 As well as being kept as pets , cats are also used in the international fur and leather industries for making coats , hats , blankets and stuffed toys ; and shoes , gloves and musical instruments respectively ( about 24 cats are needed to make a cat fur coat ) . This use has now been outlawed in the United States , Australia , and the European Union . Cat pelts have been used for superstitious purposes as part of the practise of witchcraft , and are still made into blankets in Switzerland as folk remedies believed to help rheumatism . In the Western intellectual tradition , the idea of cats as everyday objects have served to illustrate problems of quantum mechanics in the Schrödinger 's cat thought experiment . 
