, domestic cats ( Felis catus ) are part of the genus Felis , which is a group of small cats containing seven species. Members of the genus are found worldwide and include the Jungle Cat ( Felis chaus ) of southeast Asia, the African Wildcat ( Felis silvestris lybica ), the Chinese Mountain Cat ( Felis silvestris bieti ) and the Arabian Sand Cat ( Felis margarita ). All the cats in this genus share a common ancestor that probably lived around six million years ago in Asia. Although the exact relationships within the Felidae are still uncertain, both the Chinese Mountain Cat and the African Wildcat are close relations of the domestic cat and are both classed as subspecies of the Wildcat Felis silvestris . As domestic cats are little altered from wildcats, they can readily interbreed. This hybridization may pose a danger to the genetic distinctiveness of wildcat populations, particularly in Scotland and Hungary.
The domestic cat was first classified as Felis catus by Carolus Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae of 1758. However, due to modern phylogenetics, domestic cats are now usually regarded as another subspecies of the Wildcat Felis silvestris . This has resulted in mixed usage of the terms, as the domestic cat can be called by its subspecies name, Felis silvestris catus . Wildcats have also been referred to as various subspecies of F. catus , but in 2003 the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature fixed the name for Wildcats as F. silvestris . The most common name in use for the domestic cat remains F. catus , following a convention for domesticated animals of using the earliest (the senior) synonym proposed. Sometimes the domestic cat is called Felis domesticus or Felis domestica , the term coined by German naturalist Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben in 1777. These are not valid taxonomic names, and Linnaeus' binomial takes precedence.
Cats have either a mutualistic or commensal relationship with humans. However, in comparison to dogs, cats have not undergone major changes during the domestication process, as the form and behavior of the domestic cat are not radically different from those of wildcats, and domestic cats are perfectly capable of surviving in the wild. Several natural behaviors and characteristics of Wildcats may have preadapted them for domestication as pets. These traits include their small size, social nature, obvious body language, love of play and relatively high intelligence, they may also have an inborn tendency towards tameness.
There are two main models for how cats were domesticated. In one model, people deliberately tamed cats in a process of artificial selection, as they were useful predators of vermin. However, this model has been criticized as implausible, because there may have been little reward for such an effort: cats do not carry out commands and, although they do eat rodents, other species such as ferrets or terriers may be better at controlling these pests. The alternative idea is that cats were simply tolerated by people and gradually diverged from their 'wild' relatives through natural selection, as they adapted to hunting the vermin found around humans in towns and villages.
Anatomy
Domestic cats are similar in size to the other members of the genus Felis , typically weighing between 4 kilograms (8 lb 13 oz) and 5 kilograms (11 lb 0 oz). However, some breeds, such as the Maine Coon, can exceed 11 kilograms (25 lb). Conversely, very small cats (less than 1.8 kilograms (3 lb 15 oz)) have been reported. The world record for the largest cat is 21.297 kilograms (46 lb 15.2 oz). The smallest adult cat ever officially recorded weighed around 1.36 kilograms (3 lb). Cats average about 23–25 centimeters (9–10 in) in height and 46 centimeters (18.1 in) in head/body length (males being larger than females), with tails averaging 30 centimeters (11.8 in) in length.
Cats have 7 cervical vertebrae like almost all mammals, 13 thoracic vertebrae (humans have 12), 7 lumbar vertebrae (humans have 5), 3 sacral vertebrae like most mammals (humans have 5 because of their bipedal posture), and a variable number of caudal vertebrae in the tail (humans retain 3 to 5 caudal vertebrae, fused into an internal coccyx). The extra lumbar and thoracic vertebrae account for the cat's spinal mobility and flexibility. Attached to the spine are 13 ribs, the shoulder, and the pelvis. Unlike human arms, cat forelimbs are attached to the shoulder by free-floating clavicle bones, which allows them to pass their body through any space into which they can fit their heads.
The cat skull is unusual among mammals in having very large eye sockets and a powerful and specialized jaw. Within the jaw, cats have teeth adapted for killing prey and tearing meat. When it overpowers its prey, a cat delivers a lethal neck bite with its two long canine teeth, inser
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How to tell your cat is pregnant? Unless you’re breeding your cat chances are you won’t know your cat is pregnant until she is well along in the gestation period.
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How do I know if my cat is pregnant? | Answerbag
How do I know if my cat is pregnant? If you think your cat might be pregnant, you should first check her nipples. These become more prominent and pinker by week three of gestation.
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How do you know if your cat is pregnant? - Yahoo!7 Answers
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