Chinese cat-lovers joke that cats are really a super-intelligent alien species, the 喵星人 (miāoxīngrén, citizens of planet Meow), who came to Earth tens of thousands of years ago to enslave the human race.

They have been rather successful, as shown by the fact that cat-lovers also refer to themselves as 猫奴 (māonú, “slave to cats”) or, for a more exalted version, the humble 铲屎官 (chǎnshǐguān, “Excrement Removal Officer”) to their feline overlord.

To Chinese feline lovers, that overpowering urge to pet a cat whenever you see its impossibly large eyes and fuzzy paws (even in 2D) also has a name, 吸猫 (xīmāo, lit. “snort cat”), implying that such impulses are a lifetime addiction.

The love for cats clearly run deep, which prompts every child to ask at least once in their lives, why the cat isn’t one of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals.

According to the origin myth of the Chinese zodiac, 12 animals were selected by the Jade Emperor through a race. The story goes that when the cat and rat got the news, the cat asked the rat (who was its friend at the time) to wake it up in time for the race, since it was nocturnal. The rat betrayed the cat, and by the time the cat woke up and found the race over, it got so angry it swore that its and the rat’s descendants would be enemies forevermore.

Legend aside, some scholars argues that the concept of 12 animals came into being near the end of the Warring State period (475 BCE – 221 BCE) while domesticated cats only became prevalent in China after they were introduced from the Middle East via the Silk Road during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE – 25). But this does not mean that cats were known to the Chinese before that time.

In the Classic of Poetry (《诗经》), the oldest collection of Chinese poetry, compiled in the 11th to seventh century BCE, there’s a poem that praises a rich northern land that goes: “There are all kinds of bears, cats and tigers (有熊有罴，有猫有虎)”. Here, though the character 猫 (cat) appears, it was listed among other wild beasts found in a far-off realm.

However, in the Book of Rites (《礼记》), a record of the administrative customs and religious rituals of the Zhou dynasty (1046 BCE – 256 BCE), the cat appears to be much more involved in ancient Chinese society. There’s description of a ritual to worship a cat god in the end of a year: “Invite a cat god to offer sacrifice to, for cats eat rats in the farm fields (迎猫，为其食田鼠也……迎而祭之也).”