Cats are (almost) liquid
Calvin vindicated
Before I had cats, I used to think of them in terms of other animals. What I mean is that a dog or a horse is very defined by its skeletal structure. They are like popsicle stick armatures with some flesh thrown on.
Now I think of cats more like amorphous blobs with some hard bits stuck on. I think anyone who owns a cat will know what I mean by this.
Missing a cite to some pioneering work on this in the 30s by A.S.J. Tessimond [1]
Cats no less liquid than their shadows
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned
These are old news for those of us that grew bonsai kittens in the late 90s.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050203111131/http://bonsaikitt...
Obviously it was a hoax, probably one of the first ones reaching the first generation of internet users. But lots of people fell for it.
I wish they did this experiment with two slits to see if cats behaved (almost) like particles and/or (almost) like waves
Oh but that is old news!
"On the Rheology of Cats":
https://www.drgoulu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Rheology-...
My cat woke up, did a big stretch, and yawned. Then she hiccoughed, turned into a small dragon, and coughed up a fireball.
"!!!" I said.
"What?" She shrugged back into cat form.
"You're a shape shifter?"
"All cats are. There's just never any reason to not be a cat."
> If the opportunity was given to them, dogs opted for a detour in the case of uncomfortably small apertures
Except in the case of one very sweet but not exactly brilliant large dog I know that legitimately believes his entire body is just the tip of his nose that he can see. I’ve seen him walk straight through a 2” hole in a screen door, and he will repeatedly try to sit on e.g. a chair armrest and not understand why it doesn’t work.
Having 7 cats, they are all different. My oldest mail holds himself rigid. The youngest male - still a kitten - is a noodle of murder and destruction.
Interesting because I have recently been trying to catch a stray cat for a capture-release process and the cat will not walk into a typical trap-door type wire mesh trap. Watching him on video the roof of the trap seems to freak him out. It seems a better trap would have a narrow gap with high door that lets them confidently walk into the trap and trigger would just block the slot perhaps with some sort of sliding door blocking the exit.
The overhead view of figure 3 in particular is noteworthy to me. The 3 human subjects are represented as abstract ovals, and the cat drawn as a cat who is staring up as if to look through the fourth ceiling at the reader.
The reader becomes, in a sense, a greeble.
This paper would have been a fun project for a scientific illustrator.
There's no mention of their whiskers, I was under the impression that this is what they use to become aware of their body size in tight spaces.
> their free-floating, diminutive collarbones allow them to squeeze themselves through very narrow gaps.
Detached collarbones is one of the many interesting things I know about cats because of my cat obsessed kid!
In addition to the vibrissae explanation, I also wonder if their eyes (vertical pupils) just see better when it comes to height and not width, necessitating greater hesitation when it comes to judging things at their height and not high in the air. I am thinking they might need to move their head or eyes a bit side to side, though it may still be too fast to be readily apparent to the researcher. Relevant article [1]:
"If you have a vertical slit, you're very likely to be an ambush predator," says Banks. That's the kind of animal who lies in wait and then leaps out to kill. He says these predators need to accurately judge the distance to their prey, and the vertical slit has optical features that make it ideal for that.
But that rule only holds if the animal is short, so its eyes aren't too high off the ground, Sprague says."
Ergo, cats have vertical pupils but tigers have round pupils. The tiger can probably judge horizontal distances better than the cat.
1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/08/07/4301496...
This sounds like something Karl Pilkington would come up with.
The title made me click, and the content was enjoyable. But I still don't think clickbait like this should be present in scientific papers.
It's something about how scientific papers are not "for pleasure", they're informational tools. An easter egg in a game is cool right, but an easter egg in a graphics driver? That's the distinction I'm making here.
I watched as a cat dove through a narrow opening (stair baulsters)only to wedge its aft end,stop dead,do a totaly ignoble face plant,and then sort of oooze through to land gracelessly. So in this case there was no hesitation,and cats regularly missjudge and get run over by cars,so at best the data is just that...data.
Much easier: A cat only knows about the size of its head. If the head fits through, the body will do also. That's extremely easy to guess for a cat, no body awareness, just head radius awareness
This seems relevant: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lastquarte...
Cats cannot be defined as liquid, as liquid is a scientific classification based in the laws of physics, and cats are widely known for not particularly caring about obeying the laws of physics.
When a cat can go between two openings that are too small for the cat to pass through and the cat isn't being observed is what's interesting though and nobody has yet explained that.
Anecdotally my cat is always very cautious before going through cat flags, which are not particularly narrow but very short, but never hesitate to run into narrow but deep stuff...
We need a documentary.
I accidentally closed a very heavy door on my childhood cat and thought I killed it but it just bounced back and was perfectly fine.
I wonder if the same experiment could be done with big cats - Would an opening that touches the mane of a lion have the same results?
This science paper could have been a cat meme video. Never thought I would be saying that and meaning it literally.
I'm more amazed that the authors could cite 52 references of similar studies!
Feels like a candidate for the Ig Nobel prize - and this is high praise!
related (german) https://noe.orf.at/stories/3272194/
This is why they flow out of our grasp.
Obligatory Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/catsareliquid/.
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Here's the podcast: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/52350e74-f4b0-42d9-a1...
> While dogs slowed down and hesitated before they attempted to use an uncomfortably small opening, in the case of cats, we did not detect this change in their behavior before their attempt to go through even the narrowest openings. However, remarkably, cats showed hesitation both before they attempted to penetrate the shortest openings, and while they moved through it.
I just skimmed, but I didn’t see any mention whiskers. It’s seems to me that cats can make highly precise measurements of width just by sticking their heads in a space, but height judgments requires additional consideration.