How Cats Always Land on Their Feet

For many years, there was a joke spread online that cats always land on their feet, so if you tie a cat to a piece of toast with jam on it and release it with the cat’s back toward the ground, the toast will always land face-up.

In 1894, a French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey has started a public discussion about cats always landing on their feet. A picture he took of a cat falling raised attention to this phenomenon; scientists even gave it a professional name called the “falling cat problem”. This was a discovery that goes against physics laws. Usually, when an object is in the midair, there must be a force to make it start spinning.

Recently, researchers at Japan Yamaguchi University have carefully studied five spines from five dead cats. They have discovered that the main reason for accomplishing this move is due to the cat’s flexibility in their spine. The team of researchers have discovered that the front part (thoracic spine) of the cat’s spine is three times more flexible than the back part (lumbar spine).

However, this source of evidence was not enough for the study of the “falling cat problem” the researchers wanted to study a cat in motion and see the movement of it. So, they used a high-speed camera with two cats being dropped from a height about 1 meter on to a soft cushion. The video suggested that the cat didn’t just spin the front part, after the front spine twisted the back part followed, which is a more complete motion of falling and landing on their feet.

Therefore, the mysterious of the “falling cat problem” was successfully solved.