The Internet has fallen in love with an adorable cat who does somersaults to order. I think their name is Mischo. I don’t think this happened because of deliberate training but, rather, informal self-imposed training for the cat’s entertainment and to entertain her human caregiver. The caregiver encouraged it through rewards. There is also an amusing fascination with the lady’s carpet š. She notices the comments and says: “Iām also loving how invested people are in my carpet”. It is a bit manky.
This is a very fluffy black moggy who has mastered the somersault unlike her sister who, frankly, looks a little bit overweight if not obese. This is one of those TikTok videos which has racked up millions of views. It went viral obviously.
You will hear the female owner asking her Mischo’s sister, Norah, what she can do and in response she meows as if to say nothing (other than ask for some food š¤).
Commenters are asking her to do more somersaults, and why not add in some gymnastics of a different kind? Maybe it’s time for a Cat Olympics with a gymnastic discipline. Come to think of it, domestic cats are gifted gymnasts. It comes completely naturally to them because of their flexibility, balance and muscularity (fast twitch muscles).
Cats can be taught to do tricks like this. Perhaps this woman did in fact teach her cat to do it. You probably know that you use positive reinforcement. You have to get your cat to begin to do the trick and then you reward them for that effort and build up from there. Perhaps she gently pushed her cat over and rewarded her.
That said, I’ve seen cats on the Internet performing interesting gymnastic manoeuvres simply to entertain themselves. Most often there will be deliberate training as in the case of a cat called Simon on YouTube who also somersaults, it seems, on command. It’s a better example than the one we see in the TikTok video. You can see it below.
Note: This is a video from another website which is embedded here. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.
Perhaps there’s a sort of craze developing here among cat caregivers. They think that they will give it a try to achieve some high hitting videos. Maybe that is a problem because if the objective is to achieve fame through your cat through a successful video, I am not sure that this is a good motivator to train your cat to do somersaults.
The fat cat is a snowshoe. I’ve had the luck to own 2 and both became overweight which surprised me because they come from Siamese who tend to be thin. And every Snowshoe cat I’ve seen has been fat. Maybe something in their DNA? A quick duck duck go search and clicking on images the Snowshoe does appear to have a thicker body and larger bone structure.