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You Know Who Has A Great Job? My Cats.

In return for a bit of company and affection, the three felines get free food, (an all-you-can-eat buffet of crunchy nutrient-filled goodness in a bowl) they get picked up after, they get fun toys, and they can sleep wherever they want.

House cats are crepuscular, just like marsupials, and they sleep thirteen to sixteen hours a day. Unless you are a bat, a possum, or a hibernating critter, you get less sleep than your average cat.

Up to sixty percent of a cat’s sleep is REM sleep, which is about three times as much as a person gets. So not only do the little fuzzfaces get twice as much sleep as we do, they dream three times as much. About what, I have no idea.

So I suppose cats are a natural choice to study the effects of sleep on the brain. But I think covering a cat’s eye for six hours, measuring its brain, and then letting it sleep and or not sleep, then deciding the sleeping cat “showed more change and adaption” is sort of stupid. Do we really need scientists to tell us animals react better when they are allowed to sleep?

Sure, it is kind of interesting to know that brain plasticity, even in cats, is determined by deep, non-REM sleep. On the other hand, maybe the cats who were allowed to sleep just had the energy required to plot revenge against the humans in the little white lab coats.

Maybe my cats could get day jobs at a lab. Well, a lab that wouldn’t poke their brains. Or test cosmetics on them. Or make them sit in a wire cage all day. Hmm. I guess that leaves lab work out.

My cats are probably good for my blood pressure, too. When they aren’t trying to scratch somewhere they shouldn’t, cough up a hairball on the only rug in the house, or attack each other in the night, anyway. I don’t know what it is about them that makes me love them so much, but I do.