A cat yawns at Nekorobi cat cafe on January 20, 2009 in Tokyo, Japan. Cat cafes, where people can spend time with their favorite cat for about 10 US dollars an hour, are now getting more popular with people living in urban areas. The regular customers are mainly in their 20's to 30's and seaking healing by cats, or people who cannot afford to have pets full time. Some visiters come to the cat cafe three times a week. (Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images)

Japanese embroidery artist Hiroko Kubota was in the process of making custom sized clothes for her smaller-framed son when he made a small request: could some of the shirts have cats on them? Kubota explains her son was somewhat obsessed with cats and had collected a small library of adorable images found around the web.

A cat jumps from a shelf to catch a light beam at the “Kis-Kis” Cat Cafe in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, July 6, 2015. A local animals rights group founded the shelter for dozen of homeless cats and combined it with the cafe, where visitors can communicate with animals for hourly fee in addition to drinks, table games, books and WI-FI. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Most pet cats will become timid or defensive when outdoors, but not Millie – after being adopted by her mountain-climbing owner Craig Armstrong, Millie has become a feline hiking and mountain-climbing legend.

The claws are out for North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and Russia's Vladimir Putin – as cats now able to use a model of him as a scratching post. And moggies can also maul at Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose face also features on the new cat toys which are 1.5ft tall and cost £4,500. They are made from hessian rope, and 3D-printed faces are then attached to the posts, before they are handpainted. The toys took a team of artists 200 hours to finish. (Photo by The Pussycat Riot)

A truck filled with 500 cats thought to be destined for restaurants was intercepted on Wednesday in Xuzhou, eastern China’s Jiangsu Province. Officer Sun Hai said he and a colleague pulled the vehicle over during a routine traffic check. The officer commented, “The driver said it was a full load of rabbit, but after we instructed him to uncover the load we were shocked to find a full load of living cats.