Cat Facts For Kids

Does your kid love cats? Keep them entertained with 20 fun and educational cat facts!

1. Cats don’t have a sweet tooth. Not only is chocolate bad for them (you should never feed a cat chocolate as it could make them very sick), but humans and cats have different taste buds and cats can’t notice the sweetness in food. Cats can’t tell if something is sweet or not because their natural diet doesn’t contain anything sweet.
2. Cats are space travellers. In 1963, a black and white stray cat called Felicette was sent to space on a rocket!
3. Cats have much better night vision than humans. While they can’t see in total darkness, they can see 6 times better than humans.
4. Cats have 20 muscles in their ears and can move each ear separately.
5. Cats can hear high pitched noises that humans and even dogs wouldn’t notice.
6. Cats are nocturnal creatures and are liveliest at night. This is because night-time is full of prey creatures that cats like to hunt.
7. Cats are lazy creatures and sleep between 12-16 hours a day. Unlike humans, cats don’t sleep solidly for hours on end and spend the rest of the day awake. Instead, they nap on and off throughout the day. If you think 16 hours is long, lions and tigers sometimes sleep for up to 20 hours a day!
8. Cats have a really good sense of smell because they have 80 million smell receptors while humans only have 5 million.
9. Cats are good for your health. Having a pet cat can reduce anxiety, lower blood pressure, sooth headaches and cheer people up when they’re down.
10. Tardar Sauce (i.e. Grumpy Cat) became an American internet celebrity because of her hilariously grumpy facial expression. She currently has 2.4m followers on Instagram and in January 2018 she won a $70,000 law suit.
11. Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor who conquered lots of places including modern day France, was allegedly afraid of cats. So were Mussolini, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Hitler.
12. Cats have 230 bones and 24 whiskers.
13. Most cats are lactose intolerant. Despite cute pictures of cats drinking milk from saucers they shouldn’t actually be given cow’s milk because it makes them ill.
14. Cats can run up to 30 miles an hour although most of the time they’d rather lie down. How fast can you run?
15. The proper name for a group of kittens is a kindle.
16. Cats say hello to each other by rubbing noses.
17. The Ancient Egyptians loved cats and worshiped a Cat Goddess called Bastet, who has the head of a cat and the body of a person. Cats were mummified along with other animals to accompany humans into the afterlife.
18. Domestic cats have been around for over 9,500 years.
19. Cats can be right or left handed (or pawed) just like humans. Females tend to be right pawed, while male cats tend to be left pawed.
20. Isaac Newton invented the cat flap to stop his own cat roaming around his house and disturbing his experiments.