Scientists have accomplished a great deal. Diseases that have cured, On Mars, I have piloted a helicopter. However, one group of them once looked at cats that had their eyeballs scooped out to see how they landed on their feet. We already knew cats could right themselves when they fall before the scientists brought out their melon baller and attached it to their eyes. We also knew the process had something to do with their vision and the vestibular system in their ear, which controls their balance.
We also knew that if you blindfold an adult cat and throw it in the air. it will still right itself to a degree, though blindfolded cats landed a little more awkwardly because they didn’t know how far they were off the ground, thanks to another experiment that goes against the stereotype of scientists standing around in lab coats looking wistfully at a test tube.
Therefore, concisely, we understood it had something to do with both systems, each of which had a role to play. However, this was insufficient for scientists who had their own ocular scoops and a desire to scoop. Scientists in France wanted to determine how much sight played a part in the cats’ amazing self-righting ability, so they opted to research cats that had been blinded since birth.
As a control, they received six kittens that had been “enucleated” – a technical word for having their eyes removed – as well as other cats who had not. For the next 50 days, they held the cats in the air four times a day and dropped them spine first to the ground. They also hurled the kittens up in the air to check if the extra time in the air damaged their ability to stand up.
The kittens were unable to correct themselves for the first 25 days, regardless of whether they had been blinded or not, because they had not yet mastered that skill. Those cats that had not encountered old scoopy began to stand out from their blind counterparts after that period. Meanwhile, the enucleated cats continued to strike themselves on the backs, most likely blaming their bad luck at not being in the control group.
The blindfolded cats improved their performance with time. They discovered that the cats were able to right themselves throughout the fall but struggled to stick the landing, suggesting that the cats’ righting mechanism was mostly based on their feeling of balance, with eyesight playing a role in the final phase of the landing. I am sure you will agree that this is wisdom worth 12 cats’ eyes.
