Talk:Cat righting reflex

message: 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)

message: 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)
thread_title:  Scientific American article 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Not every cat... 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Bell 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Terminal velocity 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Problem with the animation 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Range of species