1. How and why do cats purr?
Many of us are familiar with that moment, when a cat is making itself comfortable in your lap, it looks at you starts to close it eyes, and even before you hear it you start to feel the purring.
It seems to be the cat’s sign of affection to you. Or rather not?
Believe it or not, that simple purring is a tremendous mystery for modern science. Not only that scientist have not proven the exact mechanism behind a cat’s purring, they actually have no idea why do cats purr at all.
Some smart guys those scientists are, huh?
The fact is that all cats purr, and I really mean ALL. Ranging from your favorite little whisker bearer that wakes you up in the middle of the night meowing at God knows what, to the lions and tigers in their natural habitats.
They all do purr. So who is petting those tigers in the wild to make them purr? The answer is – nobody. Cats purr not only when you pet them, they don’t even purr only when they feel comfortable.
They have been observed to purr when giving birth, in pain or simply being stressed out. So what does the purr do? Nobody knows. Some have proposed that the frequency of the purr is helping their regeneration, especially for bones.
But that has yet to be proven with some serious science. However that does not stop certain people to produce strange contraptions that utilize the same frequency as a cat’s purr and sell them with the promise of helping people heal their injuries faster.
Well it seems kind of natural that we don’t know why cats purr. You can’t just ask “Heya kitty, why on earth are you purring”. But strange enough scientists have no clue as to how exactly cats manage to pull out that vibrating sounds from their bodies.
Weird, huh? I mean those guys can find a billion year old bone from an animal and deduct that it was a kind of a blow horn organ, and that animal sounded like a muffled trumpet, and they even dare to play some sounds that they believe match the sound of that animal…. But they can’t tell you how a cat purrs.
Some have tried the simplest explanation – cats pass air through their vocal chords, and the purring sound comes to live. But no study has even proven this, and yes there have been studies, quite a few actually.
Having no scientific explanation, the most adequate theory to this day is that cats use their purring to put a spell on us, that makes us feed and pet them unconditionally, turning us into their slaves. And until science gives us a better explanation, backed by some formidably looking data, I am sticking to this explanation.
Good to read that, but i believe that the writer went a little bit hard on religion. Answers the writer talked about were not given by my religion. For example, the stars we think that we look at are not the stars but the light emitted by those stars and has just reached our sghit, is mentioned in my religion and was proved later by science. I am sure that real religions give the correct piece of information and real science have to prove them.