The Weird Thing About Cat Legs | Hacker News Reader

The Weird Thing About Cat Legs

theatlantic.com

113 pointsAmorymeltzer28 comments

Good article. One difference I've seen between big cats and house cats is that big cats never (as far as I know) tuck their feet under their bodies in the "bread loaf" position that house cats do. I always assumed it was because it put too much pressure on the big cat's legs. So house cats often sit like this:

http://www.nedhardy.com/wp-content/uploads/images/2014/septe...

While big cats put their legs out in front, like this:

http://cbs.umn.edu/sites/cbs.umn.edu/files/public/african_li...

House cats will take the lion position, but lions do not take the house cat position.

Do lion cubs tuck their feet? Perhaps it is a case of neoteny in house cats.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny

Another difference is that large cats have round pupils and small cats have vertical/slit pupils. Probably due to differnces in the type of prey they hunt -- small cats hunt rodents and other generally nocturnal creatures, so they have eyes acclimated to dim lighting. Big cats hunt antelopes and other diurnal animals so they have eyes acclimated to bright daylight.

Big cats don't have cushions?

I've seen my housecats do this on hardwood floor.

Big cats don't need to preserve heat, because of the square-cube law?

I always assumed that because house cats have a higher average body temperature than humans (around 103F), but live in an environment that is kept for human comfort (ambient temps designed for humans) they are more often trying to keep warm.

if you had a lion laying down on a very large couch, they might lay down like some house cats do (softer surface)...

We are, I realize, trying to out-stealth a cat. It's going about as well as you'd expect.

I don't have time read the full article right now, but this pair of sentences alone is priceless...

That pair of sentences alone was worth the read :P

Also this one: The problem is that, acclimation aside, Pudding is still a cat — an innate master of not doing what you want him to do.

Our cats often make me think of the opening of War of the Worlds:

"intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us"

[OK Not 100% sure about the "vast intellect" bit - but "cool and unsympathetic" definitely].

As well as the conclusion...

"'We're just doing this for curiosity' Curiosity eh? Maybe that's why the cats aren't cooperating."

Great read, enjoyable. I just love reading about big cats and small cats in general.

The "weird thing" being: 'A Cat's posture should change as it gets older, but it doesn't'

s/older/larger/

Thank you; I hate when the answer to a clickbait title is buried deep in an article.

Correction (thanks ams6110):

The "weird thing" being: 'The posture of larger cats should be different to smaller cats, but it isn't'.

“It's famously said that a lion is just a scaled-up house cat,” says Anjali Goswami from University College London, who works with Hutchinson. “That's very weird.”

Still didn't quite capture it:

"When animals get bigger, their posture changes. Their legs tend to straighten, becoming stiffer and more pillar-like to better support their weight. Not so with cats. When a lion strides across the savannah, it has essentially the same posture as the domesticated tabby that slinks over your lap. Lions, tigers, and leopards—oh my—are, as Hutchinson writes, the only large, crouching mammals."

However I agree this article could have been a tweet.

I think the article could've stood a bunch of editing, but (at the least to this repeat cat owner) the humour of their attempts to get the cats to co-operate was well worth retaining.

Skip to 8 paragraphs in.

Seriously...what a poorly written article. 2 paragraphs of content surrounded by fluff.

Everyone's opinions are different and we all read for different reasons, but just because an article isn't a strictly factual, question->answer piece doesn't mean it's poorly written. As the article makes clear the answer is still unknown, therefore the purpose of the piece is to both show how science is done, even when it doesn't go as planned, and to get the reader thinking about something they may have never considered before about an animal many of us spend a lot of time with.

The article has a title, and the contents don't match the title until nearly half way through the piece, and also don't really continue to match it past there. The length of the introduction is appropriate for a short book, not a 2000 word essay. As the article makes clear, the answer is still unknown, and so the article as titled should not have been written. Changing the title alone could make this a better written piece, but as is it doesn't match the expectations given to the reader.

Its the Atlantic, not Science. And its an article about cats as much as it is about science.

Title.

I agree when the article takes half an hour to read, but this was still pretty short so I didn't mind it.

If any article needed a tl;dr, it’s this one. A headline like this, and they bury the lede deeper than Jimmy Hoffa’s skeleton.

Thanks, ypeterholmes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074842

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