Passage 2
Cats have the widest hearing range of` nearly any mammal, not only can they perceive sound in what we define as the “ultrasonic" range, they can also appreciate all the bass Dr Dre can throw at them. They can swivel their whiskers forwards while hunting to provide a kind of short-range radar. And they can see exceptionally well in the dark thanks to a reflective surface behind the retina that bounces light back, giving it a second chance to hit a photoreceptor. They see more distinct images per second than we do.
Dog partisans will appeal to the dog's allegedly superior intelligence—though if that were the primary criterion for choosing a pet, one would expect to see a lot more crows and squid on leads around town, In fact, cats are rather cleverer than commonly assumed, as the biologist and animal-behaviour expert John Bradshaw shows in his new book, They can even be trained to an extent, which was news to me.
Bradshaw's book mixes pellets of cat lore with accounts of feline evolution, anatomy, genetics and development from newborn kitten to adulthood, plus descriptions of cat-psychology experiments in the laboratory, many of which he has conducted himself, Some of the most interesting parts indicate holes in our current scientific knowledge. “Vany mother cats try to move their litters at least once before they wean them," he observes, “but science has yet to find out why” . No one knows why cats go crazy for catnip, nor why they are able “to classify shapes according to whether they are closed or open” . Kittens, meanwhile, “may also use special movements of their tails to signal playfulness, but so far no scientist has been able to decode these” . As far as potential research projects go, decoding the tail-language of playing kittens must be about the interesting unsolved problem in science.
The cat is an apparently phlegmatic beast, but Bradshaw points out that cats experience strong emotions, and sometimes might be suffering in silence. They aren’t particularly sociable, and cats who are housed with others who weren’t litter-mates——perhaps by well-meaning owners who think they need the company-can become chronically stressed.
Luckily, then, cats probably aren’t aware that today they are once again hate figures, the furry target of spittle-spraying ecologists who, armed with dodgy statistics, accuse cats of wildly ”murdering” all the country's songbirds. It's a bit more complicated than that, Bradshaw shows. Rats also kill songbirds, and cats keep their numbers down; while the RSPB says the disappearance of habitat is a far more important factor in the decline of songbird populations than predator numbers. But we could at least, Bradshaw suggests, reverse the counterproductive selection pressure we currently exert on the domestic cat when we neuter house cats before they reproduce. This means, he explains, that the “friendliest, most docile" cats are prevented from leaving any descendants, while wild cats-which are more suspicious of humans and better at hunting will leave more offspring. Unintentionally, we are causing cats to evolve into animals society won't like as much, Cat-haters probably won't appreciate this book, but anyone else might. It is written in a friendly and engaging way, has helpful tips for cat owners, and is packed with excellent cat facts. Why, you might have wondered, do cats get stuck up trees? Because all their claws face forwards.so none can be used as brakes on the descent. We all know how good cats are at twisting mid-air to land on their feet, but they have an even more impressive trick: some cats adopt a "parachute” position during a long fall, with all four legs stuck out to the side, before coming back to the landing position at the last moment.
This cat-parachute pose, Bradshaw calculates, “limits the falling speed to a maximum of fifty. three miles an hour" so enabling some cats to fall from high-rise buildings and walk away unhurt. I'd like to see a dog try that.
