A cat is flexible like a liquid

Cats are amazingly supple creatures. In particular, they have a strange desire and tendency to push themselves into the most awkward places. The Internet is full of humorous pictures of cats crammed into unimaginably small boxes and objects.

They were browsed by a physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin while avoiding work some years ago. A cat is actually a liquid, realized a researcher specializing in flow theory.

Liquid you see, the definition is that it flows evenly to fill the container, while maintaining its own volume. When you look at a cat crammed into a small box, you can see that this is exactly how it is for the animal.

As a witty fellow, Fardin wrote a research article in which he examines some basic questions of flow theory through the example of a cat.

In particular, when looking at the time dimension of the runoff, one can think of the flow theory boundary conditions of the liquid filling the cat. Fardin’s thought work was awarded the Nobel Prize for Humor in 2017.

in Hungary have now considered the fluidity of cats from a slightly different angle. Would the suppleness tell something about their body image?

Zoologist Péter Pongrácz has studied the soul landscape of animals and previously found that dogs don’t like to squeeze through openings that are too small. They can at least somehow estimate their own size.

With cats, the question is more flexible. Now Pongrácz did an experiment where cats were made to pass through thin slits. A plate was placed in the doorway with either horizontally narrowing slits or vertically shallowing openings.

It was found that the cat doesn’t care, no matter how narrow the gap is horizontally. The cats forced themselves through even the tightest crevices. But they didn’t like to crouch through the shallowest openings. Maybe they don’t even want to crawl in tight holes in nature.

Above all, the cat also understands its own size, which tells about its self-understanding. The test was carried out in the homes of cat owners, because studying cats in a laboratory is extremely difficult, as they are notoriously stubborn.

The study was published by iScience.