After all, cats are a liquid, research confirms

If you’ve ever lived with a cat, you’ve seen how they ooze, spill and flow, like a little ambulatory fur puddle.

Not only do we think of cats as liquid objects, they smugly seem to know it.

Science has now effectively proven it: when cats are faced with a series of increasingly smaller openings, they can pour their way through them, much like a liquid, hesitating when the opening is too small for comfort.

It suggests that cats not only exhibit some properties of liquids, but also possess a degree of self-consciousness about their own size.

The finding, made by ethologist Péter Pongrácz of Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, adds to our understanding of the cat’s sense of self – an important measure in assessing the cognitive abilities of a given species.

The fluidity of felines has not escaped the attention of science. In 2014, a paper by physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin showed that cats ooze over time to adapt to the shape of containers in which they confine themselves. This could, in a rather fanciful sense, put cats in the category of amorphous solids – not quite solid, but not quite liquid either.

Pongrácz’s research was conducted to determine whether cats demonstrate awareness of their own bodies. He participated in a similar study in dogs in 2019, which showed that by being on the lookout for holes too small for their bodies, our canine companions know their own size and use that knowledge to make decisions.

Cats are a little harder to study because they are much more orderly. Dogs like to do the things people ask of them, but cats only do what cats want. And cats don’t like laboratory environments.

So Pongrácz designed an experiment that suited an environment more comfortable for the cats, going to their own home in Budapest to put them to the test. The arrangement consisted of planks with cut-out openings, the first series with varying widths and the second with varying heights.

Although only 30 of the 38 selected cats actually completed the experiment, the results of their participation were telling.

With most holes, the cats filtered through to their human on the other side without hesitation, even if the hole was half their body width. But with the panels of different heights, the cats showed hesitation if the opening was shorter than the height of their withers, and even looked for alternative solutions, such as jumping all the way over the panel.

This behavior was more common in larger cats, suggesting that awareness of body size plays a role in decision-making.

It’s also important to note that because the experiment took place in the cats’ homes—an environment in which the animals would feel safe—the hesitation was likely not due to wariness about what might be happening on the other side of the panel. can happen.

These results suggest that the narrowness of the opening and the height of the opening are perceived differently by cats. Narrow gaps are fine, and a cat will squeeze itself through them like toothpaste from a tube without a care in the world.

However, the opening height requires more attention, possibly because the cat has to duck to get through.

“The results indicate that cats may find it more difficult to crawl through a short opening than to squeeze themselves through a long but narrow opening. Their specific anatomical features support this theory,” Pongrácz writes.

“Additionally, cats might behave more cautiously if they have to lower their posture in a very short gap, as they may feel more vulnerable in this situation.”

He plans to design more experiments to test cats’ awareness of their size and weight in more challenging situations, and to discover how that awareness influences their decision-making processes.

The research was published in iScience.

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