Stair cat…

Misty’s disappeared down the cellar again. I don’t know what it is about that cat and the cellar but as soon as that door is open down she goes…

‘Okay, so far so good, I’ve made it into the cellar and nobody is following me. All I have to do is sit and wait, he’ll come down eventually.

I like this game, it’s a hoot. He comes down the stairs, I tangle myself around his feet, and he does that funny dance, the one where he waves his arms about and clutches for the banister. So far he hasn’t fallen but he will do one day. I don’t think it’ll hurt him much, after all, falling down a few stairs doesn’t hurt us cats. That’s because of my cat righting reflex, my innate ability to orient myself as I fall in order to land on my feet uninjured. We’re born with it, well almost. I’ve had mine since I was three or four weeks old and it took me about four weeks to perfect it. I had some hissing good fun learning to do it I can tell you, and a few close shaves, I lost two of my lives just practicing. It’s all about my unusually flexible backbone and the fact that I don’t really have any functional collarbones

This is how to do it. First you need to work out ‘up’ from ‘down’ visually because you’re going to need to manage to twist yourself to face downwards without ever changing your net angular momentum. Sounds complicated but it isn’t, it’s easy, I call it the Twist and in the words of Chubby Checker ‘Now we’re gonna do the Twist and it goes like this…’

First you bend in the middle so that the front half of your body rotates about a different axis than your rear half.

Then you tuck your front legs in to reduce your moment of inertia of the front half of your body and extend your rear legs to increase your moment of inertia of the rear half of your body so that you can rotate your front half quite far (as much as 90°) while your rear half rotates in the opposite direction quite a bit less (as little as 10°).
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And finally you extend your front legs and tuck in your rear legs so that you can rotate your rear half quite far while your front half rotates in the opposite direction quite a bit less.

Got it? That’s how you do the Twist - simple! Of course, depending on your flexibility and initial angular momentum, you may need to repeat steps two and three one or more times in order to complete a full 180° rotation, but that’s enough of the science stuff.

Us cats also have a few other advantages over peoples – we are small, we have a light bone structure, we have thick fur that decreases our terminal velocity, we are supple and spread out our bodies to increase drag and slow down our fall and our terminal velocity is lower than a man’s at 60mph compared to 130mph for Hisfault in a free-fall position. Cats are also cool and even at terminal velocity we can relax as we fall which helps to protect us on impact. Ooops! More science stuff. Anyway, I’m not at all sure that Hisfault is THAT cool and he doesn’t have my padded paws. Despite that and even with all his disadvantages I’m sure that he’ll manage to survive, and if he doesn’t - well, I still have Foodies and that Whirling Girl thing to play with.

Shhhhhh… I think I can hear him coming… here goes…’

Come on up Misty, where are you? Do I have to come down and fetch you? Okay, if that’s the way you want it…what the? Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!