Cats Surviving Long Falls
| Cats Surviving Long Falls | |
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| An Investigation by Kristie Neises | |
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Tiger the grey tabby is having a normal day for a cat. He has eaten four times since he woke up at noon, and has had at least twenty minutes worth of petting done to him and it is only three in the afternoon. It is now time for him to lounge on the balcony in the sunlight and take a nap. Tiger jumps up on the railing and easily and casually lies along it to get maximum sun exposure. As he dozes he dreams a lovely dream but soon it changes. Tiger is now restless and his dream that has now turned for the worst, he now has to chase his food instead of having it handed to him in a bowl! Tiger twitches and soon he finds himself wide awake and tumbling through the air down nine stories. As he falls he goes with his instincts, but will they be enough!
When cats fall there is more at work than their quick reflexes. This is especially true when they fall from tall buildings out of windows and balconies (this happens far more often than you think!). Cats have been known to survive falls from two to thirty two stories (in other words around 6 to 98 meters)! These unfortunate and clumsy felines have often walked away with little to no injury! If a human fell from that distance then they would surely be injured. So what is going on here!?
It turns out that not only do cats have a nice talent for reorienting their body so that their legs are nicely facing downward so that they land on their feet during a fall but physics is also at play here. When a cat falls there is gravity and air drag working on it in tandem with its reflexes.
Gravity is a force that is exerted on all things by the earth. It is what keeps us on the ground and keeps things falling back to the earth and not floating away. According to Newton’s second law if a force is acting on an object then it will accelerate. Also when an object falls then its distance is proportional to the square of the elapsed time that has taken place. Air drag/resistance is the other force that is working on a cat while it falls. It turns out that this is a very important force that is the saving factor to many a cat.
Now that we know some of the physics behind it then let’s get back to talking about cats and them being clumsy and falling off of buildings. When a cat falls then it reorients its body so that its legs are underneath it. Once it is reoriented then the cat still has some way to fall (especially with ones that fall more than six stories!). As the cat falls more and more than the amount of air drag acting on it also increases. If the fall is large enough then the air drag is enough to reduce the cat’s acceleration as it falls. At around six stores the cat has enough drag acting on it that it matches the force of gravity and the cat no longer accelerates in its fall, this is called terminal speed. Because a cats body is sensitive (like ours) to terminal speed then it can have one of two reactions. (It has been found that a falling cat's terminal speed is around 100 km/h or about 60mph).
1. If terminal speed is not reached then the body feels the acceleration of the fall. It stays stiff and the legs stay beneath the cat to be ready for a fall which often results in injury. Think of this as falling straight legged down a few stories without being flexible, it will hurt!
Or
2. When terminal speed is reached the body relaxes a little bit since there no longer is acceleration and it cannot be felt. When this happens then the relaxations causes the body to move outward and spread causing even more reference area which then causes more air drag. This increase in air drag reduces the speed of the fall. This reduces the terminal speed that the cat is falling at creating a safer fall that kitty can live through.
It turns out that our fateful friend Tiger the grey tabby falls through the air and down nine stories from his balcony resting spot. He lands on the ground safely on his feet and walks away as if nothing has happened in search of food again. Although it is very interesting to think about a cat falling from many stories and still making it to the ground safely and able to walk away it is still a responsible owner’s job to make sure that their cat cannot fall out of any windows or off any balconies at home. Kitty may be able to reorient his body and create more drag on himself after reaching terminal speed to slow down his fall, but it can still result in injury.
Wikipedia, unknown author, Wikipedia, accessed Oct 25, 2011, www.wikipedia.org
This site is one of the best resources I have found. It gave me information about drag (even going so far as providing the mathematical equations to calculate drag and the drag coefficient of objects), and it also provided information about the way cats right themselves mid air and more details about “High Rise Syndrome”. It even had a short section about falling cats which mostly referred to the problem of if a cat is breaking laws of physics by righting itself but it also briefly talked about cats and reaching terminal velocity/speed. This source was very useful to composing my answer because it explained the technical aspects of everything in very plain and simple explanations. The source is credible for its user based editing system combined with its popularity and the moderators that check that everything is correct. Because of these things combined hundreds of people can help submit to an article and thus create it so that anyone can read it and then afterwards moderators can check to make sure that the information is correct.
Specific Wikipedia Pages Used
Drag Coefficient
Drag Equation
High Rise Syndrome
Cat Righting Reflex
Falling Cat Problem
Dr.Becker M., "Cats' survival in falls? Amazing", The Record (Hackensack, N.J.), Knight Ridder (10/13/2005). p.F.06.
This article was helpful for getting the basic idea of the topic. It talks about “High Rise Syndrome” in cats and how when they reach terminal velocity then they relax and cause more drag. This increased amount of drag slows down their speed to be under terminal velocity. Other than that the article does not go into any technical explanations. It is a good article to use as a starting point since the concepts have been simplified. It was written for a newspaper so it has a bit of casual voice in the writing style but it does not detract from the facts. As far as reliable the author is not going into any technical explanation but instead a simple one that is to be read by anyone and understood so it is reliable for what it is but not as anything more that a starting point.
Dr. Long R., "How cats survive huge falls", for Southam (09/07/2000). Calgary herald(0828-1815), p.41
This article was only semi helpful because it gave a good explanation of falling without a bunch of math. The rest of the article is a bit too fluffy (literally since he refers to all cats as being called Fluffy and never once uses the actual word “cat”). It was written by a veterinarian for a local newspaper recounting a certain local cat who made the news and explained in a humorous and personal way why the cat survived. This source was useful for finding a better description of falling and the drag created specifically for cats. The source is credible enough since it is from a vet but the article is for a popular newspaper in the area and so it is jazzed up a bit and tends to be a bit more dramatic in descriptions of everything else.
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