When I wrote the message about putting the Christmas
star on my amateur radio tower, that reminded me of a weird
topic that I have run across which is what happens to cats when
they fall from high places. There have been a couple of
accidents in places like New York City or any city with very
tall buildings in which some poor cat fell out of a window in a
high-rise building. While nobody would ever deliberately try
such an experiment, fate has created a few of those situations by
accident.
I once heard a veterinarian who had a practice in New
York City tell of two accidents in which one cat fell over 40
stories to the ground and another fell about 60 floors. One had
a slight fracture of one of it's legs and a chipped tooth and
the other seemed to be un-scratched.
Both falls were the result of the cats becoming excited
about things that suddenly happened such as their owners
returning home from a day at work or seeing an insect fly by the
window which was just too tempting not to try to grab. The cat
just got too excited and went right through the open window out
in to the blue yonder.
Cats are built to land on their feet by way of their
center of gravity so they don't even have to try to get in the
right position. They also apparently know this is going to be a
long fall and they try to relax. There is something called
terminal villosity which means that at a certain speed, the wind
resistance equals the acceleration of gravity and at that
point, you could fall forever and never go any faster than
terminal villosity.
a severely over-weight cat would probably be hurt or
killed because it would reach a higher terminal villosity but
normal-weight cats are likely to survive a long fall.
Humans, dogs and other larger mammals have the grace in
air of stones so we need to watch ourselves as gravity is not
kind to us.
amartin
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