#1 - The Common cat

It takes a lot of energy to run a cat. Most cats do not waste too many motions in their daily routine, but they certainly go through a lot of them, and many of these maneuvers are olympic. 

Now our family dog does not few things in the same light exactly. She might be very content to lounge in the morning sun with one or two of her whiskered acquaintances purring and rubbing themselves against her jowls as the dew rises from the lawn, but she is just as likely to view their slightly too cute approach across the grass as some sort of athletic challenge, and the ensuing stirrings in their respective gray matters can result in one of the most astounding displays of carnivorous pursuit and turf-tearing escape a common man is ever likely to witness.

The precise chain of events is pretty hard to analyze, mainly because Felis domesticus is quite capable of shifting from his devil-may- care strolling mode, through the wide-eyed recognition-of-hard-facts phase and into that closely figured speed in 15th gear in something just under three millionths of a second. Thus he neatly places himself barely beyond those woofing jaws to experience the thrill of having his fuzzy tail inhaled. It is an astute observer who can follow all this in detail.

I do not know if it is a conscious effort on the part of the cat or not, but I have noticed that a cat who is a little worried about whether he has gone through the gears in the proper sequence or not, and gets a bit sidetracked on this problem, will tilt the top inch or so of his tail forward. This single little survival tactic enables him to get his mind off gears and points a precise course for the four-inch hole under the barn for which he was aiming all along.

Once this tail-tilting maneuver has been executed, there is the interesting phenomenon of " dog breath acceleration " by which our tom cat's eyes become so enlarged that the hole under the barn achieves the illusory proportions of the proverbial barn door, thus ensuring that, no matter what, he is going to get through this exercise in one piece. And he does.

Ninety-five million muscle contractions and heart beats, a perfectly-executed tail tilt and the physical displacement of several shovels full of driveway gravel collectively represent only three and a half seconds out of our poor, overworked kitty’s life.