Animal · Cyprus, Türkiye, Egypt
Domestic cat
Felis catus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The domestic cat is the same species everywhere in the world, and it came to live with people by itself: its wild ancestor moved into the first grain stores to hunt mice. Today there are more cats in homes than any other pet.
Picture credit: Von.grzanka (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the domestic cat live?
Home: Houses, farms and streets on every continent except Antarctica.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Cyprus, Türkiye, Egypt, Germany, the United States.
The short profile
Fully grown: 45–50 cm long, plus a 25–30 cm tail. It weighs about 4 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
Every house cat on Earth descends from the African wildcat, which lives in the Near East and North Africa. When people began storing grain there, about ten thousand years ago, the stores attracted mice — and the mice attracted wildcats. The tamest cats got the best hunting, so tameness was passed on. Nobody had to catch them. The oldest proof is a grave on Cyprus, around 9 500 years old, where a person and a cat were buried together; cats are not native to Cyprus, so somebody carried that cat across the sea by boat. A cat hears far higher sounds than a person can, up to about 64 000 vibrations a second, which covers the squeaks mice make to each other. Its tongue is covered in tiny backward hooks, which is why it feels like sandpaper and why a cat can comb its own fur with it.
Find it on the globe
Domestic cat is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Where does the house cat come from?
From the African wildcat of the Near East and North Africa. Cats were not caught and tamed: they moved into early grain stores on their own to hunt the mice there, and the calmest ones stayed.
Why is a cat's tongue rough?
It is covered in hundreds of tiny hooks that point backwards. They work like a comb: a cat pulls its tongue through its fur to clean it and to spread saliva, which cools the animal as it dries.
Is the house cat a wild animal?
No — it is its own form, kept by people worldwide, and the Red List does not assess it like a wild species. Its relative the European wildcat is a separate, genuinely wild animal that avoids people.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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