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Scientists Explain Feline Purring
Manuka writes: "The Daily Telegraph has an article that tells us that scientists have discovered that purring in cats is actually a self-healing mechanism that strengthens their bones and lends weight to the extraordinary resilience of felines. Tigers lack this mechanism for some reason. They are also exploring the possibilities of replicating this mechanism in humans with 'sound treatment,' to help treat bone disorders." This article does not address how cats purr, though, and that seems like just as burning a question, nor does it explain how those low-freq sounds actually do achieve the benefits attributed to them.
How they purr? I had it explained to me (from a PBS Special, IIRC), that the 'purring' noise is the result of bones/cartalige ridges (sp) vibrating togther in the larnyx.
They went on to say that 'big cats' (tigers, lions, etc) CAN'T purr, because these bones/whatever in the throat have in fact evolved into the mechanisms responsible for roaring. House cats, as well, can't roar, but can (obviously) purr.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
That's at best contentious, and at worse misleadingly false. Not every trait that survives or is prevalent in a species needs to be advantageous. I'm as hard-core a Darwinian as you will find out there, but there are lots of reasons purring could have survived without being advantageous to cats. It could be linked to something that does something that does contribute to survival but is in and of itself of no advantage or even small detriment to survival. Or it could have been useful at some point in the past, and not any longer (who knows, primordial feline predators who have since gone extinct might have been confused by those frequencies).
No sir, I don't like it when scientists make these sorts of errors.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
...then why don't other animals with bones do it too?
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-- SIGFPE
That "definition i quote" is the onestill in use ast the Bronx zoo as of a year ago, the San Francisco Zoological society as of 2 years ago, and every boo kI've ever read on the subject hta was written by a DVm or someoen with similar academic crednetials. (And I read a lot of them. The cats are a great interest of mine.)
:)
Can you show me a webstie with soemd egree of authority that says different? (Authority is key, I can show you a website thats says ANYTHING and websites often quote each other. According to most of the web Weird AL wrote "What if god smoked Canabis" which is completel;y wrong.)
I note though that evben yo uadmitted "iots not quite the same thing" which is to say you uadmitted that Great Cats DON'T purr. They do something else which you have arbitrarily over-loaded the term purr onto.
The fact of the matter, for anyone who is interested in real science, is cats can leap off of roofs because the have a much smaller body-mass to surface area ratio then huamns and thus have a lower terminal verlocity. Thsi is basic high-school physcis.
A mouse, which doesnt purr, can fall off the top of the empire state building and walk away.
I like someoen elses suggestion, go strap 5 cats on your body and jump off out a thrid story window if you buy this reseracher's nonsense.
I'd give you I may be mixing up growl and roar. Its been awhile (abt a year) since i last looked at these definitions.
Then again I'n not publishing on the topic or I'd be a LOT mor carefuly to get the details correct...
Great Cats are your lions, tigers and such.
'nuff said
That small cats purr in response to **any** strong emotional state.
Which explains an awful lot better your "cats purr when injured" factoid as WELL as why they purr when stroked.
Ofcourse thats typocal psuedo-sciecne logic. "Cats purr when injurered therefor purring must be caused by injury." Thats called confusing a correlation with a causality.
This IS a joke, right???
Its not just Tigers, it sall great Cats that don't purr. Ist the construction of the voice box. Great Cats can growl but not purr, small cats can purr but not truely growl. in afct, this is the DEFINITION of Great Cat and small cat.
Hard to take any supposed 'resarcher" seriously who didn't even know the bilogical definitiosn of his subject material.
This belongs on Whitley's World, not Slashdot.
(If you are INTO new-age total BS psuedo-science you might want to try www.whitleysworld.com)
Strap several live cats to your body then jump off a building. You should recover from any incidental broken bones in a day or so. Well, provided you don't die of blood loss.
This article leads me to wonder if they have considered studying people who are long time owners of cats to see if they have any significant increase in bone mass as compared to the average person. It would seem to me that if you were to regularly hold a cat while it was purring then you would be likely to recieve some of the benefits of the purring as well (at least in the region of your body that was in contact with the cat).
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
This, they say, explains why cats survive falls from high buildings and why they are said to have "nine lives". Exposure to similar sound frequencies is known to improve bone density in humans.
This, they say, explains why mosh-divers survive leaps into crowds of drunken rock fans.
This reminds me of a WWII story. Seems someone got the bright idea that, since cats hate water, they'd make good pilots for anti-ship bombs. The thinking (if that's what you could call it) was that you'd stick a cat in a bomb with some controls that it was trained to use, and it would guide the bomb away from water and toward the ship. They had to drop a cat in harness a few times to prove that this was one of the dumbest ideas anyone ever had.
Maybe I've just seen one too many cheezy martial arts movies, but a quick search with Google showed that there apparently really are some religious groups out there who hum low-frequency sounds while meditating (there are tons of really wacked-out new agea types clouding the search results though ... anyone here an expert on ancient Asian or Indian religions?).
Here are a few pages with details:
wav of Cheetah purr,
Big cats,
Lion,
Puma.
As for the research, it's a well known fact that injured cats purr (see, e.g. Encyclopaedia Britannica) so it's hardly suprising that it might have some beneficial effect. Here's a link to the original article this story is on.
One recent study, published in The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, found that out of 132 cats that fell an average of 5.5 storeys, 90 per cent survived, including one that fell 45 storeys.
I like cats and all, but I found the mental picture I formed while reading this quite funny: Men dressed in white lab coats conducting an official study by throwing cats out windows to see if they'd survive, with another man with a clipboard and white lab coat standing on the ground tallying the results.