Felis Sapiens - Technology

Technology

The Cat wears clothes, in a particularly garish style, and it is implied that all other cats dress well. They developed the trouser press before the wheel. The Cat launders his clothing by licking it, as a house cat would; he merely sprays his tongue with detergent first. They seem to need at least five or six showers daily and nine or ten snooze breaks every day, to save energy for his main evening sleep.

Whenever he enters unfamiliar surroundings, he removes a small spray can from his lapel and begins spraying objects, reciting all the while, "This is mine, this is mine." This is apparently a technologically-based scent-marking of his territory; the exact contents of the can are unknown.

Most of their other technology, particularly spacecraft, was stolen from the cargo hold of the Red Dwarf. In particular, they depended on canned food for survival. In the novelisations, the first tool discovered by cats is a can opener.

The Cat race learnt English by watching The Flintstones. They also have a spoken language: the only word known is jozxyqk, meaning "the sound you make when you get your sexual organs trapped in something" (although it is strongly implied this is merely an attempt to cheat at a game of Scrabble). They use their scent to read books and have two hundred and forty-six smell symbols in their lexicon which can be broken down into smaller smells to alter the meaning of the smell. Dave Lister's T-shirt contained a sentence about a fearful, very bad estate agent going to a noxious toilet. Lister can read a cat-authored Dick and Jane early primer by strongly sniffing the pages, but relies on Holly to translate more complicated works, like the Cat Bible.