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Featured The Secret to a Happy Home May Lie with Your Cat Cats are typically known for lounging around, sleeping and getting into mischief. They are also known to linger in the same place or give an intense stare that leaves many people thinking their cat is vying for their attention. But did you know these acts may actually be a sign of an ancient Chinese art that helps bring balance to the home?

The Mystery That Is the Cat

It was nearly thirty-five hundred years ago that the cat was fully domesticated. We have proof of this from writings and pictures of ancient Egypt. But we are not certain that when the process began. This is for sure, though, that few animals have developed such an intimate relationship with mankind.

There are two types of cat, one is wild and the other one is domestic. The domestic cat is a contradiction. It demands and receives great independence in movement and action, but at the same time it has a very close relationship with humans.

The cat leads a double life. At home it is an over-grown kitten gazing up at its owners but outside it is a fully adult, bossy, freedom-loving wild creature, alert and self sufficient, sometimes selfish, and its human protectors for the moment are completely out of its mind.

The cat can manage to remain a tame animal because of the sequence of its upbringing. It becomes attached both with other cats, usually its mother and litter-mates, and with the family of humans that has adopted it, during its infancy and kitten-hood. In fact the cat becomes bi-mental and thinks that it belongs to both species. Since it does not have the concept of mirrors and reflections, it does not have any way of knowing how it looks, and therefore may come to think that it looks like a human being. It may be both feline and human. When it is fully adult most of its responses are feline ones and it has only one major reaction to its human owners. It treats them as pseudo-parents because at the tender age when they are taken from their real mother they are given milk and food by the human owner.

Cats are solitary hunters of small prey. It has been seen in history that they were of little use to human huntsmen in the field because they weren't pack hunters who could be useful on the hunt. Neither did they raise the alarm in response to intruders at home, and were of little use as guardians of property, or as defenders of their owners. The usefulness of cats came much later, when human beings learned agriculture and settled down in villages and cities for the first time, and needed a way to protect their granaries against the infestation of pests and rodents.

Cats do have a complex social organization, but they never hunt in packs. In the wild most of their day is spent in solitary stalking. Going for a walk with a human therefore has no appeal for them. And as for "coming to heel" and learning to "sit" and "stay," they are simply not interested. So, the moment a cat manages to persuade a human being to open a door, it is off and away without a backward glance. as it goes out it just forgets about its mentor and the wild-cat-brain is clicked on.

In fact, a huge difference between a cat lover and a dog lover is noticeable. Usually cat lovers have a stronger personality bias toward independent thought and action. Artists like cats whereas soldiers like dogs. One interesting thing is that usually women love cats whereas men like dogs.

Dogs are more attached to their owners, while cats are more dedicated to the house where they have always lived. If you move your residence from one place to another, your dog shall surely follow you, but your cat is more likely to remain at the old place, adapting to its new owners.

Cats have an amazing sensory capacities, beautiful voice and graceful body language, excellent hunting actions, complex sexual behavior, and noticeable parental care which endear them to the humans for ages.

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