FloatLikeALemming

<pedantry>It is impossible to kill cats by dropping them from great heights. You could always just throw them hard and downwards...</pedantry>

Since I'm a great lover of cats, I'll only throw them upwards.

Question - if you throw a cat upwards hard at a ceiling, does it always twist to land on its feet?  Or would this be a case of CuriosityKilledTheCat? --DR

Except they don't know to keep their heads up, so their noses often impact the ground rather faster than healthy - SunKitten

Depends how high you drop them from...I'm sure there's potential for a cat to burn up on re-entry/freeze due to upper atmosphere temperatures/asphyxiate due to low [O2] in upper atmosphere, depending on how quickly they dissipate heat. --SF

If you're eager to kill those furry critters by dropping them but cannot find a suitable structure to take advantage of the 'burn up on re-entry/freeze due to upper atmosphere temperatures/asphyxiate due to low [O2] in upper atmosphere' effects, I suggest breaking the cats' fall with a vat of boiling oil. -ColinLeung

Now that's just needlessly cruel.  - MoonShadow

According to a letter in the back of a NewScientist? I read a while back, there is a range of heights a cat can fall from which are high enough to potentially kill it but not high enough to give it time to twist around. - MoonShadow

I have, from 1A Dynamics, a series of pictures, depicting a cat dropped from upside down (back first), from about 1.5m above the ground, and landing feet first, without recourse to pushing off anything. This makes me doubt that slightly. -- TI

I've seen the article too.  I think it wasn't that they couldn't twist in time, it was that they did twist, but went too far and ended up unable to stop turning over before they hit.  --Vitenka

From the kinds of heights cats usually fall from, it's optimal.  from extreme heights it's optimal too - better to break legs than ribs.  But as previously mentioned, there's a range of heights from which a cat would be better off just going all floppy and taking it than trying to twist around.  --Vitenka (A cat landing is kinda like a parachute roll though, I think - just they have a couple of extra legs to roll onto.)

When the SAS start recruiting cats, the world will be a safer place... --K

Surely not... do you trust the SAS that much? If they had access to that many silent ready-trained nightstalker-infiltrators, the power granted would surely be too much for any one organisation to resist being corrupted by...?  --AlexChurchill

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