From yahoo! news we hear about the rediscovery of the flat-headed cat, but the headline is a bit misleading, for the flat-headed cat was thought extinct in Thailan, but it’s still present in other places. Click below to read; you may not know about flat-headed cats (Prionailurus planiceps)) anyway. Here’s the range given by Wikipedia, and Thailand does extend partway into the Malay Peninsula.
An excerpt:
An elusive wild cat long feared extinct in Thailand has been rediscovered three decades after the last recorded sighting, conservation authorities and an NGO said Friday.
Flat-headed cats are among the world’s rarest and most threatened wild felines. Their range is limited to Southeast Asia and they are endangered because of dwindling habitat.
The domestic cat-sized feline with its distinctive round and close-set eyes was last spotted in a documented sighting in Thailand in 1995.
But an ecological survey that began last year, using camera traps in southern Thailand’s Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary, recorded 29 detections, according to the country’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation and wild cat conservation organisation Panthera.
“The rediscovery is exciting, yet concerning at the same time,” veterinarian and researcher Kaset Sutasha of Kasetsart University told AFP, noting that habitat fragmentation has left the species increasingly “isolated”.
It was not immediately clear how many individuals the detections represent, as the species lacks distinctive markings so counting is tricky.
But the findings suggest a relatively high concentration of the species, Panthera conservation programme manager Rattapan Pattanarangsan told AFP.
The footage included a female flat-headed cat with her cub — a rare and encouraging sign for a species that typically produces only one offspring at a time.
Nocturnal and elusive, the flat-headed cat typically lives in dense wetland ecosystems such as peat swamps and freshwater mangroves, environments that are extremely difficult for researchers to access, Rattapan said.
Globally, the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that around 2,500 adult flat-headed cats remain in the wild, classifying the species as endangered.
In Thailand, it has long been listed as “possibly extinct”.
THE CAT CAME BACK! Here’s a video showing the cats filmed in southern Thailand. Their hats are indeed flat!
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I have had the next article verified by my friend Catherine who lives in Amsterdam, who has see these cat stairs. Click to read the article from Vice.
The nooz:
Amsterdam is world-renowned for its canals. They’re a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You might already know that. You might not realize, however, that Amsterdam is crazy for cats, and now it’s trying to protect them.
Amsterdam is spending €100,000 to build tiny wooden staircases along its canals as part of a cat safety initiative. After 19 cats drowned in the city’s elaborate network of waterways over the past six months, city officials finally decided that enough is enough. It’s time to start saving these kitties.
The plan was put forward by Judith Krom of the Party for the Animals. While other political parties in the Netherlands bicker about human needs, the Party for the Animals represents the political interests, rights, and welfare of wildlife.
That includes the Netherlands’ massive population of stray cats.
The cash comes from a forgotten biodiversity budget fund, and the staircases (nicknamed “cat traps”) are designed to give cats (and any other critters) a way out of the canals when their curiosity leads them into a waterway they’re not evolutionarily equipped to thrive within.
Animal welfare group Dierenambulance Amsterdam is collaborating with the city to identify the locations where the most accidental cat water plunges have occurred. Then, they’ll install the stairs at high-risk sites later this year.
This story was written in August of 2025 but some stairs have already gone up. And not just in Amsterdam:
Not to be outdone, the city of Amersfoort already started installing around 300 of its cat stairs as part of its 2024 animal welfare program. The local council even collaborated with residents to identify trouble spots.
Krom called it a “simple measure” that can “prevent enormous animal suffering.” As the world spins ever faster into absurdity, it’s heartening to hear such empathy being extended in our age of callousness.
I found a video showing the cat stairs:
You have to hand it to the Dutch; you have to have a big heart to do something like this.
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An article in Current Biology answers a provocative question with an untested hypothesis. The question is this: why do most cats, at least according to the survey, sleep on their left sides? While individual cats are left-pawed or right-pawed, domestic cats as a whole are—unlike humans—about 50% of each type. But not so for the way they sleep. Most moggies sleep on their left sides, at least in this sample, which was actually taken by watching YouTube videos.
Click on the title below or find the pdf here.
The method (quotes from the paper are indented):
To address this question, we included 301 publicly available YouTube videos in our analysis based on our defined criteria, featuring a cat that is visible from head to hind legs with a full-body sleeping position lying on one side, with this sleep side not changing for at least 10 seconds. Only original, unaltered videos were included, while low-resolution, obscured, duplicated, or modified (e.g., mirrored/selfie) videos were excluded (Supplemental information). Our results revealed a statistically significant leftward bias at the population level (χ2 = 22.9, df = 1, p < 0.001) with n = 192 cats (63.8%) showing a leftward sleeping position and n = 109 cats a rightward one (36.2%) (Figure 1). Thus, on average, about two-thirds of cats preferred to sleep on the left side of their body with their left shoulder down.
A figure with the data. They imply that individual cats always sleep on the same side, but I doubt that. And readers can check that themselves. It’s just that a random snapshot of cats on YouTube are mostly sleeping on their left side:
Now the sample isn’t huge, and perhaps people tend to photograph their cats when they lie on their left sides, but I think this is probably a real phenomenon, In fact, if your cat is sleeping now, go look at what side it’s lying on and answer the poll below (a one-time observation).
The question then arises, of course: WHY do they sleep on their left side? Well, we could say we don’t know, just as we don’t know why most people are right-handed (maybe they’ve figured it out by now). But biologists want THEORIES, and one suggestion involves the lateralization of the cat brain. In short, right side of the brain, which contains the predator detection “module”, is connected by nerves to the left eye. (We have the same crossover between our eyes and the brain hemispheres, which many of you probably know.) The theory, then, which is the authors’, is that sleeping this way allows the left eye to see the predator and activate the right side of the brai, and this causes a quicker response. Or, to put it as the authors do:
This finding is not only interesting from the perspective that cats show a significant population-level bias for the left side but also fits very well with previous findings on functional specialization in the mammalian right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is dominant for threat processing, and in most species, animals react faster when a predator is approaching from the left side. Moreover, the right hemisphere is dominant for spatial attention and the right amygdala in the processing of fear in response to a threat. Upon awakening, a leftward sleeping position would provide a fast left visual field view of objects that approach from below or from similarly elevated positions, thus allowing optimal conditions for fast processing of external stimuli in the right hemisphere of the brain.
Well, as someone said, “all this is as plausible as anything else.” But it could be tested by having mock predators approach sleeping cats and see if the ones sleeping on their left become aware or flee faster than the right-sided sleepers. Pity the authors did not test this!
So go look at your moggie now and take this poll if you have a cat (answer for each cat separately if you have more than one).
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Lagniappe. A tweet from the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office:
Happy #Caturday
(Yes, it’s Saturday)pic.twitter.com/L9IBOLFDnw— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 27, 2025
And this:
h/t: Stephen. VaneWimsey,
The poll does not allow for re-voting. One of my boys is more left-sleeping, the other prefers right side or belly
It should work for multiple answers. I set it up that way but will try to fix it if it’s broken.
It should work for multiple cats now.
11:43 eastern time: still doesn’t allow for more than one–it’s stuck on the first one I entered. I have 3 cats in the last category, 3 left, 2 right–though it’s sometimes more right than left. In the first category, one was sleeping on his belly, the other two were wandering around.
The poll allows you to check two boxes, but then rejects the vote with an error message. However, it appears that reloading the page after your first allows you to vote again.
There’s a voter ID metaphor in their somewhere.
The flat-headed cat was new to me. They are very tiny and their eyes are close-set, wonder why. The ramps up from the canals are very touching. Can’t vote as we haven’t had a cat for over a year now, but will keep my eyes open about side-laying preferences when we bring another cat to live with us.
Great to read about the Flat-headed Cats! Good that Amsterdam is trying to protect its cats.
I had no idea that cats tend to sleep on their left sides. It’ll be interesting to see the results of your poll. We had four cats over the years. I never even thought to see if they slept on a preferred side. I do know that all cats sleep on the same side of the bed—the one where the person is trying to sleep!
I looked at my photos of my two cats from the last 2 months. 2 cats lying on the left side, 1 on the right, 1 that started on the right but then luxuriantly rolled over to the left, and one lying with the top half of his torso and head straight on his back looking up and his lower torso lying on the right.
Not surprising, but the flat-headed cat (a placental mammal) is well on the Asian side of the Wallace line. South of that would be other small predators that are marsupials. The Numbat would be a passable substitution for a small forest cat.
One factor for preferred sleeping side is comfort, owing to the assymetry of internal organs. This does not have to be result of natural selection. The number of lobes in the lung differs between left and right (I don’t know what it is for cats), and the heart, liver, and stomach all sit asymmetrically. I think this sort of thing should at least be considered.
Not sure how anyone can make a legit left vs. right side determination without long-term observation. As they nap, my 3 cats switch back and forth periodically, waking just long enough to re-roll in the other direction.
If your goal were to determine whether there is a preferred side among a population of cats, then a single observation per cat among a large sample of cats would make up for lack of repeated observations per cat; in fact, it would be better.
Right, but the sample size isn’t that large given the natural variability. I’d need to do a power calculation to be sure!
“The theory, then, which is the authors’, is that sleeping this way allows the left eye to see the predator and activate the right side of the brain, and this causes a quicker response.”
But this seems backward to me — surely when lying on the left side, the right eye has the greater field of vision? (I’m trying and probably failing to see this from a cat’s point of view. I assume I’m missing something.)
There is a famous paper by two quantum theorists who while on vacation tried to determine whether cows move their jaws clockwise or anticlockwise during mastication and observed a small difference:
https://www.nature.com/articles/120807a0
Seems that only a little follow up work was done and these papers are often cited as an interesting tangent in works on molecular chirality. Maybe the sleeping cats will be added into this bibliography.