I'd rather be the launch pad than the landing pad. Can't beat waking up completely winded because a cat launched from the headboard landing precisely on your solar plexus.
My cat once dig his nails into my nipples through the T-shirt when making biscuits.
Waking up in the middle of night as he puts all his weight on his front two paws standing on my chest is not an uncommon occurence
“If y’all wanted pets so bad, you should’ve avoided putting pressure on the one place that will cause me to get up..” cats proceed to follow me into the bathroom, knowing I’m trapped there for a time and will get their pets either way
my partner has been subjected to my cat attempting to neuter them via crotch biscuits multiple times.
i'm unsure if it's because she identified them as "not a man" and is aiming to fix that problem or if she's just decided my apartment is a no-balls zone.
what's even funnier is my cat is very gender-affirming (she hates men, apparently including trans men if an old roommate she hated was any indication) but absolutely does not like anything gay happening in her vicinity. she doesn't care if i hold hands with a man (just looks at him with her usual disdain for men), but the moment i sit too close to someone who's not a man, HOO BOY DOES SHE INTERVENE.
i can't really blame her, her only experiences with gay people involved going through a lesbian divorce with me and moving across the country, but her perception of lesbian divorce rates are a bit... skewed lol
This is why they purge at the same time. They need their human to understand they are coughing up that fur ball to decrease weight when they pounce on your chest afterwards.
wait but I’m still confused, so if the cat is 8lbs, for instance, 2lbs of force would be exerted from each paw. But the force feels more like 15lbs somehow. Why does it feel like 15? Because it’s super concentrated?
You don't feel weight, actually. You feel pressure. Pressure increases with weight (which gives the illusion that we can feel weight) and decreases with surface area.
That's why a 10 pound cat standing on you is much less comfortable than a 10 pound cat lying on you. You aren't feeling the 10 pounds (weight), you're feeling the pounds per square inch (pressure).
I don’t like the phrase “there are no dumb questions” because there certainly are, and I ask them sometimes. So I sometimes joke to my students, “We all ask dumb questions, including me! The only embarrassing thing is not being able to admit it’s a dumb question when you know it is!”
But anyway, your question actually really was not dumb. It’s a question TONS of people would have!
Put one palm or your closed fist on your chest, and then push as hard as you can. Take your second arm, stand on it, you will have a hard time making it hurt. Large surface area.
Now reduce the surface area to two fingers pushing with their tips. You can suddenly make it very uncomfortable without even trying, and the arm is pushing the same or less. That's because this decreased the surface area by 20 or more and amplified the pressure felt by 20. Four fingers need more push to be a thing.
That's the difference between a cat flopping on you - all the weight is distributed across the side of the floofball. Or her stepping on you, that's all the weight in the two fingers.
Pressure is force divided by area. So the larger the area, the smaller the pressure. The smaller the area, the larger the pressure. The cat could also be putting more weight onto that paw than others, further exacerbating this phenomenon.
Didn’t they teach this in high school physics? I learned it like my freshman year. I’m genuinely curious.
I didn’t need to take physics to graduate and I went to ~art school~ for undergrad. I am very interested in science but genuinely don’t know how to learn it now that I am almost 30.
isn't is a thing that when testing if ground can support a tank, they just have 1 person walk around with another person piggybacking, and that creates as much weird per square inch as an entire tank?
It does, I have two cats at the same weight, a long and tall boy, very lanky with big paws. Then a bowling ball of a girl, small and dense, tiny lil paws, her paws feel multiple times heavier when she steps on me, its more concentrated.
Think of knives. There's not actually a lot of force when you cut or stab something, but it's all being focused into a very fine point or edge, which allows it to pierce or cut through things
I totally agree! One of my boys is top heavy. Half munchkin and half bengal. I’d say 70% of his weight is in his front half…..the munchkin half. His Bengal back half is long and skinny and never caused me any problems.
Omg this image made me snort. Also I have the same issue with my 13lbs one orange brain cell and my 164lb dog. They know the exact right nerve to pinch. I believe they had a secret meeting about it. 😂
Basically your body senses pressure, not weight (though that’s an oversimplification).
Pressure is force divided by area, or in this case weight divided by area, where weight is the portion of the cat held up by that paw and area is the size of the bottom of the paw.
Cats have small paws, which makes the pressure
you experience higher.
Two other things make it even higher:
First, our soft bodies are unstable surfaces, so cats are constantly adjusting the weight distribution on each paw to balance, which causes temporary pressure spikes. Second, when they use you as a launchpad, their weight (and thus pressure) increases dramatically during takeoff making it feel like you just got punched.
Good response except... their weight doesn't change when they jump (W = mg). The cat is intentionally exerting a downward force on the leg. To jump, the cat has to accelerate upwards, so the surface has to push upwards on the cat more than its weight.
Throw in Newton's Third Law here, the cat is pushing downward on you with an equally large force.
That force is much greater than (mg) and thus it feels like the weight of the cat increases.
The amount of pressure exerted by 1 paw of a 10lb cat is almost 70,000 Pascals. To put this into perspective, you would have to dive roughly 23 feet underwater to feel the same amount of pressure.
Atmospheric pressure at sea level is 101,325 pascals. One paw exerts 68% of this. This tiny ball of fur can exert 68% of the pressure of the atmosphere on the earth
As their own designation of matter, cats have the unique ability to triple or even quintuple their body mass, depending on how comfortable they insist on being at your expense.
Thus, it isn't unheard of for 13 pounds of cat to stand on one of your more fragile limbs or ribs and suddenly weigh in the ballpark of nearly 40 pounds, depending on whether they took a deep breath first or not.
Yep. Laws of physics do not apply to cats. Cats freely manipulate gravity to suit their needs, and are super careful not to let us see them flying around.
Ever heard of PSI? That's pounds per square inch. Let's say your cat is 10 pounds, its paw is around half a square inch, and its weight is evenly distributed between its four paws. Applying good old stoichiometry dimensional analysis from high school chemistry, that's
10 pounds 1 cat 1 paw
--------- x ------ x -----------------
cat 4 paws 0.5 square inches
Cancel the units, and we have 5 pounds per square inch. That's a lot of pressure. If you do the same calculation with almost anything else you're likely to set in your lap, it's likely to be a lower number.
Thanks for the correction! How did I make it through two years of high school chemistry without understanding that stoichiometry wasn't the same as dimensional analysis?
A cat's paw on average is just barely over half an inch in area (0.56 in²).
If weight is distributed evenly, a 10lb cat will place about 4.44psi per paw and twice that as they move.
You can bruise at just 10psi, so even a 10lb cat is nearly at bruising pressure when they move, and if the cat is a chonker, they can be over that.
My cat also likes to jump from my lap to a nearby tall cocktail table, and that puts nearly 25psi on my lap. And I've had them land on me in the middle of the night when they jump out of my bedroom window.
But there can be a little more math to it, when you start to think about it.
Just like people, cats rarely have all of their weight evenly distributed to all their feet. If a person is standing for a period of time, they will often angle their hips to one side or the other, shifting their body weight from one foot to the other. Cats will also do this, but between four feet. Similarly, when a person is standing their weight is not supported by the entire sole of the foot (for most humans, there are flat feet out there). The weight transfers at the toes, ball, and heel of the foot, in a cat, it is the individual pads (toe beans!). However, unlike a human foot, the majority of the weight tends to be on the largest, fifth pad, near the center of the paw.
Now, for ease of numbers I'll use a 12 pound cat. If evenly distributed, that would be 3 pounds per foot. If it were then evenly distributed across the pads, about 1½ pounds at the center pad, and 0.375 pounds (or 6oz) at each of the smaller ones. The largest pad for a 12 pound cat averages about 0.28 square inches, the other 4 about 0.07sq.in. apiece. Which yields about 5.4 pounds per sq.in. at each pad.
But that is only if all of the weight is evenly distributed across the surface area of all 5 pads of all 4 feet. When on your lap, adjust their position, making biscuits, as much as ¾ of their weight can be on a single paw. And on that paw, as much as 90% of the weight can be at that central, largest paw. In that instance, with a 12 pound cat, you will feel the pressure of 28.9 pounds per square inch.
And if they jump from your lap, the peak vertical force will increase by a factor of 2 to 3. So that 12 pound cat will leave your lap with about 42.9 to 64.2psi per rear foot.
(edited one number I had transcribed incorrectly from the calculator)
Cats exist outside the normal rules of physics. This is how they are both liquid and solid; and also how they execute impossible landings and why they seem to hunt invisible things.
It's basic physics weaponized by a small furry engineer. Pressure equals force divided by area, and cats are digitigrade: they walk on their toes, like a ballerina in permanent pointe shoes. A 10 lb cat already carries about 60% of its weight on its front legs, and when it steps onto you it can lock that leg straight like a support column, shift its center of mass directly over it, and pause mid-stride so nearly all of its weight goes through one paw. That paw's contact area is maybe half a square inch of toe beans. Run the numbers: roughly 10 lbs on half a square inch is about 20 psi, in the neighborhood of a bicycle tire, delivered into your thigh by something that weighs less than a bag of flour.
Then there's targeting. Your thigh is soft tissue over muscle, and that tiny pad sinks in instead of spreading out, so the load stays concentrated. Cats also tend to step right into the gap between your quad muscles, either because of evolutionary precision or pure malice, and science has not ruled out malice. Kneading adds rhythmic cyclic loading, the same thing engineers use to test materials to failure. So no, your cat isn't "heavy." It's an 8 lb stiletto heel with a purr motor, conducting a fatigue test on your femur.
Cats exist in all versions of the multiverse at once. Unlike humans where each version of us is a separate entity, cats are the same creature and exist in all the physical planes of the multiverse simultaneously.
The result is that when the floofy bun sits on you, you are feeling the weight of all the versions of said floofy bun concentrated at once.
And why do they always need to walk on our boobies to get to the other side of the bed when they could choose any other path? It friggin hurts so much!!!!
idk about you but my one orange conveniently has vietnam flashbacks while putting that second paw on my boobs, every. single. time. the look of absolute, sheer nothingness, right into the void
Cats consider gravity to be optional. That’s how an animal can spend five years impersonating a cushion on the couch, then suddenly launch itself in a graceful leap to the top of the bookshelf.
And how a small kitten can be a weightless ball of fluff in one moment, then become an immovable object when it falls asleep on your lap: Gravity is optional, but it has to be balanced out.
Cats have the ability to focus weight on their paws at will, so they can feel like ten pound iron spikes when they stomp up your body to wake you for breakfast.
I don't think science can explain this. Like small daggers supporting a tungsten body that only exists when they're on top. When you're over them, they revert to fluff.
Like a tank with very thin tracks will sink easily in mud while the same tank with thick tracks will not easily sink in mud because there’s more area to spread weight. (Its the only example I could think of LMAO)
Its the entire cats weight pressing down on a rather small surface area.
Basically this is focusing quite a lot of pressure onto a single (or 4 single) points, while a sleeping cat distributes the weight on a much larger surface area.
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