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How do they always seem to land on their feet after a
fall?
The proverbial curiosity doesn't usually kill cats. The inquisitive
feline has a knack of dodging death by a whisker. Cats are intrepid
explorers and fearless acrobats. After all, a creature with nine
lives can afford to take risks. According to Brewer's Dictionary Of
Phrase & Fable, a cat is said to have nine lives because it is "more
tenacious of life than many animals."
Medieval Europe was a tough place to be a
cat,
and they were sometimes thrown from high towers
 The
clumsy biped is understandably impressed by the feline arts of
stealth, poise and athletic prowess. But why nine? Nine, a trinity
of trinities, is a mystical number often invoked in religion and
folklore. The cat was once revered in Egypt, and this is probably
where its nine lives began. The priesthood in On - known to the
Greeks as Heliopolis and now a suburb of Cairo - worshipped Atum-Ra,
a sun god who gave life to the gods of air, moisture, earth and sky,
who, in turn, produced Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys. These gods
are collectively known as the Ennead, or the Nine. Atum-Ra, who took
the form of a cat for visits to the underworld, embodied nine lives
in one creator. A hymn from the fourth century BC says, "O sacred
cat! Your mouth is the mouth of the god Atum, the lord of life who
has saved you from all taint."
Vestiges of this ancient, cat-worshipping religion
lingered in Europe until at least the middle ages. The cat was no
longer divine but was still regarded as magical and otherworldly.
The ailuromorphic gods are long forgotten, but the cat's resilience
still inspires fascination, which is why the myth of the cat's nine
lives has endured for so long.
Medieval Europe was a tough place to be a cat, and they were
sometimes thrown from high towers. The origin of these rituals is
obscure but the cats often survived the ordeal and seemed to walk
away unscathed, much to the amazement of spectators.
Cats aren't all that tough;
they don't always land the right way up
Legend has it that Baldwin III, Count of Ypres, threw
some cats from a tower in AD962. The Belgian town still marks the
event with an annual cat festival. A procession celebrates cat
history and cats are thrown from the 70-metre Cloth Hall tower. But
there is no need to write to your MEP, only toy cats are used these
days. Live cats were used until 1817, when the keeper of the town
recorded that, "in spite of the height of the fall, the animal ran
off quickly so that it might never be caught again in a similar
ceremony."
The miracles of the middle ages became the science of the 19th
century, when the cat's remarkable ability to survive a fall was
finally explained. In 1894, the French physiologist Etienne-Jules
Marey held a cat upside down by its legs and dropped it. The
resultant film, captured by a camera that took 60 images a second,
demonstrates how a cat lands on its feet. As the cat falls, an
automatic twisting reaction begins and the cat manoeuvres its head,
back, legs and tail to lessen the impact. Cats, it seems, have an
instinct for physics.
Don't try this at home, though. Cats aren't all that tough; they
don't always land the right way up, which is why your average pussy
cat jumping from the garden fence will occasionally come home
limping, bruised or fractured because of a badly timed fall. Still,
studies on cats falling from skyscrapers suggest that up to 90%
survive, albeit with broken bones and sore paws. The distance is
crucial. Too much and the cat will splat, just as we non-feline
mortals would. Too little and the cat doesn't have time to correct
itself. There is much to admire in the cat's grace and agility. But
don't forget to close the upstairs window, just in case. |
