For me, this is an example of thoughtless or careless cat cruelty in the 1960s. Perhaps I am exaggerating but there was no need to do this. People can do it to themselves. They can work out what happens when you are in zero gravity. I bet their learnt nothing from this experiment. I suppose the fascination for these guys was that cats are well known to self-right when falling. They twist and turn very quickly to enable themselves to land on their feet. This requires an ability to self-orientate which is based upon the workings of the inner ear and the brain together.
RELATED: NASA studied cat’s self-righting mechanism to help astronauts in space
I guess they wanted to see how their self-righting mechanism works in zero gravity. Of course, it doesn’t work and the cats are completely confused and no doubt very stressed. A pointless, amusing, experiment (for the military). They also put pigeons into the zero-gravity chamber. For me, another example of animal abuse. I presume that they achieved zero gravity by taking an aircraft as high as possible and then diving down as rapidly as possible. Under these circumstances you attain zero gravity for a very short time.
Of course, in the 1960s animal welfare was not quite so sophisticated as it is today but there’s still lots of work to do. At least we can say that humankind has come on a little bit in terms of animal welfare over the intervening 60 years. Cats are more likely, nowadays, to be considered as family members and as sentient beings than in the 60s.
My research tells me that the French were the first to put cats into space. They put two cats into space in 1963. One of them survived.
Apparently studying living things in space is called bioastronautics. Because all living creatures on land on the planet have evolved with gravity when they are in zero gravity it is biologically confusing and it can be destructive.
It is reported that the cats did in some way shape or form manage to orientate themselves into an upright position or they tried to get there. This demonstrated that they have a sense of up and down according to one article I read. I find it completely pointless, actually. We know that cats can self-orientate so what does it prove to put them in zero gravity?
