Why cats can (almost) wriggle through any crack

Peculiarities of anatomy
How cats manage to slip through the tightest of crevices

A narrow fence or a cracked door is no obstacle for a cat. The animals also make it through the smallest loopholes – because of their special physique.

When I was a child, there was the same spectacle almost every night: One after the other, our two tomcats squeezed through the tilted skylight and got into the house. We didn’t have a cat flap, and at some point the two of them must have discovered that you could also get into the apartment this way. Even if the window was only open a crack.

Who hasn’t seen it: cats seem to effortlessly squeeze their way through narrow crevices, passageways and fences. They are the first ones in the apartment when you come home and have just turned the key. Precisely because they can snake through the barely open door. This looks very fluid and elegant. You might think that the cat will become very long and narrow.

A cat is very agile because of its special physique

But why is that? As kids, we learned the rule of thumb: cats can go through anything that’s no wider than their whiskers. In some current articles on the subject, it says more precisely: If the gap is as wide as the head, the kitty can squeeze through. However, this wisdom is probably not fully followed by very overweight animals.

The reason for this extreme mobility lies in the anatomical peculiarity of cats and in the structure of their skeleton, which makes the animals very flexible and stretchy. You’re missing a broad collarbone. This bone is only rudimentary in them, the shoulders are only loosely connected to the rest of the skeleton by ligaments. The chest of the animals is narrow.

Also, cats have about 40 more bones than humans, making them very agile overall. We have about 206. The larger number of vertebrae alone makes the skeleton of popular pets very flexible. Overall, cat bones are light and strong.

So cats can really make themselves very “narrow” and because of their naturally slim and flexible physique they can get through many obstacles that appear precariously narrow from a human point of view.

Self is the hangover – why wait for someone to open the door?

The peculiarity of their anatomy gave our two tomcats a few additional comfortable hours on their blankets night after night. Because without squeezing through the tilted window, they would have had to wait until someone opened the door in the morning.

Sources: “Petbook.de“, Petdoctors.at, Purina.de, Fressnapf.de,

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