Juvenile member of the Felis silvestris catus species, also known in English vernacular as a “kitten”
According to Wikipedia (the poor person’s ultimate authority on all things that matter), cats in mature adulthood typically sleep between twelve to sixteen hours a day, the more torpid of the species spending up to twenty hours in slumber. In human world, we call that chronic fatigue syndrome or myasthenia gravis. For cats though, it is perfectly acceptable to spend most of their living hours unconscious, conserving every bit of precious energy.
My question is: what in the world could they possibly be saving all that energy for? There probably are notable exceptions to the rule, but in general, most cats are not going to be running marathons in those four to eight hours of wakefulness. In the case of my own specimen of felis silvestris, I’ve observed him do nothing more taxing than pounce on wayward leaves that blow in whenever my roommates and I go in and out, and meow in my ear at 3:00 a.m. when he is hungry.
An unusually active cat. Note the look of bewilderment observed in his companion’s expression.
Oh, yes, there is the occasional ‘freak-out,’ a phenomenon observed in most household cats. It is characterized by one or two high bursts of energetic activity, including but not limited to: dashing across the living room three times, attacking sweaters and furniture, running into walls, meowing plaintively. This episode can last up to ten minutes before the cat, remembering its primary purpose in life, settles back down into its lethargic routine.
Cat for purchase for $.10 along with monitor at flea market.
Ultimately, though, I don’t think the freakout can totally account for all the energy saved up by the feline during the course of a day. What, then, happens to all that energy? Is this a problem for the physicists, who are too busy trying to figure out whether the cat in the box is dead or alive to bother with such matters? Or is it a problem for the psychologists, who will analyze the cat’s dreams and relate them back to the suckling of the mother’s teat? Perhaps this is one of life’s mysteries that will go unsolved, as long as humans walk the earth (and cats sleep on their monitors).
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You know, I’ve wondered this too. Now that my kittens have grown up into cats, they sleep all the time. (They used to sleep in four hour increments, then run marathons up and down the hallway, then sleep again.) The other day I actually worried whether they were okay, even though I know sleeping is really all cats do. But I wondered for a second if maybe they were really just that bored here that they couldn’t be bothered to even stay awake.
Yeah, my roommate pointed out that cats seem to act like they have clinical depression once they pass the age of four. Perhaps they should look into making Kitty Prozac.
You know, the worst roommate I ever had kept her pets on Prozac. She was completely insane, and not in the the mildly amusing way that a more recent roommate was.
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