• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Cats Know Their Height But Not Width When Confronted With Small Openings

September 20, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Cats appear to know (or at least consider) whether they can fit through a gap that is wide but not very high, indicating an understanding of their own dimensions. However, this only seems to work one way, as they will tackle a tall but narrow gap with confidence, even if it’s far too thin to let them pass.

Advertisement

Proof that cats can behave as both a solid and a liquid won a researcher an Ig Nobel Prize inspired by felines’ capacity to squeeze through gaps that appear impossibly small. Nevertheless, some holes are catproof. Dr Péter Pongrácz of Eötvös Lorand University, perhaps in search of a similar award, has tested if cats understand their own liquidity.

Some animals are known to be able to judge their own ability to fit through openings and will avoid trying those that are too small for them, indicating awareness of their own dimensions. Pongrácz himself has explored this with dogs, showing they will go around a shortcut they judge they can’t fit through. He also showed they understand their bodies can get in the way. According to Pongrácz, as he wrote in the paper; “So far no one has tested the ability for self-representation in cats.” Fortunately, he has not let this void in our knowledge go unaddressed.

In doing so, however, Pongrácz learned one reason such experiments have not been done before. Dogs were happy to be experimental subjects in his lab, as long as there was a food reward at the end. Cats refused to engage under such alien circumstances, forcing Pongrácz to find obliging human servants of cats who would let him into their shared home with cat-testing equipment in hand. 

Pongrácz gave the cats an incentive to get to the other side of a screen with a rectangular hole in it, which he made progressively smaller in repeated trials. Sometimes the hole was made steadily narrower while keeping the same (adequate) height, in other cases its height was reduced while the width remained ample.

Some cats dealt with the problem by jumping over the screen, others investigated and turned away, their body language no doubt radiating that they had not been bested, they just were not interested in getting through. Most, however, made the effort to squeeze through, only to sometimes have to admit defeat.

Advertisement

Intriguingly, where dogs would hesitate before tackling holes that might prove too small, the cats only did so with openings that were short and wide, not those that were high and narrow. Moreover, taller cats were more likely to seek alternative paths than short ones when confronted with a vertically tight gap, even those they were able to eventually get through with difficulty.

Thus, it appears cats have an awareness that their bodies are a finite height, and assess short but wide holes to see if they expect to fit. On the other hand, when confronted with something narrow, they simply assume they can, only to sometimes learn their limits.

Pongrácz acknowledges the need to conduct the experiment in the cats’ home range meant he could not impose uniformity in how far they started from the screen, as he was able to do with dogs.

As amusing and delightful as this work may be to cat lovers, there is a deeper significance. Pongrácz notes that research into self-representation has traditionally used a binary model. Animals and children were considered either to be self-aware, as measured by their ability to recognize themselves in a mirror, or not. Yet like most binaries, this is destructively simplistic. Increasingly, psychologists and animal behaviorists recognize there are components to self-representation, and animals can have some without others. It seems he has found a particularly striking example of this.

Advertisement

Testing components individually involves acknowledging that animals develop forms of intelligence that suit their ecological niche and background, rather than being part of some hierarchy where humans are the pinnacle. Designing experiments that suit this, including the one described here, is part of respecting the capacities of cats and other animals. 

The agile ambush predators from which house cats descend would have benefitted from squeezing into the tightest spaces possible to pounce on prey. Modern cats also benefit, although now it is more because many humans find it adorable. Either way, there are reasons for them to be aware of their body’s dimensions.

Quite why this self-representation applies vertically but not horizontally is unclear, but probably reflects the challenges wildcats faced before they decided to adopt us.

The study is published open access in the journal iScience. 

Advertisement

[H/T Phys.org]

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Loaded U.S. face tough Ryder Cup test against battle-hardened Europe
  2. One Identity has acquired OneLogin, a rival to Okta and Ping in sign-on and identity access management
  3. “Starquakes” On Neutron Stars Could Be Source Of Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts
  4. The Smallest Mammal In The World Lived 53 Million Years Ago

Source Link: Cats Know Their Height But Not Width When Confronted With Small Openings

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Something Out Of Nothing: New Approach Mimics Matter Creation Using Superfluid Helium
  • Surströmming: Why Sweden’s Stinky Fermented Fish Smells So Bad (But People Still Eat It)
  • First-Ever Recording Of Black Hole Recoil Captured During Merger – And You Can Listen To It
  • The Moon Is Moving Away From Earth At A Rate Of About 3.8 Centimeters Per Year. Will It Ever Drift Apart?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version