Oh, the science gods are smiling on me today. No, I have not finished THE EXPERIMENT THAT WILL NOT DIE, but it’s getting there. And no, I have not found a new job. Stop asking. No, it’s even better. Someone high up provided me with an opportunity to indulge that smug instinct present in all nerdy kids, that know-it-all sense of superiority and absolute glee in someone else’s intellectual misstep that got me to where am I today – the opportunity to say “NO, that’s WRONG. You IDIOT.”
I signed up for twitter when I started blogging because apparently it’s what bloggers do. I log in sporadically and face that “What’s happening?” box with a stupid look and inanely enter in something self-indulgently referential to either my blog or Hannah. (Follow me on twitter! I’m the mommiologist and I promise to be interesting from here on!) However, I am actually enjoying my updates from the likes of the Cassini spacecraft, Jane Goodall, Barack Obama, and Stephen Colbert. And today, I got this tweet (is that what the kids are calling it these days?): ” NatGeoSociety
#Video: Why do cats always land on all fours? http://on.natgeo.com/cAHSh9 #animals”
Oh National Geographic, you idiot.
We all know that cats land on all fours. Our childhood cat Fluffy was rendered a drooling, nocturnal recluse by a friend of the family’s attempt to prove this by launching her off the dining room table. She landed on all fours physically, but maybe not so much emotionally. Other people still seem to think cat-throwing is a viable scientific endeavor, and even manage to get ethics approval for the study that provided the video in the clip.
In 1987, a vet named Dr. Michael Garvey at the Animal Medical Center in New York noticed an interesting trend: as expected, there’s a strong relationship between the number of injuries a cat sustains and the number of stories from which it falls, but only up to roughly 6 floors. Cats who fall from higher heights tend to have fewer injuries, which seems strongly counter intuitive. Dr. Garvey explained this phenomenon by saying that this height allows cats time to a) reach terminal velocity and b) right themselves and c) relax. Hitting the ground relaxed, even at terminal velocity, hurts a lot less than hitting it tense, apparently.
I remember, back in the dim days of the last century when I was an undergraduate, discussing this case in a class called Ecological Methods. The professor, a sarcastic, slightly bitter hippy type who probably had a very bad case of the know-it-alls as a child, went through the whole story, then asked: “can anyone see what’s wrong with this study?”
Silence.
Finally, a smarty-pants from the back of the class asked: “Did anyone count the dead cats?”
Consider humans falling from a window: regardless of whether the person survives, there will be considerable paperwork. Definitely a record of some sort. However, if your cat falls from a window and you reach it and it’s an ex-cat, joined the choir eternal, you aren’t going to pay good money to have a vet declare it dead. You will get a shovel. The author of this study, however, took his data from vet clinic admission records, so you can see how a large subset of the data had been missed. Maybe those cats that fell ten stories and bounced off an awning before hitting the ground skewed the results a little.
I thought this story was dead and only good for inducing smug giggles in other scientists, but no! So thank you, National Geographic, thank you.
