51 Most Popular Cat Breeds in the World | How Cat Breeds Origins

51 Most Popular Cat Breeds in the World | How Cat Breeds And Their Origins 

The cat (Felis catus) is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and is often referred to as the domestic cat to distinguish it from the wild members of the family. A cat can either be a house cat, a farm cat or a feral cat; the latter ranges freely and avoids human contact. Domestic cats are valued by humans for companionship and their ability to hunt rodents. About 51 cat breeds are recognized by various cat registries.

The cat is similar in anatomy to the other felid species: it has a strong flexible body, quick reflexes, sharp teeth and retractable claws adapted to killing small prey. Its night vision and sense of smell are well developed. Cat communication includes vocalizations like meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling and grunting as well as cat-specific body language. It is a solitary hunter but a social species. It can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, such as those made by mice and other small mammals. It is a predator that is most active at dawn and dusk. It secretes and perceives pheromones.

Female domestic cats can have kittens from spring to late autumn, with litter sizes often ranging from two to five kittens. Domestic cats are bred and shown at events as registered pedigreed cats, a hobby known as cat fancy. Failure to control breeding of pet cats by spaying and neutering, as well as abandonment of pets, resulted in large numbers of feral cats worldwide, contributing to the extinction of entire bird, mammal, and reptile species, and evoking population control.

Cats were first domesticated in the Near East around 7500 BCE. It was long thought that cat domestication was initiated in ancient Egypt, as since around 3100 BCE veneration was given to cats in ancient Egypt.As of 2017, the domestic cat was the second-most popular pet in the United States, with 95 million cats owned. In the United Kingdom, around 7.3 million cats lived in more than 4.8 million households as of 2019.

A dog may be a human's best friend, but cats aren't far from it either. Worshiped since the times of ancient Egypt, these lovely furry creatures sure know ways to people's hearts. Therefore, it will probably come as no surprise that even long before the era of the internet and YouTube, cat videos were already popular. Back in 1894, inventor Thomas Edison filmed two kittens "boxing" inside a ring, and this just proves the fact that humans have long been obsessed with cute cat content way before it was cool.

However, one thing that separates dogs from cats is how they became domesticated. One recent survey of cat genes suggests that the felines might have actually domesticated us, and not the other way around. According to scientists, the earlier ancestors of domestic cats spread from southwest Asia into Europe sometime around 4400 B.C. Cats started hanging around farming communities in the Fertile Crescent about 8,000 years ago, where they formed a mutually beneficial relationship with humans.

Surprisingly, the same study reveals that wild and domestic cats showed almost no major differences in their genetics, with one of the traits telling them apart being their tabby coat markings. It is speculated that the marking began appearing in domesticated cats in the Middle Ages, and the gene for this type of coat goes back to the Ottoman Empire. It was only in the 18th century that the tabby coat markings became widespread to be fully associated with domestic cats. However, creating new cat breeds came even later—in the 19th century.