It is widely believed that cats have a unique property: if the head crashes into a hole, it means that the animal can be grouped so that the whole body passes. We decided to check if this belief is confirmed by scientific facts.
Information About this unique capabilities cats Most often you can Meet on specialized resources about these animals. Answer on questionwith what Related Such peculiarity, users Looking for on various forums And sites. Usually amazing The flexibility of cats is veterinary Doctors, Media And Users social networks Explain What cats No Klyuchits. IN connection With Incredible plasticity These animals Can even Meet messages, Like Scientists supposedly Recognized, What Cats - This is on yourself business liquid.
The scientific work, which is written by numerous media, really exists. Physicist Mark Antoine Farden from the Higher School of Lyon in 2014 published article "On the reoology of cats." Reoology - This is a section of physics that studies deformation properties and fluidity of substances. The scientist was interested in the ability of cats to completely fill any form with their body, from which it did The joke conclusion that these animals can actually be not in solid, but in a liquid aggregate state. And although from a household point of view, such a statement looks more like a funny aphorism, everything is more serious for physicists. The article for The Conversation Farden explainsthat, for example, a glacier for reoology is also a liquid body, although from school Programs we know that ice is water in a solid aggregate state. The fact is that from the point of view of this section of physics, the aggregate state of substance is not a fixed property, but a characteristic that depends on the ability to change its form over time. To designate the so -called relaxation time, scientists use The number of Deborah. So, in cats, this parameter is really low, which is characteristic of high -thelerts. In 2017, Farden received For his own Observation Shnobel Prize in Physics - this award Present For "scientific works that first make you laugh, and then think." However, the possibilities of cats to climb into narrow holes Farden did not study at all.
Some reasons to assume that cats are endowed with more flexibility than other mammals. However, the matter is not at all in the absent collarbone, which in cats, contrary to numerous publications on the Internet, There is. But unlike the human collarbone, cat - Rudimentary, that is, is in an underdeveloped state.
Klyuchits in cats are much less Compared to the rest of the shoulder girdle. In addition, they are attached to the rest of the skeleton not with bone joints, but by the muscles, which provides the animal for really good mobility and the ability to turn the shoulder belt, climbing into narrow places.
And although such anatomy really contributes to flexibility, such a skeleton device does not guarantee that the cat can go through any hole where its head crawls. Internet users who have heard about the incredible ability of cats put their experiments and record them on the video. For example, 2.7 million views on YouTube scored a video with cats named Maru and Khan. To a certain limit, a larger Maru passes through more and more narrow cracks, but at a 7 cm mark he understands that he can put his head into the gap (and does it twice), but her body does not pass through a too narrow hole.
In fact defining The factor in the question of whether the cat will crawl into the hole or not - this is the opportunity to squeeze through the gap not the head, but the shoulder belt. And although in the scheme above it does not look much larger than the skull, it is worth considering the total mass of the cat. Dr. Marty Becker, veterinarian and co -host of the Good morning, America program on the ABC channel, Explains: “The world is full of well -fed cats, for puffy animals, climbing through a small hole can be difficult. Such cats can easily get stuck. The cat mustache have the same size in width as the body of a cat, it is they who help the animal to determine the suitable diameter. However, when the cat gains weight (and, accordingly, becomes wider - approx. Ed.), They do not grow in proportion to its body, which can put a complete pet in a very difficult situation. ” The same is true for pregnant animals.
Uri Berstin, veterinarian from Vancouver, Gives Another explanation to the unique abilities of cats: “They have on average twice as much skin than they really need to cover their body. When we look at the cat, we think that we see a cat, but in fact we see her skin, and a real cat is somewhere inside. ” However, he agrees that not any cat can squeeze through the hole only the size of his head, some still need a larger diameter.
According to statistics, 63% of domestic cats have Excess weight or even suffer from obesity. Moreover, animal owners tend to underestimate this problem: in 2018, Swedish scientists Studied Data on more than 2500 cats and compared how often their weight is considered excess doctors and owners. It turned out that only 22% of animal owners think that the pet has a problem with weight, at that time the excess body weight, according to veterinarians, had 45% of cats. That is, the owners do not quite adequately draw a border where their pet is simply well -fed, and where he already experiences problems with excess weight.
Thus, the statement that the cat will climb into any gap where her head passes is true only for slender animals. Extra kilograms, as experts note, will most likely lead to the fact that the animal will need a larger diameter of the hole or it will simply get stuck where his head successfully passed. Moreover, to explain the increased flexibility of these mammals in the absence of their collarbones in the root is not true. Reduced and attached only by muscle tissue to the shoulder girdle, the cats still have these bones.
Image on the cover: Pickpic
Half truth
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