The vb Cat Community Observation Study: Experiment Number One
Source: I have five happy cats. This is not very common. I kinda realized there might be something there that I could turn into – gasp! – science. And of course, my cats are nothing short of Nobel prize-deserving beings, and their contribution to their own race – and ours – should not be forgotten. When studying cats for science, however, the main difficulty is that cats will deliberately mess with science, just for the heck of it. The trick is to study them when they don’t care – that is, when they eat. You could be bleeding to death next to them while they eat and they’d only think “cool! dessert!” As an aside, you know those little angel and demon characters that appear in cartoons to illustrate “right” and “wrong”? Well my own personal little devil looks like my physics teacher, and right now, the little teacher-devil is laughing his ass off: yeah, vieux bandit and science, right! (hey – I passed. Or he made sure I did. Doesn’t matter now, does it?). Anyway, I therefore introduce, present and host… The vb Cat Community Observation Study: Experiment Number One!
Theory: When cats eat, they curl their tail behind or alongside them, on one side or the other (on an interesting note, I once read that it was better for the cats’ digestion to eat from an elevated bowl, and I feel like a bad mother for having known this for so long and not having yet acted on it; doing research to confirm or infirm the theory, however, leads one to way too many stores and marketing ploys – elevated bowls that enhance the decor of any room? puh-lease!). Perhaps what determines the side on which felines curl their tail is a personal preference or a body comfort… “thing”. Much like we are more comfortable crossing our fingers with the right side index coming first or with the left.
Method of investigation: Observe five cats from my household during their meals and note the rail position of each, to see if a pattern emerges. A duration of 20 meals was chosen. In the subjects’ case, 20 meals will only require a few days of observation, meals being induced approximately by the time of the day and how loud the large hungry tabby is meowing (if the neighbours have good cause to complain, it’s time for a meal). (Yes, I know I seem to have too much time on my hands.)
Observation: The feeding schedule in the household has recently been modified, causing stress to all five subjects. We position this will not have a significant impact on the test results or that, if it will, such an impact will actually work towards improving the results, since stressed felines are more likely to act on an impulse to find comfort, which we position is the reason behind the tail-curling behaviour, and thereby to act, if one may use the term to describe indoor pampered city cats, more “naturally”.
Results: See the graph below (yes of course there’s a graph! I’m a geek. We like graphs. Deal with it.) Green represents the cat’s left, blue represents the cat’s right, and yellow means that the tail was not curled, but positioned in a very straight line behing the cat.
Conclusion: You’ll notice that only Milady (the only girl) used only one side. One possible conclusion is that girls and females are more reliable, but that flatters the scientist too much to suggest objectivity. The cats are listed from oldest to youngest (Esteban being listed before Tao because he entered our house first, technically, but the two are twins). You’ll notice that it seems that the older the cat, the more reliable. Perhaps tail-side comfort stabilizes with age, with Katcher and Moocah showing signs of tail-side stabilization (We all know, after all, that teenagers never know what they want and experiment on all sides.) Another possibility is that darker cats (the top three) are more stable than cream-coloured ones. Or perhaps I indeed had too much time on my hands and this means very little. Observation post-study has confirmed Milady’s persistent preference for the left. She’s definately a tail-leftie.
