36 Facts About Cats - mental_floss List Show (Ep.221)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube and this is Lila

You know, Lila, we have a lot in common. We're both friends with Meredith, we both live in Indiana, we both hate mice

The major difference is that you do your own grooming, whereas I rely upon Mark for my makeup

Anyway, did you know that Mary Todd Lincoln was once asked if Abe Lincoln had any hobbies and her reply was...cats

That's the first of many cat facts I will be sharing with you today in this video presented by our friends at GEICO

Hold on a moment, I have to go find Lila. Since I'm talking about historical figures who loved cats, Charles Dickens once said

what greater gift than the love of a cat? You have to remember he lived before the Xbox One

John Lennon was also a big fan of cats. Over the years he had cats named Salt and Pepper, Major and Minor, Tim, Sam, Mimi, Bernard

Sally, Elvis, and Jesus. You think Jesus walked around just thinking he was, you know, Jesus

Of course he did. He was a cat. Polydactyl felines are sometimes called Hemingway cats because Ernest Hemingway once had a six-toed cat named Snowball

He let it run wild outside his Key West home and now there are some 40 to 50 six-toed descendants of Snowball still allowed to roam around his house

Speaking of which, outdoor cats somehow timeshare areas to prevent fights. Like, even if multiple cats like going to the same place, they seem to have some way of knowing how to avoid each other

In 1894, Thomas Edison reportedly made the very first viral cat video when he filmed two cats hashing it out in a tiny boxing ring, with a bit of help from human handlers, of course

It's a great video, but I'm gonna stick with keyboard cats. The cat who played Crookshanks in Harry Potter endured a great indignity in service to his work

His trainers would gather bits of his shed fur, roll it into balls, and clip them back onto him in order to really pump up his rough and slightly mangy appearance

Onto another famous cat, Mr. Bigglesworth, the hairless sphinx from the Austin Powers

movies is named SGC Belfry Ted Nude Gent. Anybody? Nude gent? Huh? Cuz he's a sphinx

Some cats who had nothing to do with the film industry still manage to get famous. For example

Humphrey was the first feline to be named Chief Government Mouser in the United Kingdom The black and white cat wandered into number 10 Downing Street in 1989 and was quickly employed by the Cabinet Office He remained in the esteemed position for three successive Prime Ministers proving that while

it's hard out there for a cat, it's harder out there for a Prime Minister

Anyway, nowadays the British government employs over 100,000 cats to keep mice away

That's almost double the population of Greenland. Bill Clinton's cat, Socks, didn't love the family's Labrador retriever, Buddy, which

which is an example of irony because his name was literally Buddy

A cat named Tibbles, along with several other cats, caused the Stevens Island Wren to go extinct as a result of overhunting

Which leads to the question, who would name their cat Tibbles? No wonder he acted out in anger and hunted down all those Stevens Island Wrens

The mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska, is a cat named Stubbs. He is now responsible for the town's steady stream of 30 to 40 tourists daily, which is pretty good for a town of just 900 people

Some of us know Talkeetna, Alaska because of the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival, which is famous because that's where I got dumped one time

In 1963, France sent the first cat into space, but in the two years prior, they'd sent several rats into space

No word on whether the cat was able to, you know, like, track down the rats. Probably not, though. I've seen gravity

This cat's on its way to space, but I don't see George Clooney, so I'm a little nervous

In the early 1800s, Trim the cat, along with his owner, Captain Matthew Flinders, completed

the first ever circumnavigation of Australia. And since we're talking about history, scientists once believed that cats were domesticated

in ancient Egypt approximately 4,000 years ago, but new research published in 2013 shows

that a breed of once wild cats lived in close proximity to farmers in China some 5,300 years ago

Hairballs were once thought to cure epilepsy, the plague, and poisoning. Like during the Middle Ages, hairballs were even set in gold

You can also set a cat in gold. In the 1870s, a Belgian village trained 37 male cats to deliver letters

Conceived by the esteemed Belgian Society for the Elevation of the Domestic Cat, the

plan was to wrap waterproof mailbags around each feline's neck. And the plan failed

But some cats have jobs that they actually pretty successful at like Tama the cat who a station master at the Wakiyama Electric Rail Station in Japan and has two assistants who are also cats A study done in 2008 found that Tama helped bring in annually 1 billion yen or 10 million dollars to the local economy thanks to tourism

Because who doesn't want to go to a station that's run by a cat

Russia loses about 800 million dollars a year from illegal sturgeon fishing, so in 2003

police in Stavropol hired a cat named Rusik to sniff out sturgeon smugglers

Speaking of Russia, in the 1960s America deployed the first cat ever used to spy on the Russians

It cost 20 million dollars and was immediately hit by a taxi after leaving the CIA van

This cat had recording devices surgically implanted into it and it made it like one minute into Russia

In 1997, Quetzel the Cat jumped on a piano and created a song

The cat's owner transcribed that tune and submitted the piece to a Parisian music competition

where it won a prize. That's awesome. Even cats are less tone-deaf than I am

Then of course we have fictional cats like Hello Kitty, who was actually partially named

after Alice's cat, Kitty, from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. The creator added the hello later

Why is Hello Kitty in a jar, by the way? Speaking of name origins, Tom, of the Tom and Jerry cartoons, was originally named Jasper

Yon Cat was created by 25-year-old Christopher Torres while he was participating in a donation

drive for the Red Cross. One person suggested he draw a Pop-Tart, and another person suggested that he draw a cat

He ended up creating the first hybrid Pop-Tart cat. Some cats are actually allergic to humans

Like one in every 200 cats is diagnosed with cat asthma, which is worse when they come

into contact with humans. Some people are allergic to cats of course, but I find that 1 in 200 people lie and say

that they have a cat allergy when in fact they just don't like cats. According to Psychology Today, quote, the brains of cats have an amazing surface folding and

a structure that is about 90% similar to ours. The cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that's responsible for cognitive information

processing is actually more complex in cats than it is in dogs, and cats have some 300

million neurons, whereas dogs only have about 160 million. Speaking of cat brains, felines also have their own form of Alzheimer's disease

Also like us they can get fat In fact 55 of American cats are either overweight or obese Cats also can taste sweet food which makes me wonder how are they getting obese Cats purr when

they're content, but they also purr when they're giving birth, or sick, or nursing

or wounded, or in a stressful situation. Ugh, cats, can't you be straightforward about any of your feelings? They're astonishingly

emotionally complex, or maybe they just hate me, I can't tell, actually. Speaking of how

complicated a creature the cat is, some cats prefer wicking their paws to drinking out

of a water bowl if they don't like the shape of the water bowl. Some also experience what's called a whisker stress. They may not like the pressure of their

whiskers while they eat or drink. Cats spend between 30 and 50 percent of their days cleaning themselves, which means that

even though your cat poops in the house, it's still cleaner than most hipsters

Meredith. We can't say bad things about hipsters, that's our core audience

Hairballs, by the way, aren't just for cats. Like, cows and rabbits are especially prone to hairballs, but their bodies aren't designed

to vomit them up. Fascinatingly, it seems that cats who tumble from great heights have a much better chance

of survival than those who fall from five stories or fewer. Obviously don't try this at home, but it may be because terminal velocity for a cat

isn't that high, and if it comes from really high up, it has more time to, like, get ready

for the fall. Don't try it at home. And finally, I return to my salon to tell you, and also Lila, that the record for a cat

surviving a fall? 43 stories. Mila, I think that's taller than the tallest building in

Indianapolis, so you should be fine. Thanks to Geico for making this video possible, and thanks to you for watching Menoplas here

on YouTube, which is made with the help of all of these nice people. Every week we endeavor

to answer one of your mind-blowing questions. This week's question comes from Amanda Stewart, who asks, where is the hole in the ozone in

relationship to Earth's landmasses? Does it stay in the same place or does it move

Well Amanda, that's a fascinating question that I feel unqualified to answer. After all

I am not a scientist, but we have one here in the studio today

Lila? If you have a mind-blowing question, please leave it in comments

We'll endeavor to answer as many as we can. Thanks again for watching, and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome