Posted on 11/13/2010 3:34:15 AM PST by SonOfDarkSkies
It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.
...
Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the point at which gravitational force would overcome inertia and cause the water to fall.
What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.
Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Good Morning and PING this one over to Slings and Arrows! :)=^..^=
This gives an entirely new meaning to “lap dance.”;-)
And then there are the middle aged, overweight white male cats that can’t dance at all.
You said it! :)=^..^=
Dogs have a noisier method of lapping (they scoop) but a dog moves more liquid per second than would a comparably sized cat. Maybe it’s in cats’ interest to be quieter given the stealthy way that they hunt.
i have one cat that puts his paw in the water and drinks from his paw.
i have one cat that puts his paw in the water and drinks from his paw.
Dog. I always assumed they scooped the water forward. Just about everyone who sees this says the same thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63Ch2pNkZwU
One of ours does that...I can’t imagine it’s too clean given she has dustmops for paws, but she seems happy enough about it.
That and the fact that dogs are inelegant and generally sloppy!;-)
Dogs are like guys and cats are like guyettes ;-)
Ain’t that the truth!
i got a tom cat who seems to think he’s a dog
I sure am glad to find this out, I was really worried about how cat’s drink.
4 engineers with not a hell of a lot to do.
My cat drinks from the kitchen faucet. I guess her tongue doesn’t work the way the scientists discovered. It’s better, I suppose, than drinking from the toilet.
And one of our cats would turn the water bowl over to lick the spilled water from the floor! Till we got a bowl that he couldn't upend.
But nothing is funnier than the way this cat drinks by putting its whole head under a running faucet: http://www.truthaboutpetfood.com/blogs/crazy-water-cat.html
Please put your coffee cup down before viewing the video. I'm not buying you a new keyboard! :-)
Perhaps these geniuses can determine why they crap all over the house if I don't sift their turds every day.
Don’t worry, their secret of purring is still safe.
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