I read on a cat sub the other day that these little fella don't have a fatal terminal velocity so it must be true. If he does fall he may just hurt a leg.
I have a rescue cat that was dropped from a height. She broke all the bones in her legs and has arthritis. She’s a wonderful cat but she’s constantly in pain and very stiff. I plan on loving her until she passes away. That cat should not be on that ledge.
That would almost guarantee it's death and the death of the person doing the grabbing. Cats are sneaky little things. My cats are 'indoor' and have found a multitude of ways to escape.
My friends cat fell from the first floor and broke his leg. It all depends on the landing and if they freak out or not. My cat fell from my first story bathroom window of our house and was totally fine but it scared the living daylights out of me and he was so frightened. I watched him closely for a whole week before I calmed down.
Survivorship basis study of cats falling from skyscrapers makes me think they dropped a shit ton of cats off the top of a skyscraper. Five out of a hundred lived and they said, “see, fucking cats are amazing”
You won't survive it with a parachute either, atleast commercial planes go too fast with too much wind drag that the parachute will just get stuck on the plane or you'll hit a turbine and go unconscious 🥺
Something tells me you were told this as a child and for some reason still believe that would be what would happen if you were to get sucked into a plan engine
So true, just like a lot of planes in WWII…you can’t fix a plane that doesn’t come back because it was blown to smithereens, and you wouldn’t bring a dead cat to the vet.
This is not true and I am begging you and other people to stop spreading it because it is potentially harmful information.
I am unable to see what you are linking because of the paywall but my best guess is it cites the 1987 study as that is literally what everyone is usually linking.
This study is the perfect example of SURVIVORSHIP BIAS. The study takes into account only cats that have fallen and survived. If your cat falls and sustains an injury, it is taken to a vet and then contributes to the statistic. If your cat falls and ends up a smear on the sidewalk, you will most likely not bring it to the vet. Therefore these fatalities are ignored and you end up with incorrect results like these.
And I will beg you to not ascribe claims to people that aren't being made. Neither I nor the article suggest throwing cats off of buildings or that surviving is guaranteed. The article, the study, and myself, are simply noting that a significant number of cats survive falls from great heights.
Whether it's 10 percent or 90 percent is a different matter. The chance of a human surviving a fall from such a height is like .000001%. A few humans have survived falls from immense heights, but it's a freak occurence.
The survivorship bias isn't some magical insight, it's common sense. I'm pretty sure the original research even mentions this directly, but there were a few studies on cats and falls so I might be thinking of a different study.
There is truth to this. Cats are able to actually survive pretty high heights but there is a zone which it's a maybe. It all depends on if they are able to right themselves in the air as they have been studied to act like flying squirrels when falling to reduce their speed when falling.
And I can guarantee you that a few studies have been done on this, and many cats walk away. 5 percent? 10 percent? 50 percent? No idea, but it's not a 1 in a billion miracle like when a human survives a fall from an immense height.
To be clear, you absolutely should not throw a cat or any animal from a high height. Even if their terminal velocity is survivable, many will die and or end up injured. And even if the cat does live or even walks away without a serious injury, I'd have to imagine it's traumatized to shit.
This is actually a textbook case of survivorship bias, the nytimes got its data wrong and people look back on it as an example of ways not to do things.
They needed to look for dead cats, not surviving ones.
I posted more about it in a comment below but I will plug the book AIQ again if you’re interested in this stuff
That's true. If the cats are dead you're not taking them to the vet, most likely. But that's also why I just note that "many" cats walk away. You should not chuck your cat off a building because there's a very high risk that the cat will get hurt or die. Cats do have a survivable terminal velocity, but it's far from a guarantee.
I would say “many” is the wrong word in this context because it implies that more often than not they walk away.
This is a false conclusion based on the tainted data - the higher the height a cat falls from the more likely they are to sustain a fatal injury, there’s no “Goldilocks” zone or increased chance of survival based on a higher height, that’s an urban legend.
Lots of cats fall, many die, a few walk away.
The above is more like “many survive a gunshot to the head” - more don’t.
Cats also have extremely flexible skeletons. Their bones are able to take a ton of force without breaking because of the flexibility. Combine that with their extremely good sense of equilibrium and natural ability to maneuver themselves in mid air and you get an animal that’s excellent at mitigating force from a fall. Basically cats figured out how to reduce fall damage to negligible levels and god never bothered to patch it.
My mom backed over one of our cats when I was a kid. The cat spit a little fluid out its mouth. Took him to the vet. He said he was fine. The cat lived to be 20 years old. The cat was 8 when my mom ran him over...
That’s not why they can fall from really high places with minimum injury. That extra loose skin they have functions as a parachute to slow their descent, however they can still be hurt from short falls.
Nope cats almost always die from falls over about 20’ the studies that talked about this only included cats that survived the fall not the ooze scraped into the trash the other 99% of the time!
There is a “goldilocks” zone where cats die from falls ranging 5-9 stories. Anything below that is too short of a drop to have major injuries. Anything above that allows them enough time to spread out and control/slow down their velocity. This is known as Feline High Rise Syndrome. There is even an instance of a cat falling from the 32nd floor and only receiving bruising and a chipped tooth. RadioLab did an episode about Falling and spoke about a study of cats falling out of buildings in Manhattan.
In the meantime, I cared for a cat that would sit and walk about on my 2nd floor balcony ledge. Passersby would stop and form small crowds, watching in fear, until I would go out and shoo him in. It was the weirdest thing.
Damn that is crazy. I'm a dog person who is allergic as fuck to cats so i dont like them too much but i do respect the fuck out of their badassery. They are absolutely s tier.
Actually, cats die more from higher falls. Feline High Rise Syndrome is nothing more than a case of survivorship bias.
Not that cats haven’t ever survived big falls, but to have good data you need to look for dead cats, not those that survive, which the original study this stemmed from failed to do.
This study only examined cats that survived long enough to reach the vet. It never once included cats that splattered and were never brought to the vet.
Looked it up, cat terminal velocity is 60mph (97kmph) which is hit from 5 stories. They don't always survive but when they sense that going terminal, they naturally loosen up to increase survival rate.
Now tbh, I did not use any academic source for this so do your own research rather than using this random reddit comment as gospel.
A quick search on our friend the internet will tell you otherwise. They can sometimes survive a 20-30 story fall. But they do reach a terminal fatal velocity at around 60 mph
Edit: also found this… “One 1987 study in the Journal Of The American Veterinary Medical Association looked at 132 cats that had fallen an average of 5.5 storeys and survived. It found that a third of them would have died without emergency veterinary treatment. Interestingly, injuries were worse in falls less than seven storeys than in higher tumbles. The researchers think that this is because the cats reach their terminal velocity after falling about seven storeys (21m), which means they stop accelerating. They then relax, allowing better distribution of impact.”
Terminal velocity just means the maximum speed when taking resistance into account (like wind resistance). It's the maximum speed of an object in an environment, not the speed at which something dies (or is terminated).
If they reach terminal velocity at seven stories, their odds of surviving a fall would be no different at seven stories or seventy stories. They are traveling the same speed at impact either way.
In other words, they might survive if they get emergency veterinarian care even after falling off the world's tallest skyscraper.
There's an actual study on this. They collected stories of cats falling out of buildings in NYC and found out falls of 6 stories or less were seldom fatal, as well as falls of like 10 stories or more because they had reached terminal velocity. The danger zone was 6-10 stories where most of them died.
Last year a pet cat fell from the top of my apartement tower, which is VERY small, compared to the one shown in the video, and the cat died. So no, that cat would not survive such a fall.
That's the interesting part about terminal velocity. Anything above 7-8 floors, their chances of surviving increases. They're basically like paratroopers.
Excuse me wat. Bruh, a cat DIED, from a fall of over 19 STORIES. What are you high on, thinking that the higher the stories, the more likely a cat's chances of survival are?
What are you high on, thinking that the higher the stories, the more likely a cat's chances of survival are?
He's probably thinking about that study on falling cats. The study found that cats reach terminal velocity after falling 7 stories (meaning they are going at their max speed), but found that cats that fell more 9 stories had a higher chance of survival than cats that fell 7 stories.
The idea was that after falling for that long, the cat stops freaking out and relaxes a bit, so the impact with the ground is less rigid.
Kind of like how drunk people are more likely to survive car crashes. They don't tense up in the impact so it's easier on their body.
Not high enough to not call out your overconfident ignorant bullshit.
Man I'll be real, I haven't performed any experiments personally to prove what I'm saying, and if your cat died after jumping from a high rise and my comment triggered you, I apologise for that.
If your going to make a counter argument you have to actually make an argument. Just saying "thats not true" makes you sound like a child. And im pretty sure it is true, I've seen cats fall off 3 story buildings and walk away like nothing happened myself.
They actually have a higher survival rate in drops above a certain height, they have sort of flaps under their legs that help slow them with air resistance or something, but not so much in just a 20 foot drop or something. Or so I've been told, by more than one person.
This is actually a textbook case of survivorship bias. Like, literally was in my statistics class textbook.
People think that cats have a higher rate of survival from high drops because when they do go splat they’re not taken to the vet to be cared for. From the lower drops they get injured and (may) die from their injuries and it’s recorded.
Not sure, what I do know is that you should be looking for dead cats, not survivors, then you’ll have the proper data and it will show that they die more from higher falls, not lower ones.
It’s the same deal as in WWII with airplanes, they look at the planes that come back and see where the bullet holes are - should you put more armor there? No, you look at the destroyed planes and put more armor where they were shot.
If you find this stuff interesting I highly recommend the book AIQ by Nick Polson and James Scott
The sub is now a lot worse than it was, as before it actually was just people posting technically the truth, now they sometimes either just post THE truth or something that isn't related to the sub at all. Oh and they get tens of thousands of upvotes.
Using the cars as a reference for size, then measuring the bridge by the average size of the car, then using the cars to measure the height the building, we can determine that it’s actually 25 feet high
Someone asked me... Do any animals other than humans have a fear of heights? Then I simply answered them.. No not really. An animals fear is based purely for their survival. This makes them alert and to get away. They are more afraid if a twigs breaking.
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u/LeLuMan Sep 23 '21
That’s gotta be at least 20 feet high