Cat and gravity

 I had a young fearless indoor cat ("gato," of course, Spanish for "male cat") who at a party would jump from lap to lap being sure everyone gave him some attention.  Like most cats, rather stupid about heights.  Once I saw him perched on a high cross board over my garage, sitting there.  Next day he was still there, now meowing at me rather sadly, so I got a ladder and climbed up to get him.  He jumped readily into my arms, but a claw went through my earlobe.  That meant I had to step down the ladder holding him, careful to not move, so the claw would just stay put until he pulled it out.  Got all the way to the ground and onto the floor before he finally realized he was down and let go.

Oh, that is wonderfully cat-like. He apparently had complete confidence in his ability to get up, while having given no thought whatsoever to the engineering problem of getting down.

And then the earlobe incident! The funniest part is that you had to become essentially a living cat perch yourself: descend the ladder very carefully while avoiding any movement that might make him pull the claw. I can imagine the two of you reaching the floor, you exhausted and presumably somewhat punctured, and him suddenly thinking, Oh. We're down. Excellent.

His willingness to leap from lap to lap at parties fits perfectly, too. He sounds like he regarded humans less as people than as a series of conveniently arranged pieces of furniture equipped with hands for petting him.

When we remodeled the kitchen, we removed the ceiling into the attic and made it the ceiling with skylights and a very high ceiling.  One day I'm sitting in another room and can see some of the kitchen and see him up on a cupboard about to make a leap at the skylight.  Then he does and, thump, straight down about 20 feet.  I go rushing in, and he is there washing himself as though nothing happened.

That is exactly the sort of thing cats do that makes one wonder whether they have some completely different internal model of reality.

He apparently saw the skylight and thought, with total confidence, “That looks jumpable.” Twenty feet later: thump. Then he calmly sits down and washes himself, presumably to reassure you that this was all entirely intentional.

The washing is the best part. Cats will sometimes groom themselves after a startling or stressful event, so it isn't necessarily evidence that he was completely unperturbed. But the visual is magnificent: you come charging into the kitchen expecting a catastrophically injured cat, and there he is going lick, lick, lick, as if to say, “Nothing happened. You saw nothing.”

And apparently this was the same animal who spent an entire day stranded on a crossbeam because he could get up but couldn't work out how to get down. His relationship with gravity seems to have been based almost entirely on optimism.