Cat imagevia Shutterstock
The other dark , I watched a YouTube video featuring a womanhood stand on her seam , bind a Arabian tea upside down by its feet , then repeatedly drop the cat onto the mattress . Amazingly , every clock time the cat was release , it immediately right itself and landed on its feet .
The woman was performing the same introductory experiment that French scientist Etienne Jules Marey did back in 1890 . Marey , famous for investigations in which his chronophotographic camera was able to capture up to 60 sequent frame a second , dropped a cat and shoot it . And yes , there ’s a time on YouTube :
The role of both of these television was to demonstrate the cat ’s unparalleled innate power to reorientate its consistency during a fall . There ’s even a name for this phenomenon : the “ righting reflex . ” fauna expert say that the righting instinctive reflex is discernible in kitten as betimes as three to four weeks , and is full developed at seven weeks .
How does the righting reflex work?
First , cats have hypersensitive signified organ . A vestibular setup in their internal ear work as a balance and predilection ambit . They always know right side up . secondly , cats have a unequalled skeletal social structure - an unusually flexible backbone and the absence seizure of a collarbone . So when a cat falls , its smoke respond with lightning pep pill , and it is able to reorientate its body and twist its head around so it can see where it ’s going to shore .
Beyond their amazing aerial spins , cats also have what could be call off a build - in chute . Like many small animals , they have a low body - volume - to - weight ratio , which when light , allows them to slow up their velocity by scatter out and becoming their own parachute . It ’s the same kind of maneuver that fly squirrels do in mid - airwave .
But as amazing as their gravity - resist ability are , cats are not unvanquishable .
In 1987 , veterinary surgeon at New York City ’s Animal Medical Center did a study of felines that had fall from tall building . 90 % of them survived , though most sustained serious injury . Of those , more than one - third needed life story - saving discourse , while just under a third required no treatment . What ’s remarkable is that the work found that CAT that fell from heights of 7 to 32 stories were less likely to die than those that fell from 2 to 6 stories .
Why ? One possibility is that after a certain space , a cat reaches maximal speed and that vestibular mechanism in its ear shut off . As a answer , the quat relaxes . As any stuntman can assure you , relaxed limb are less likely to stop than unrelaxed one . Another is that the heavy acme gives the CT prison term to adopt its parachute pose .
For those of you who savour physical science , the “ falling cat trouble , ” as it ’s called , has been parsed in diagram and technical language in online dissertations such as “ Gauge hypothesis of the Falling Cat ” and the Monty Python - ish sound “ Aerial Righting Reflexes in Flightless Animals . ”
Then , of path , there’sThe Buttered Cat Paradox , which Miss Cellania discussed in great detail last year .
So over to you , qat owner . Any amazing stories of your kitten taking lunatic spill and landing on its feet ?
