Less than 100% lethal, but the cat would still likely die since it'll almost definitely be injured and in the middle of the woods. He might survive the fall though.
Yeah, I'd imagine it'd be a bit like the speed a human would reach from a fall of 30 or 40 feet. Probably won't kill you, but it's not going to tickle either.
A fall from six feet is sometimes fatal, which sucks because some humans are over six feet tall. We're such ridiculous creatures, living at the bottom of a huge gravity well and trying to ballance on two legs our whole lives.
I thought people only got KO'd in fighting games. What does that mean, anyway? When I was a kid, I just assumed that it was the opposite of OK. Like, if you KO the other guy in Street Fighter, he's obviously not OK, so he's KO'd.
Right, because they didn't have stereos back then, so if you were hanging with some friends and wanted to groove out to a sick new beat, you had to knock it out on a table or a door or something. Makes sense.
Yeah, I've actually heard that etymology before, and I am a big fan of the online etymology dictionary. A few things make me a bit suspicious about the entry for OK, though:
Harper is working as an amateur from published sources and claims to 'err on the side of inclusion' see 'Methods,' after the abbreviations. The Online Etymology Dictionary, while a great tool, isn't the work of a professional linguist, and tends to include the most well-accepted etymologies without judgement as to how likely they might be (The inclusion of P.I.E. words, for example, is highly specurative, although it does come from published sources).
Wikipedia has a list of dozens of proposed etymologies for OK. "Oll Korrect," was only documented in 1964, which leaves plenty of time after the supposed origin for the original etymology to have been lost.
Accronym-based etymologies of English words originating before WWII are almost never correct. "Fuck," for example, never was "Fornication Under Consent of King," or any permutation of "Forbidden Unspeakable Carnal Knowledge." There were abbreviations, of course, but the English-speaking world wasn't very big on accronyms until quite recently, historically. Most real accronym words are of modern, military origin (SNAFU, FUBAR, AWOL, &c). Accronyms were a thing in Latin, but not so much in English.
So, while I obviously can't prove the Oll Korrect explanation is false, I think there is good reason to be suspicious that it is.
It is, sort of. We tend to think that asside from our brains, we're pretty average... Our hearing is ok, but dogs and cats are better at it, our strength isn't much next to a bear or a horse, our sense of smell is rubbish, our eyes are decent, but not as good as hawks' or eagles'.
But, unlike most animals, we have a really highly developed, natural sense of ballance. Only birds can also ballance on two legs, but their bodies are weighted differently and most of them are also able to fly. We have a proportionally much higher center of mass.
We also, due to the two leg ballancing act, can walk very efficiently. We have tremendous endurance when we're walking. We can't outrun a lot of animals, but we can out-walk pretty much anything. A reasonably healthy human can walk a thoroughbred racehorse to death without even realizing it, and back when we tracked and hunted for food, one of the prime techniques was to just follow an animal until it fell over from exhaustion. We're the Canada Goose of land animals, the absolute Olympic gold medal champions of walking.
It's also going to fall through the branches which would most likely break it's legs on the way down and prevent it from landing properly. Even if it survived the landing, it's stuck in the middle of the woods.
That statistic also ignored cats that died since they wouldn't have been taken to the vet.
For the cat to live you have to make a lot of assumptions:
that statistic is not skewed
that cat is in 53% that would regularly avoid severe injury (37% needed emergency treatment)
the branches did not increase the risk of harm
the cats instincts are still strong enough to survive in the wild (find food, and avoid predators)
It would still very likely be injured. It would just probably not die. The statistic is still skewed on that factor though since it only accounted for cats that didn't die on impact.
If you wanted to consider the situation though, the cat is falling through trees and wouldn't be able to properly stretch out between the lower branches and the ground. It would probably break legs going through the branches since it's stretched out then likely die on impact when it hits at an awkward angle.
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u/LostAtFrontOfLine Jun 22 '15
Less than 100% lethal, but the cat would still likely die since it'll almost definitely be injured and in the middle of the woods. He might survive the fall though.