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Cat lovers find themselves obsessing over the strangest and most unusual things about their feline friends. From their fuzzy foreheads to their soft tails, to the little beans on their paws, we love them all. That’s why when they sit on glass surfaces and they’re extra spread out, that we love it even more. In fact, there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to cats sitting on the glass so you don’t need to wonder if you’re weird for loving your pets that way.
Maybe the reason why we love it so much is that cats are sort of like liquids. If you put a cat in a small box, they will fill that box entirely, like liquids, and you can see how fully they’re filling it if the box is made out of glass. It’s actually really funny, because the technical definition of a liquid is any substance that completely fills the container it’s put in. You know, like cats do.
Source: Reddit
Inverse brought up how cats are basically liquid too:
Cats exist in their own three states of matter: loaf, cinnamon roll, and liquid. The last category is certainly the most confusing because cats should be solids — and of course, they can be. But anyone who owns a cat knows kitties can contort themselves in the most astonishing ways, seamlessly smooshing themselves into any object they choose.
“Cats are super flexible in general, and a big part of that has to do with the structure of their collar bones which are quite different than ours,” Mikel Delgado, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis, says. “They’re only attached by muscle, not bone, which adds to the cat’s already impressive flexibility (for example in their spine). This means that if their head fits through, probably the rest of them can too, which is why some cats can squeeze under doors or cracked windows.”
Being flexible could be advantageous to cats, who still, after all these years, haven’t been able to kick their wild instincts. “[Flexibility] allows cats to access elusive prey hiding in tight spots, or escape predators,” Delgado says. “It also allows them to jump, climb, and run fast!”
While the idea of cats as liquid might seem like meme fodder — which it totally is — there’s been some research about kitty liquids. In a 2014 study called “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?” French scientist Marc-Antoine Fardin calculated how and why cats of different ages can retain such unusual shapes. The study won in last year’s Ig Nobel Prize, which awards science research that could be considered silly — not that kitty fluid dynamics is a joke, or anything.
It’s true that we may never understand how cats can be liquids, cinnamon rolls, loaves, rotisserie chickens, muffins, eggplants, and doughnuts all at the same time. But no one ever claimed that comprehending these floofy enigmas would be easy.
What do you think then? Are cats liquid or merely just a meme gone too far?
