Meet The Tiny Tiger At Home

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Welcome to the Animal Naturopathic Medicine Educator podcast, specializing in canine, feline, and equine animal health from a biological perspective. Today your host is myself, Ashley, and I want to have a little fun with this discussion and talk about the tiny tiger that lives in your living room. And yes, I am speaking of the one and only cat. Cats are fabulous, and I always feel like they don't get as much uh hype as they should in terms of just how unique they are as a species, especially in regards to the fact that they have not deviated from their ancestral origins or innate behaviors at all, even with domestication from humans. They still are hunters at their core, which is seen every time a cat is outside and their instinct to stalk and hunt kicks in. As much as we humans feed them, buy them expensive climbing trees and laugh at their chaotic midnight antics, it is easy to forget that our fairy roommates are actually highly advanced, elite predators. Unlike dogs, humans never truly bred cats to change their nature, nor were we able to change their suave predator qualities. Instead, I kind of feel as if cats sort of chose us. They are not reliant on humans for survival, they are capable, competent, independent species that don't need no human. And I know that I could probably talk about how amazing cats are for hours, so I have noted down uh four incredible but also slightly humorous um sentences that I'm going to stick to and expand upon, try and keep it snappy as to why I think the domestic cat is one of nature's most impressive masterpieces. And I am probably going to sound like the ultimate hypewoman here, but I know that um all cat lovers will definitely get a chuckle out of this.

Built Like Liquid

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Okay, so first off, my first point is cats are built like liquid. Um, hypothetically, obviously. Um, cat owners will know what I mean by this, but for those that don't own cats, um, have you ever seen a cat squeeze through an impressively tiny gap? Their bones will look like they don't exist, they disappear, right? It's like magic. But it all comes down to their unique anatomy. And the reason for this is the floating shoulder. Let me expand. So, unlike humans whose shoulder blades are anchored securely by a rigid colour bone, a cat's clavicle is tiny tiny, it's almost non existent, and it's buried deep inside thick muscle tissue. And this free-floating design allows their shoulder blades to collapse inward, freely sliding along the ribcage as they rotate, flatten, and compress the entire shoulder girdle inward, almost like to the front of the ribcage. And if a cat can fit its head through a space, the rest of its body can effortlessly follow, as a cat's ribcage and pelvis are the same size as its head, or in some breeds, will actually be slightly smaller in angulation. Hence why a cat can approach a narrow gap with so much confidence, there's no hesitation, they know they won't get stuck.

The Mid Air Righting Reflex

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The other spect that gives a cat this made-of-liquid body quality is their gyroscopic spine. On top of their compressible shoulder blades, cats possess an ultra-flexible spine containing 30 vertebrates, excluding the tail, so five more than humans. And this elasticity powers the famous writing angle. Or you may know this as the age-old saying that we all say that cats always land on their feet. When a cat falls, its vestibular system in the inner ear instantly identifies which way is up, even when gravity is calling. So the cat twists its flexible spine in mid-air, like a gyroscope, essentially splitting the spine into two halves, the front half and the back half, so like cranial and chordal. So one half is flexing to the right, and the other half is flexing to the left, and the limbs will follow the angle of the spine as it flexes in opposite direction, kind of like they're doing the twist. And the tail will act like a rudder on a plane to balance the two halves in the air. And this action will keep flexing the two separate halves from left to right, left to right as it falls, constantly changing direction, which is kind of like the cat is fighting an invisible monster mid-air when they fall. Like they look like they're a bit like frantic and spaty. But this gyroscope method allows the aligning of the cat's front paws and back paws, and then tail, to always land on their feet safe, absorbing the impact of the ground through their elastic, muscular limbs that can, yes, hyperextend, but also compress into extreme tight angles within milliseconds as it abruptly makes contact with the ground. And this then allows them to land safely on their feet from remarkable heights all the time with little injury. There are not many animals that have this incredible ability, and those that do, like a llama or a gecko, they're actually using their long muscular tails like a whirlwind to shift momentum to land on their feet. They do not use their spine as they don't have this impressive, flexible spine like what a cat does. The cat literally has a one in a million gyroscope spine. Okay.

Night Vision Ears And Whiskers

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Point number two I have here is they possess superhero sensors just like Superman. So your cat experiences a completely different world than you do. So operating with sensory tools that mimic superhero abilities, really, or possibly high-tech military gear, they naturally possess glow-in-the-dark vision. So cats cannot see in total pitch blackness, but they come incredibly close. Behind a cat's retina sits a biological mirror called the tapetum lucidum. Any light that passes through the retina without being absorbed hits this mirror and bounces right back through the eye, giving the photoreceptors, so this is the parts responsible for creating an image, a second chance to actually catch it and catch this image. This amplification mechanism lets cats see perfectly in conditions that are six times darker than what humans can. And it is the exact reason why their eyes will have that eerie glow when hit by a flashlight, almost like a reflective mirror. They have supersonic ears like satellite radars, so like human ears, right? They're stationary and muffled, but a cat's ears are precision-tracking dishes. They are powered by 32 independent muscles in each ear. They can rotate 180 degrees completely independently of one another. So you can have one ear that's rotating this way, and the other ear will rotate the other way. And this allows cats to then pinpoint the exact direction and origin of a sound within a few inches, even from meters away. They can also detect ultrasonic frequencies up to 64,000 Hertz, which is a full octave higher than a dog's hearing range, which is what allows them to hear the high-pitched social, like sorry, social squeals of mice like hiding underground. They can sense airwaves through the navigation matrix within their whiskers. So a cat's whiskers are not just like long hairs, as we all know, they are highly calibrated navigation instruments. The root of their whisker is embedded deep in a pocket of tissue packed with like thousands of nerve endings. And these hairs are so sensitive they can detect minute changes in air currents, acting like radars to help a cat sense approaching objects or moving prey in pitch black black darkness. And this is where cats also know something is approaching before it's even come into view. Like that's quite clearly a superhero type of a sense, isn't it? We should have super cat instead of superman. Anyway, so point number three they are mini tigers.

How Cats Chose To Live With Us

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All cats, regardless of breed, share 95.6% of their DNA with tigers. So your cute tabby is genetically almost identical to a 300 kilo jungle predator, sharing the exact same predatory instincts, sleep schedules, and territorial drives. Most domestic animals were captured and selectively bred by humans over millennia for specific traits like docility, food, wool production or pulling power like horses. But cats took a completely different path. In a way, they self-domesticated to coexist with humans for their own predatory gain. When early humans transitioned to agriculture, grain stores attracted thousands of rodents. Wild African cats, they noticed this buffet and they willingly moved into human settlements to hunt. They were unfazed by the humans, didn't see them as a threat, and the humans tolerated them because they kept diseases and pests away. But these early humans, they never forced cats to change, nor could they actually achieve that. As unlike dogs, for example, cats are not pack animals, they don't hunt in groups or rely on the group like a dog does. So cross-species hunting and like cooperation does not work in that same way for a cat. But co-inhabiting for easy prey, easy hunting can act like a cat can definitely do that. And cats are smart and they will definitely choose the hunt smarter, not harder option. Because cats are solo hunters, just like tigers, they they always will be because humans never fundamentally altered their biology. The domestic cat's deep-coated hunting and survival instincts remain fully intact. So, like while a modern pug, for example, like they would struggle to survive in the wild, especially if it doesn't have a pack. But a pampered house cat can switch back into a highly efficient, self-reliant predator instantly if forced into the wild, because deep down they they still are these mini tigers.

Purring As Repair And Stress Relief

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Okay, my fourth and final point is the cats purr might actually be a clue as to why they have nine lives. Okay, so hear me out. So we usually associate purring with a happy cat, right? But they also purr when they are stressed, hurt, or even giving birth. So scientists have discussed for many years that the purr is not just a social signal, it is a built-in cellular repair mechanism. And this is because biomechanical frequency of a cat's purr is generated by the rapid rhythmic twitching of their laryngeal muscles, so this is the vocal cords, vibrating at a steady frequency between 20 hertz to about 140 hertz. And in human biomedicine, identical sound frequencies are actually utilized in bone-growing like therapies for growth to accelerate the healing of like fractures and regeneration of damaged soft tissues. And because cats spend up to 16 hours a day sleeping to conserve energy for hunting, naturally one would think that they would be prone to bone density loss or muscle atrophy from long periods of inactivity, right? But no, the internal vibration of purring acts as like a low energy exercise program, stimulating bone and tissue regeneration without the cat having to exert physical energy. Plus, it naturally lowers their blood pressure. And furthermore, when like your cat purrs on your lap, that low frequency vibration has been proven to reduce stress levels in humans too. Like any cat owner will know what I'm talking about. You instantly, ha, when you feel that purring on your lap.

Seeing Cats With New Respect

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So the next time that like you s like your cat stares blankly at a wall or pounces on a shadow or refuses to come when you call, remember you aren't looking at a simple pet. You are looking at a perfectly preserved miniature wild tiger that simply tolerates our existence because we feed them lovely snacks and we give them a warm bed. But let's face it, like I think anyone that has had a cat as a pet knows that they are the captain of their own ship. And I think that we all should try to uh embody the essence of a cat in some way, whether it is their self-assurance, their curiosity, or their no fear mentality. Like these majestic wonders really are otherworldly, and we love them all the more for it. So I hope you have enjoyed this feline praise, and please tune in next time. Goodbye, everyone.