A cat represents a specialization of a Miacis in terms of species ancestry which is the first known carnid (carnivorous, or meat-eating) creature that is parly-arboreal and appeared during the Paleoscene and Eocene Epoch. The Miacis is thus a common ancestor of any carnivorous animal such as cats (and other genre such as lions, cheetahs, etc.), dogs, foxes, bears, and so on, such that its pattern should be helpful for studying and tracing the behaviour of modern-day carnids.

The most traditional potty-training for a cat involves violence however that is unnecessary. In order to potty-train a cat, the procedure is to pick up the cat when it's young after every meal and every nap and place the cat onto the litter tray on top of the sand. Cats are apparently wired to recognize the sand and to know what the sand is for. If the cat does not do anything and just leaves the tray, then that is completely alright and the procedure should be repeated until the cat goes at least once at the litter tray. Once the cat goes once, it has been potty trained and the procedure can be cased.

Cats are capable of rudimentary language and communication and that varies depending on how much time has been vested in spending time with the cat as it grew up. Interestingly, however, the language seems to be species-wide and not localized to enducation There are certain queues and behaviors that comprise the communication corpus that a cat is capable of.

Note that cats are primarily territorial such that staring at cats for a long while will sooner or later garner some sort of response.

Cats also talk back to some degree and just like humans the syntax is to be found in the tonal modulation; that is, depending on how the pitch varies, certain different things might be meant.

A short-high pitched meow or several very short high pitched meows in quick succession is usually a sign of acknowledgment just like a non-verbal smiling queue and the meow is high pitched, often several meows and uttered in quick succession. A long whiny yelp is definitely a sign of pain or distress.

Observably The behavioural patterns seem consistent across the entire species, possibly even with extension to the feline family.

Interestingly, "purring" is another feature of the language spoken by cats because "purring" is not a hereditary behavior but rather a learned behavior imprinted onto cats by their mothers after birth and during nursing (just like a nursing rhyme). As the cat grows up purring is then associated with memories of younger days.

Young cats can be adopted right-after the milking cycle, but removing a cat from the rest of the litter during the early days, perhaps even before the milking cycle stops, might end up with a cat that simply does not purr. For that purpose, it is important to remember that when a cat grows, ideally the person nurturing the cat should purr at the cat in order to imprint the same behavior.

Otherwise, cats learn a lot during their early days nursing and that includes a wide array of skills, "purring" but also hunting such that it is essential for young kitties to receive a very large amount of attention during the months that they are supposed to spend with their mothers.

Cats are heavily carnivorous with the only exception being that from time to time they tend to ingest some forms of grass to help digestion.

Cats are very apt visually and auditively but their main long-term memorization takes place olfactively. A cat is said to forget a person's face in a matter of hours but they will remember the person's smell much much longer. This is somewhat different from a dog that will still use visual and audio queues to determine the identify of a person, even if both cats and dogs have smell as their most advanced sense.

Cats are trainable with the note that they do not respond well to punishment and typically do not understand punishment very well. Having said that, it is possible to train a cat using the other half of the traditional Pavlovian training method by just rewarding the cat with treats when it does what is desirable and foregoing the punishment.

A little-known fact is that cats have 6 fingers per paw and not 5 as one would excpect. The 6th finger consists in the Carpal Pad and even though one might say it is a recessive trait, because cats cannot really control the 6th finger like the others and the finger does not even contain a claw, the 6th finger is still mechanically relevant when it comes to the cat gripping, grabbing or grappling.

The side-image does not picture the situation too clearly, but the 6th finger, the Carpal Pad, tends to be somewhat lower and diametrically opposed to the Dew Claw (a rough thumb equivalent) in older and more mature cats, which means that when a cat twists its hand it can grip onto something between the Dew Claw and the Carpal Pad pretty reliably without even using the other fingers.

Perhaps a way to reason about this is to realize that both dogs and cats all stem from miacids, which is an extinct group of animals said to be the ancestors of all carnivorous animals, that were also said to be arboreal or tree-dwelling animals such that the extra finger is a latent trait that would help greatly when grappling on a tree.

A complete hunting cycle not only includes the cat hunting prey but also catching the pray which provides the cat with the actual satisfaction.

Cat laser toys on the other hand only fulfill half of the cycle and are actually teasers and frustrators for the cat that will never actually manage to "catch" the laser dot.

Inanimate toys are not all too suitable for cats because they provide the second half of the cycle and that is being caught but there is not much hunting involved because the toy is inanimate.

Perhaps a suitable compromise, and providing that sufficient time is given for the cat to acclimatize itself with the toy, is a cheap remote-controlled race car meant for very young children that could provide the cat with a complete hunting cycle.

Surprisingly, cats seem afraid of smoke but cats are not afraid of fire! Turning a lighter on in front of a cat will make the cat curious or perhaps even approach the fire, in some cases going as far as trying to smell the flame as if it were some novelty. However, if one were to set something on fire that generates smoke, the cat will be terrified by the scene and run as fast as it can. This shows that there is a massive lack of knowledge about "fire" but a genetic memory or averse predisposition about "smoke" - this judgement is made upon a case where a cat was removed from its litter at a young age and did not have any other guiding or feedback except nursing such that having any foreknowledge about either "fire" or "smoke" would have been impossible, except for some genetic memory.

We would argue that cats being afraid of smoke and not fire can be traced back palentologically to Miacis' and their property of being semi-arboreal creatures (the same reason for which they might have kept more digits to help climbing) that took refuge in trees (trees that would be rather short, typical of the flora in North America, Europe-Africa). It could be possible that cats that got to be close to a flame did not live to tell about it compared to cats that were further away and saw the smoke from afar along with the destruction.

Knowing European-African flora, wildfires are very common and extremely destructive given the low humidity threshold in the air, such that any fire that breaks out burns like benzine through wood and adjacent bushes. Miacis' were around between the Paleocene and the Eocene Epoch, a time during which continents like Africa or Europe had way more vegetation than in modern times. In fact, it is said that palm trees and sunny weather existed at the arctic circle with the mean-average temperature of the planet topping at over before the start of the modern ice age that continues up to today that drove all the temperatures down. Looking at the previous image, Miacis appeared during periods of extreme heat, thunderstorms, rains and very little ice covering the planet such that thick vegetation inhabited by animals was more than likely the landscape of that epoch. Clearly, the destructive force of an African wildfire as observed today is something that would have affected the habitat of cats as arboreal creatures, even more so during a time of extreme heat and dense vegetation. It is interesting how "knowledge of smoke" or the fright thereof, is literally embedded within a cat but showing the actual source of the danger, namely the flame, does not impress the cat at all.

The difference between the reactions to smoke vs. fire would be difficult to explain otherwise.

Officially there is a separation of research results determining whether cats are self-aware or not. The fine line of settling of the argument has been that "some cats are self-aware and some are not self-aware".

We would argue that cats are mostly self-aware, for whatever subset of human behavior satisfies the observational frame of a human being for an animal to be self-aware, for multiple reasons that we would like to enumerate here and that are part of our own observations.

Note that these observations are carried out onto the shoulders of cats that grew up indoors without any communication with other cats, except from veterinary visits where they might have seen other cats. Otherwise, the cats have grown up among humans such that any "foreknowledge" or mimicry that could lead to certain behavioural patterns would not exist.

Here is a list:

• A cat can "strike a pose" when it wants to impress a human. The posture is actually similar to modelling for humans with the left-most or right-most legs slightly forward, back arched back, tail in the air, etc., that seems to be used consistently and repetitively every time the cat is seeking to impress or would like a treat. The question is, if a cat is not self-aware, then how does a cat know in what posture it looks at its finest? Clearly, if it knows what posture it looks at its finest, then that is just through the sheer logic of definitions, "self awareness".

• Cats sometimes exhibit behavious in certain contexts that would hint that cats have a sense of humor. The humor is more along the lines of being mocking towards a human, taunting or teasing but without actually wanting to provoke a fight. Similarly, a cat that wants to exhibit a behavior that is indicative of boredom, might take a posture or a stance that is really very similar to humans when they exhibit behaviors signalling to the people around that they are bored. Humor, implies inteligence and self-criticism, even if it is mocking or rudimentary such that cats that manifest such behaviors tend to be self aware.

• The Mirror self-recognition test (MSR) is a test where an animal is placed before a mirror and iff. the animal touches its own body instead of the mirror then it is deemed to be self-aware. Iff. on the other hand the animal touches the mirror instead of its own body it is said to not be self-aware. However, it would be a question whether the animal would actually be a willing participant in this test or whether the animal might just walk away feeling impartial to being part of the experiment at all. We have seen cats that see themselves in the mirror, or even see the owner carrying them and do not react to the mirror, either by touching themselves or the mirror at all. Then again, how and why would a cat touch itself if it ever saw and recognized itself in the mirror? Cats groom themselves automatically without any feedback such that we would wager that a cat that sees the mirror and, at the very least, is not scared of its own reflection, should be considered a soft-pass of the MSR test in the context of cat behavior. Conversely, iff. the cat is scared of its reflection or tries to attack it, then the cat might not be self-aware.
  • The standard test involves an animal that is additionally painted without knowing while being anesthetized such that the test will determine if the animal recognizes itself visually given that the paint would appear out of order. However, there is some degree of carelessness or under-appreciation that animals manifest towards aesthetics, particularly when it is about their own bodies. This includes many animals and miacids in particular that just love throwing themselves in mud pits, rolling around in the rain and making a mess of themselves, such that it is not even clear that an animal would actually care about the paint. Cats in particular clean themselves "automatically" and that includes the entirety of their body but cats tend to prioritize spots that hurt or maybe even bother them and seemingly without actually paying attention to color patterns.

• Well-grown cats (see later comment) are able to properly distinguish elements of the human body and quite reliably so. The observation is trivial and can be made while rough-housing with a cat while noticing that, no matter how rough it gets, the cat will still be reticent and will try to avoid scratching a human across the face, the eyes and other parts that the cat somehow "instinctively" knows that they are fragile. In some ways, this denotes a sense of self-preservation that is projected onto a human where the cat is ... self-aware enough to determine that claw in the eye is something extremely damaging and should not be done.

One addition that we'd like to make is the observation that, compared to the human species, cats tend to bond and be extremely upon their parents, especially their mothers during the nursing period. Whilst it is alright to remove a cat from a litter right after it is not dependent on its mother's milk and can be administered food, cats actually acquire a whole array of skills from their parents in the early days, which includes fighting, purring and are taught to recognize various elements of the environment. The cat's upbringing projected onto its lifespan regarding its education is similar to a logarithmic curve where the formative days, weeks and months teach a cat way, way more than the cat will learn later on. Purring, for example, is a skill that is acquired by a cat in the early weeks of nursing by its mother, or, a skill that the cat cannot learn at all after the nursing period if it was not taught to purr. With that said, during the formative phase, it is important to vest as much time as available into a cat, teaching it to purr, potty training, playing with it, touching and stroking across the eyes, the nose, letting the cat see the guardian's face, and so on, in order to try and convey as much surrogate experience as possible. In context, it seems little surprising that a cat that is well-grown tends to manifest more behaviors that are indicative (to the human frame) of self-awareness, higher order cognizance and intellect.