Falling cats

There is, at Grinwout's headquarters, a cat that flies around from surface to surface as if living in an endless feline Cirque de Soleil. You can't walk across the kitchen without him leaping in front of you from counter to counter, making any attempts at food preparation something less than pacific. You get used to this after a while, but you have to wonder: what is going on in that devious little mind of his: Why must he always climb up on things? And what will happen if he falls?



The answer to that last question is, probably, not much. Cats are very good at falling. We know this because, when cats fall, they don't get all damaged, or at least as damaged as you might predict. As Daniel Nasaw writes in the BBC Magazine:

With scientists unwilling to toss cats off buildings for experimental observation, science has been unable systematically to study the rate at which they live after crashing to the ground. In a 1987 study of 132 cats brought to a New York City emergency veterinary clinic after falls from high-rise buildings, 90% of treated cats survived and only 37% needed emergency treatment to keep them alive. One that fell 32 stories onto concrete suffered only a chipped tooth and a collapsed lung and was released after 48 hours.

Well that's the problem, isn't it? To test the hypotheses on plunging cats, scientists would have to keep tossing them off of extreme heights, and even the most resilient cat will eventually tire of such treatment. But still, the evidence is clear that cats do well in falls, and this article explains why. In a nutshell, it's because cats are arboreal, and like all arboreal animals, they've evolved ways of handling the inevitable unexpected trips to the ground.

This is interesting science: Who, What, Why: How do cats survive falls from great heights?

Via.