The Cat With A Head For Heights
Cat does not have a fear of heights
This amazing video proves that, unlike humans, cats don’t suffer from a fear of heights (acrophobia). If you do and you have watched the video, you might find that it induced vertigo! It is a terrifying video in some ways. The cat is as calm as you like. Not a care in the world. It looks as though she is around 1,000 feet up or more. She’s appears to be perched on a small uplighter.
Access to it from the balcony, from which jumped down, does not look that easy. How she arrived at her precarious perch is a bit of a mystery. If she had to jump down onto it…Wow. How will she get back? The video maker appears to be the flat-dweller. What was she/he thinking while she made the video?
It looks as though the building is somewhere in Asia but that’s a wild guess. It seems to me that a fear of heights is a human condition. It is an interesting thought. Do you think it is exclusively a human condition? It might be. I’d suggest that cats don’t fear heights partly because they are so sure footed when climbing and jumping although there are some amusing ‘fails’ on YouTube. Also they have a history of being semi-arboreal. They are tree climbers. Some wild cats such as the margay live in trees. The Near Eastern wildcat (the domestic cat’s ancestor) does not live in trees but it is a very good climber.
The reason for a fear of heights is probably a bad experience when young. It seems feasible that a domestic cat could suffer from a fear of heights but we will never know. I recently did a page about Swiss cat ladders. All of them would be redundant but for the fact that domestic cats are very relaxed about heights.
Cats do fall though. They get it wrong sometimes.
Acrophobia has Greek origins. It comes from the Greek word for heights, which is “acron,” and the Greek word for fear, which is “phobos”.