by Lophophaps » Thu 23 Jun, 2022 6:52 pm
My dad was a skydiver back in the sixties. There was a bloke in his club that was a nut. He had the idea that he could test the axiom that “cats always land on their feet” from free fall altitude, where he would fall with them and observe their self-righting behaviour. He had no interest in aiding their descent, just wanted to see how they behaved in free fall. In his plan, landing was the cats’ problem, not his. Scientific impartiality, or some such thing.
He took four stray cats up in a pillowcase for the jump. After exiting the plane, he turned the pillowcase inside out, releasing the cats. To his great surprise, all four cats attached themselves to his body immediately. With their claws. Given that cats have 18 claws each, he was punctured at least 72 times. More, probably, because he struggled vainly to remove the cats as he fell, but they were having none of it, and would reattach with even more conviction with every effort he made to pull them off.
Presently, he was out of altitude, and had to turn his attention to opening the chute. Let’s pause to do some maths. A chute opening can generate as much as three Gs of force. The average cat weighs 1.4 kilograms at 1 G. At three Gs, this becomes 4 kilograms per cat. So when the chute opened, for a moment this guy had 72 razor sharp claws in his skin, each one being pulled down with a force of about 600 grams. That’s about 44 kilograms of cats. He was sliced to ribbons, basically.
All four cats hung on through the chute opening, although the skydiver’s shredded flesh allowed each one to slip a few centimetres. Bleeding and in misery, the skydiver managed to make a safe, if rather rough, landing in a farm field.
As soon as he hit the earth, all four cats ran off across the field, leaving him to lie there bleeding from his hundred or so wounds. He was the only member of the skydiving club that was displeased with the results of his experiment.