Cats: Caressing the Tiger Page #2

frees the mother

to resume hunting sooner.

Excellent, protective mothers,

cats will quickly move their offspring

if they suspect danger.

To teach their young

how to hunt and kill,

many cat mothers bring home

live prey for practice.

These caracals nicknamed "desert lynx"

may seem to be playful or cruel,

but they are merely learning.

Striking the prey stuns it,

but the cubs are too inexperienced

to deliver the fatal bite.

Cat mothers keep their

young fastidiously clean.

The soothing sensation of

tongue rubbing against fur

is duplicated each time

a human strokes a cat.

In this way a bond is formed,

and cats come to regard us

as surrogate mothers,

a role we hold throughout their lives.

In the wild, as young felines play,

they refine the predatory skills

essential to survival as adults.

Whether domestic cats

similarly practice stalking

and hunting is subject to debate.

Many experts feel that play exists

as a behavior in its own right,

simply because it's fun.

With indoor cats

many owners can attest to a phenomenon

affectionately called

the "evening crazies",

when pent-up hunting instincts

erupt into a frenzy.

Triggered by a prey's movements,

even the most well-fed cat may hunt

given the opportunity.

But the connection between making a

kill and eating it has to be learned.

An inexperienced cat may

attack with precision,

yet not recognize its kill as food.

As hunters that rely on stealth,

cats are always alert for cues

that could mean food or danger.

While smell is not

their primary sense,

no odor escapes them.

They use smell mainly to find the

territorial boundaries of other cats

or to know if other cats

have been in their territory.

To gather information

about potential mates,

cats use a second olfactory system

in the roof of the mouth.

Inhaling the airborne scent

while curling the upper lip

creates the grimacing look.

Cats move their funnel-shaped ears

to zero in on sounds.

They probably have

better acoustical discrimination

than either dogs or humans.

The function of a cat's whiskers

is not entirely understood.

But if they are severed,

the animal may lose its equilibrium

and stumble into things.

It may even be unable

to make a clean kill.

Whiskers also transmit

information about captured prey.

To remove all traces of food,

cats regularly groom.

Fastidiousness is one of

their best known traits.

Coarse and abrasive liken sandpaper,

the tongue is covered with

hook-like projection

that can even tear flesh

from bone after a kill.

To writers, artists, and poets,

cat's eyes have embodied all

things magical and mysterious.

The scientist knows that vision

is one of the cat's most vital senses,

the key to its success as a hunter.

At Florida State University,

the question of how cats see the world

has been studied for

more than 25 years.

Professor of Neuroscience

and Psychology,

Dr. Mark Berkley defied cynics

who told him the independent cat would

never make a good laboratory subject.

He designed a system that not only

works, but actually appeals to the cat

Banking on the animal's

inquisitiveness,

Berkley built a box

that invites exploration.

And when it responds correctly,

the cat is rewarded with food.

Generated by a computer,

an image will appear in front of the

cat on one side of the screen.

The cat must tell the researchers,

"Yes, I can see that".

It does so by poking the

right-hand plexiglass panel

when the image appears on the right,

and the other side when the

image appears on the left.

From the work of Berkley and others,

we know cats cannot distinguish

between human faces,

have poor color vision, and like us,

experience visual illusions.

But perhaps most noteworthy

is their ability to see at night.

Under low light levels

the cat is anywhere

from six to ten times more sensitive.

That is, at a light level

where we perhaps couldn't see anything,

he still sees, not very will,

but certainly better than we do.

I suppose it might be

the difference between

a starless night and a moonlit night,

where under a starless night that

might be the way it looks to us,

but to the cat it might look

as if the moon were up.

Able to pierce the darkness with

vision at least six times more

sensitive than our own,

the night truly belongs to the cat.

The cat's earliest ancestors

probably hunted both

on the ground and in the trees.

To survive, they needed not only claws

but remarkable balance,

an aptitude all cats retain

to this day.

In keeping with its reputation,

the cat usually does land on all fours.

And scientists

have come to understand how.

Slow-motion photography

reveals that cats always

right themselves in a precise order.

The head rotates first,

based on messages

from the eyes and inner ear.

Then the spine twists

and the rear quarters align.

At the same time the cat arches

its back to reduce the force of impact.

Despite its agility,

the cat faces particular dangers

in today's modern cities.

Here, although hundreds of

feet above the ground,

the indoor cat is just as attracted

by moving prey as is any other cat.

If anything, it may be a

stir-crazy bundle of energy.

So many cats actually careen through

unscreened windows

that the phenomenon now has a name

"high-rise syndrome".

At the Animal Medical Center

in New York City,

doctors were perplexed when they found

that victims of higher falls

often had less severs injuries than

those that fell a shorter distance.

Good morning, Miss Pizano,

how are you today?

Fine, thanks.

Dr. Michael Garvey is medical director.

Hello, Harry.

Harry is recovering

from serious fractures

after falling just a few stories.

We'd been puzzled by the

high-rise syndrome for a long time

the name that we give for

cats falling out of windows.

Our clinical impression is that

cats that fall from medium-level

stories are hurt much worse than cats

that fell from even greater distances.

That seemed to defy our logic

that cats that would fall

farther would be hurt less.

So we undertook a study to examine

the records on cats

that had been admitted here

for falling out of windows.

And it actually confirmed that our

clinical impression was correct.

It seems that cats that fall

from higher stories

and have enough time to reach free-fall

like a parachutist are relaxed.

And when you experience trauma

when you're relaxed,

you will probably avoid injury.

When you experience trauma when you

are very rigid and very tight,

you will tend to maximize injury.

The cat may not have nine lives,

but its uncanny ability

to sail through the air

is almost certainly responsible

for the myth.

Throughout its history,

myth and folklore

have enshrouded the cat.

Near Oxford, England,

scientists have been exploring

whether the legendary solitude

of the cat is fact or fiction,

or can cats adapt successfully

to living in groups?

Puss. Puss.

Puss.

Bert Parker has kept farm cats

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