adelaidemedblog

Dear Reader,

What’s up?

First download this Such Great Heights - The Postal Service and listen to it while reading the following:

You may not be interested, but I learnt today that although the fact that cats always land on their feet may not be true, it is proven that cats have a lower mortality rate when flung out of high rise apartment windows when compared to that of adult humans.

Although concrete pavement may be a precipitating factor, broken bones are generally common to animals or humans that fall onto the ground from a great height. However, there is more to this than meets the feet. A cat’s likelihood of doing serious damage to itself, if drawn on a graph, follows a negatively skewed parabolic curve of sorts with the x-axis being the distance from the ground, in stories, and the y-axis being the damage done. If we drew a line on this graph regarding humans, it would be a very linear line, suggesting that these two variables are, surprisingly, directly proportional.

To begin to explain, cats have a normal feline reflex that causes them to arch their backs and twist their bodies as they fall, although this ability is restricted by the acceleration that is exerted upon them. French doctor Étienne Jules Marey discovered the exact pictographical mechanism by which this happens in late 1894, which is a good one hundred and thirteen years before I am explaining these facts to you. Additionally, a cat has another innate feline ability to not only orient their bodies in the air to land on their feet, but collapse their bodies in such a way that the impact imparted by their bodies on the ground when they hit is diffuse - that is, spread out over a larger area of soft tissues, which are not so easily permanently damaged compared with bone.

So why is the damage done to a cat falling from height a parabolic curve? The point of inflection lies at 7 stories (the most practical method), when the kitty is at too high a point to escape by lack of velocity and too low to have time to equilibriate itself with the ground. At heights lower than 7 stories, a cat can use its feline skills to cushion its fall, via the method mentioned above, and despite the lack of time this alone is sufficient to prevent serious damage. So why does the damage a cat does to itself actually decrease when the height of dropping the muggy increases?

Herein lies the answer: Tiger won’t keep accelerating until she hits the ground.

Well, technically she will keep on accelerating, but this acceleration is akin to the acceleration of astronauts circulating the earth and so it really doesn’t affect anything in this scenario. A result of the pussy having a relatively light size/weight to surface area ratio is that, at some point in time, she will reach a terminal velocity. Before we imagine a Charlie Sheen blow-up doll bouncing up and down after a 30-storey fall, as a Charlie Sheen blow-up doll should do, we should consider the plight of the confused cat, suddenly finding itself flying out a window of a 30th floor apartment, legs, tail and all flailing behind - and a second after, above - it.

At this time, we need to take into account that a cat will relax when no forces are acting on it. This occurs only after the initial acceleration towards the ground occurs, after terminal velocity has been reached. To extrapolate, the shock of the cooler air coupled with the sudden acceleration of free fall will cause this particular cat’s body to tense, reducing the natural feline protective reflexes that enable equilibriation with the tail and flexing of the legs, thus explaining the higher incidence of cat damage at the point of the 7th level when compared with the rest of the statistical population. When falling from a higher level, the effect of terminal velocity is to relax the body, restoring proper muscular control, and also (of course), restrict the speed at which the pussy will eventually hit the ground.

I hope that during this reading time, you have discovered the answer to the question that many of you may or may not have had brewing away in the back of your minds: Why do vets see so many cats with jaw injuries?

If you have, then I have fulfilled the ultimate purpose of this short discourse of mine.

If not, well sit tight, because that, for better or for worse, is for another day.