Look! A cat!
No, seriously. Have you ever really looked at one of these before?
The kitty doesn’t have to be Fluffy, although house cats are a lot easier to study at home than, say, mountain lions or tigers.
Believe it or not, apart from size and a few lifestyle-related anatomical details, you do have a little mountain lion/tiger there!
The essence of Cat is not so easy to describe. (Image: Olas, CC BY-SA 2.0)
That’s because all members of family Felidae are built alike. (Turner and Anton)
What is a cat?
This information is from Kitchener et al., Wright and Walters, and some fun hours spent watching house cats — my own and friends’ cats.
The long feline body is much more supple than that of a gray wolf (Fido’s closest relative; I use wolves for comparison because dogs have been domesticated longer and in many cases don’t look much like their forebear now; outside the show ring, Fluffy still resembles its African wildcat ancestor in many ways).
B. J. Deming 