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Friday, April 16, 2021
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Cats Understand the Law of Cause and Effect

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black cat

Cats are stealthy hunters with impressive hearing capabilities.

It appears that humans are not the only ones who understand how the simple laws of physics work. According to a team of Japanese researchers, cats understand the law of cause and effect and they apply it whenever they are on a hunt for new prey.

What’s In the Box?

In order to see if the felines are actually connoisseurs of the laws of physics, the team of Japanese scientists conducted a wide variety of experiments.

First, they took a part of the thirty domesticated cats sample and showed them some boxes. They measured the average amount of attention that the cats paid to the objects before moving on to “more pressing matter.”

Then, they started shaking the boxes. First, they shook the empty boxes and recorded the response of the whiskered participants.

Then, they introduced something in some of the boxes so that they rattled when they were shaken. When the noisy containers were then introduced to the cats, the felines were more than curious to see what was enclosed in them.

The researchers noted that the time in which the cats paid attention to the rattling containers was significantly longer than that spent watching the empty ones. This would prove the fact that cats understand the law of cause and effect and they apply it to real situations all of the time.

According to this elementary physics rule, if the box made no noise, then it was evident it was empty. If it rattled, it meant that there was something in it. The noise was caused by a hidden object inside the sealed enclosure.

Why Isn’t Anything In The Box?

After seeing that they react differently to the noisy boxes, the researchers started testing their understanding of the law of gravity.

The team let the participants rest for a while and then brought them back to the boxes. They showed them the rattling containers and tipped them over.

When something actually fell from the noisy objects, the cats went to investigate the matter, acting like they were not at all surprised by the outcome.

However, when the researchers tilted a rattling box, and nothing came out, the felines were surprised. They waited for something to happen for a longer period of time, expecting for the cause (the noise) to have an effect (something falling from the box that was apparently harboring a hidden object).

So it seems that cats understand the law of cause and effect and they use it in their nocturnal hunting sessions.

Image source: Pixabay

Study Reveals, Dogs Use A Smart Tactic While Drinking Water

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dogs-use-a-good-strategy-while-drinking

A new research has demonstrated that even if dogs may appear messy when drinking water, they use a smart tactic while drinking water.

Dogs are not in any way agile when drinking water and splatter it all over the floor, making a wreck all around while doing so. At the same time the revelations of the study introduced at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in San Francisco gave vital data about the matter and demonstrated the way dogs use a decent tactic while drinking water.

Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech and the co-author of the study Sunghwan Jung said the technique while drinking varies from one animal to another. When it comes to humans, they use the suction method with the help of their cheeks to generate a negative pressure in the mouth, in doing so making a vacuum to drink fluids through a straw or from the lip of a cup, he said.

Both cats and canines, for example, lions and wolves have curtailed cheeks. On account of this, they are incapable of completely shutting their lips to generate suction and drink water. So to drink water, the animals utilize their tongues to get fluid and fetch it in their mouths.

Researchers said that in a 2010 study, they uncovered that felines have an exceptionally powerful method for utilizing their tongues to drink fluid. The scientists found that felines draw out their tongues in the shape of a ‘J’, scarcely touching the surface of the fluid and quickly move their tongue upwards. They draw water up into the air and afterward they rapidly close their mouths. The distinction between the tactics by dogs and felines was that dogs further put off their tongues to pull the water more rapidly. The tactic used by felines is a ton slower than that used by dogs, said Jung. So if they are sloppier and messier than felines keep in mind that dogs utilize a smart tactic while drinking, if it helps.

Jung added, “When we began this task, we believed that dogs drink correspondingly to felines. However, it just so happens its distinctive, as dogs crush their tongues on the water surface – they make loads of splattering – however a feline never does that.”

Analysts additionally found that the dogs with smaller size make a less chaos when drinking as compared to the dogs that are greater in size. This demonstrates that the water volume pulled by a dog is relevant to its size and consequently, the larger the dog, the greater the mess.

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