Talk:Cat righting reflex

I think I read somewhere that if a cat has fallen far enough it doesn't try to land on its feet, but instead lands more or less spread-eagle, to distribute the force of impact over a larger area. I don't have a reference, and I may be remembering this wrong. Can anyone verify or provide a reference? - dcljr (talk) 22:43, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Ah... here it is in the article: "Furthermore, once righted they may also spread out their body to increase drag and slow the fall to some extent." But it doesn't mention landing this way. - dcljr (talk) 22:45, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Scientific American article
Circa 1960, there was an article in Scientific American which investigated and explained how cats always fall on their feet without breaking the law of conservation of angular momentum. Now nearly half a century later, I have not yet been able to locate an exact reference to cite. DFH 20:57, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Not every cat...
I read somewhere that not every cat has this reflex, and that the presence or absence of the reflex seems to be based on genetic factors. Can anyone confirm this? 209.213.92.30 (talk) 23:28, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Bell
There's anecdotal evidence of Alexander Graham Bell researching this reflex - he had his assistants gather up all the cats they could find, and bring them up to the top of a four-story house. Bell then held them in a variety of odd positions and dropped them off the roof (onto a large pile of pillows, mind you) so that he could observe whether they did indeed land on their feet.

They did.

However, he was not able to repeat the experiment, because all the cats avoided Bell and his assistants after that. DS (talk) 15:22, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Terminal velocity
I heard the terminal velocity explanation for the first time and had a hard time believing it (especially since the person who told it to me mentioned two story-high buildings instead of seven stories). If they reach terminal velocity and then survive, wouldn't ANY fall be survivable to them? Somehow I would predict throwing cats out of planes would not result in them just having a few bruises. I did read it as statement in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15363762 but the authors do not provide a citation. It seems the whole parachuting idea was just inferred from injuries. While I find non-linearity in injuries at seven stories interesting, it does not immediately argue for terminal velocity being reached. I'm curious if there's better evidence available. --tijmz (talk) 18:23, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

The Reference in the article may be the source for the claim that the terminal veolcity is 100 km/h. However, that article also claims that velocity is pretty much attained when falling from 5-6 stories. One of these must be wrong, since a cat falling from 18 meters (6 generous stories) in vacuum would hit the ground at sqrt(2 g h) ~ 19 m/s = ~70 km/h only. The article further says "One cat that fell 32 stories suffered only mild pneumothorax and a chipped tooth". From that it would seem that the terminal velocity is pretty much attained after 20-25 m of free fall, and therefore must be much less than 70 km/h. --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 23:13, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Problem with the animation
I see a problem with the cat animation. With a 90-degree angle between the two halves of the cat, as each portion makes a full 360-degree rotation, the orientation of the body should counter rotate by 1/sqrt(2) * 360 in the opposite direction. The animation instead seems to shows a rotation of 180 degrees for the body of the cat. If I'm not mistaken (and I could), the animation would be correct if the angle between the two halves were 60 degrees.--Gciriani (talk) 19:43, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

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Range of species
Do a wide range of felids have this reflex/ability? Or is it restricted to domestic cats (and maybe other closely related species)? The article doesn't address this. — Smjg (talk) 14:06, 4 July 2020 (UTC)