Cat Tail

The tail is of vital importance for many of the movements done by cats on a daily basis, due that it gives them stability for walking on fences or narrow walls or to sit on top of a pole.

During the automatic straightening described before, it gives them the necessary equilibrium to guarantee a more secure landing.

They also use the tail as a steering wheel to correct the direction during the jump when the space in which they have to land is too small.

Capacity to react
All of the cats physical actions are directed by a framework of more than 500 muscles, controlled by a highly developed center of information lodged in the brain. The brain processes this information at a vertiginous speed, giving the cat that unequal capacity of reaction to all kind of stimulus, be it a smell or the sighting of a prey, or before any emergency situation as are falls or rough skidding.

On kittens, the brain grows very fast and reaches its full maturity at the age of 5 or 6 months.

During this period the kittens receive from the mother and brothers the stimulation they require for learning and perfecting its muscular aptitudes, and they also acquire the experience to make a maximum use of their organs of sight, smell, hearing and tact.

The brain
The cat's brain weighs between 20 and 30 grams, but the proportion of weight with respect to the body is higher than with most of the mammals, with exception of the apes and humans.

The part of the brain that occupies itself with movement and equilibrium is the cerebellum and, as the part of the brain that coordinates the smell, embraces a very extensive and highly specialized area. It is the responsible that cats nay learn by experience to move and apply its technique to new situations. It's also in charge of preserving these situations until the animal can attain its objective.

However, the cat that suffers from a painful or frustrating fall ends not to risk again trying to do the same enterprise. That is how they apply experiences to learning.

Examples of this includes the acquisition of new skills as it is to open doors, drink water from the faucet and to recover objects from inaccessible places, always that they find them interesting, of course.

It is not odd to see a cat trying to catch something with a different paw and from a different angle each time. But it is true that most of the cats see themselves impelled to this kind of activities when not having anything else to do, due that they don't enjoy very much having to do things their owners want; they boast of such independence that sometimes they may even seem cruel.