That cats are liquid is something that was intuited, but now we have scientifically proven it

If you live with a cat, you know very well that there are two universal truths. The first is that if they come asking for cuddles, it means they love you very much. The second is that they “flow”, as if they were hair entities filled with some kind of liquid, which gives them the ability to pass through extremely narrow places or accommodate themselves in ways that do not seem, at all, comfortable.

Cats are stars in our house and on the Internet. There are tens of thousands of videos showing cats in very funny ways (sometimes stressful for them) and something that is a meme is that cats are liquid. This is something that has caused us to wonder, really, because a liquid is an element that conforms to a container, and cats fit that description.

Beyond the meme and the joke, there are those who have taken seriously this question of investigating whether cats are filled with liquid. And the answer is that they have an excellent ability to calculate their body size and adapt to spaces.

Aware of their size

Living with a dog and a cat reflects that one of them dominates its body and the environment better than the opposite. The dog is usually clumsier and often underestimates both his strength and, above all, his size. He tries to enter places where he clearly doesn’t fit, he bumps the furniture occasionally and is like a big child.

That doesn’t happen with cats. If one of my cats has ever collided with a piece of furniture it is because he is skidding at full speed on the floor and slips, but his ability is amazing not only to make precise jumps into tiny spaces, but to sneak through where it seems impossible, taking a moment to think about whether it’s a viable move or not. It also impacts their ability to fall asleep in places where you wonder if something is going on with their spine.

Fascinated by it, ethologist Péter Pongrácz, a researcher at Eötvös University in Loránd in Hungary, decided that someone had to investigate it. And he got to work on a study that he published in iScience. In the experiment, Péter evaluated the domestic cats’ self-perception of body size. The way to evaluate it was using a template with different openings: from wider to much narrower, this being an experiment that they previously carried out with dogs.

Observers noticed that the dogs attempted to evade narrow openings because they are fast-moving pursuit predators. This means that they instinctively choose to avoid going through tight places, since a collision or getting stuck is not an option. In the experiment, when the opening was extremely narrow, the dogs did not even try and Pongrácz came to the conclusion that they understood that they could not get through and that this was the result of them calculating their size all the time.

In the case of the cat experiment, the same pattern of narrowing doors was used and the first thing they noticed was that, although the cats walked through the wider openings without hesitation, When it was time to go through the narrowest ones, they showed indecision for a few seconds.. Cat whiskers, called vibrissae, are essential for the feline. Among their many functions, they are known to play the role of “sonar”, helping them detect whether the opening is passable and compensating for their poor vision at close distances.

Thus, they can fit through very narrow holes without hesitation, but when things get really difficult, they take their time before trying to cross the obstacle. They also played with heights: if the height of the hole was high and the space was wide, the cats passed through without hesitation. When the height was maintained and the space was narrow, the cats did not hesitate either. The problem came when the height varied. That’s when they started to hesitate, but ended up trying to get through the opening, unlike what happened with the dogs.

In figure A, we have openings that decrease in width, but not in height. There the cats pass through any gap without hesitation. In figure B, the openings decrease at the top… and the cats think more about it

This indicated to Pongrácz that cats They are very aware, above all, of their height. It may be because the vibrissae help them calculate their width at all times, but with the height they have to carry out other checks and, therefore, they evaluate these types of obstacles more. Ivan Khvatov is a psychologist at the Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis. He did not participate in the study, but agrees commenting that cats are more malleable and flexible than dogs, so they do not have to worry as much as they do about whether they will pass through an opening, unless that opening is very low, where they will begin to make the necessary calculations.

In the journal Science, Pongrácz himself comment that, no matter how narrow the opening became, if the height was comfortable for the cats, they “didn’t slow down at all. In that case, they don’t use body awareness. They’re basically like liquids.” Now, the study, although revealing, has some limitations.

A total of 30 cats participated in the experiments, but these were not done in the laboratory. In the case of the study with dogs, they were moved to special facilities where they measured all the parameters, but in the case of cats, The tests were carried out in the pets’ homes. In the end, the interesting thing about all this is that the experiments of researchers like Pongrácz serve to discover that humans are not the only creatures aware of our own body.

The study comments that ferrets, parakeets, rat snakes, bumblebees and Asian elephants also have that bodily self-awareness that has basically helped them survive in nature for generations.

And… yes, as soon as I finish this text, I plan to go get a large cardboard to replicate the experiment with my cats. I’m sure that two will get past me, but I’m sure that the third will try to get to the can of food that awaits him on the other side.

Image | Vitali Adutskevich

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