by Matthew Cobb
I spotted this via a link on the Le Monde website. It’s not Saturday anymore, but this is too good to keep for another six days. The cat is called Rocky, he’s two year’s old, and he lives with a young woman called Daisy in the Gard region of France. Sadly, he doesn’t do this too much now, as she’s moved the furniture. When the video was taken (November 2009), he could only see the birds if he was standing up. Now, like most domestic cats, he can watch his desired prey sitting down. Oh, and turn the sound off. For some reason Daisy and her partner, Yann, have put some very irritating music on the soundtrack.
Could he do it if the sofa wasn’t so squishy? Why is this behaviour so unusual?
[First posted over at the z-letter]
dude, the soundtrack is what makes the video perfect!
Yes, “Cats on Mars” seems oddly appropriate.
What has WEIT against felid music? 😮
PS. Btw, “excellent”! But what was the cat smoking?
Shouldn’t that be purrfect?
Amazing. I can’t even get mine to sit nicely for a treat.
Boing Boing ran an article about this cat. According to his owner, Rocky got into his stand-up routine because of curiosity: he wanted to see the birds in the window and there was no nearby piece of furniture to sit upon at the time. Once that was changed, Rocky stop doing having to stand up to watch kitty TV!
BTW, I’ve known other cats who would sit up on their hind quarters and stay erect for sometime in order to look at something, but not one really stand up on his feet with straight legs, like this one. Or it would only be for one or two seconds. Rocky here is quite the athlete!
We had a cat that sat up on his haunches “prairie dog” style, but it would not stand for more than a few seconds.
The only cat I ever had would stand up to stare up a pole or a tree before deciding whether or not it was worth climbing up. He’d get up in a few seconds but it took an awful long time to get back down again, so I guess he needed a very good reason to climb.
That was one fascinated cat. Was he watching the return of Christ?
60Min alert – on Australopithecus sediba, running now Eastern time, anyone with later feeds can catch it, otherwise presumably online later.
Proto-Kzin …
Or proto-Hani, if one is fan of C.J. Cherryh… 😉
Wild. I had a cat once who was pretty good at standing up, but she didn’t put her paws down at her side like that (so human-like!), she had to had them extended out in front of her for balance. And she couldn’t do it for nearly such a sustained amount of time, usually only for about 10 seconds or so at the most.
That’s… really impressive.
Ah, I missed the position of the forelimbs. My cat would stand but never like that either; he always had his paws dangling in front like The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns.
For those who complained about the music:
Here! Better?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZy2I8csVQU
😉