Over the years, I’ve dealt with many a cat—mean, aggressive cats; fat, lazy cats; and all manners in between.  I’ve come to find that regardless of what “mode” a cat is in (or what “type” of cat it is), I can tap it right on the nose with my hand before it can do anything to prevent me.  This leads me to believe that catlike reflexes aren’t all that different from keen human reflexes, which lends credence to our equating quick human reaction time with “catlike reflexes.”  Human reaction time is twenty-five hundredths of a second; i.e. if I endeavor to touch or strike another person, and can do so in less than a quarter of a second, there is physically nothing they can do to stop it.  This is simply the amount of time it takes for the human eye to tell the brain that the body needs to respond.  I had been thinking of this primal parallel with the physical prowess of cats for a few days when a specific event precipitated this commentary.

I am a martial artist and drummer of many years, and thus I speak from a fairly highly developed kinesthetic perspective.  A quarter of a second is obviously an infinitesimal period of time, and there are aspects of the cat’s physical makeup that far exceed what any human can hope for (e.g. flexibility, agility).  A few years ago, however, my wife and I lived in a house with a basement that was breached by mice.  During a period of a few weeks, we killed two dozen of them.  Our cat, Kiki, killed zero mice.  We got most of them with traps.  And I killed five with a drum stick.

I work with a friend and fellow drummer named Paul, also a man of exceptional hand-eye coordination.  The other day, as I came into the back door of the store after disposing of some cardboard, I saw that a chipmunk had run in.  I called Paul’s attention to it, and when he got up from his desk, the little guy ran from the office in the back out into the store.  Fortunately, this was before we had opened for the day, so we were the only people there.  As we hustled after the scampering chipmunk—let’s call him “Glen”—we realized quickly that there were only a couple of book aisles where he could possibly be caught.

So here’s the deal: a mouse is quick and sneaky, but a chipmunk is fearless and lightning fast; they’re quite the cross between mice and squirrels, if you can imagine.  Then imagine trying to catch one.  Not to kill one—to catch one.  I mean, God made them with racing stripes, for Pete’s sake.  I remember at one point during the ordeal saying, “We’ll be fine as long as he’s not a jumper.”  Huh.

There we were, two grown men standing at either end of a book aisle with shallow box lids, watching Glen run back and forth between us.  He realized as he streaked toward Paul and me alternately that there was no way past either of us.  Our only hope was to trap him under a box lid and go from there.  He finally jotted close enough to me that I was able to slap my lid down over him.  I exhaled; it was a small victory.  The subsequent plan was to surround him with the boxes whose lids we endeavored to trap him with, and when Glen ran into a box, we had merely to put the lid on and take him outside.  Once the chipmunk was surrounded, Paul made sure I was ready and slowly lifted the lid.  Well, the boxes were the sort with cut-out handles, and Glen was out a box handle faster than we could think

So we taped up the handles.  I think this was where I made my, “as long as he’s not a jumper” comment.  

We cleverly guided Glen back to the book aisle, and the chipmunk again tried to sprint between my feet, only to find himself under the cardboard lid.  Once more, we surrounded him with our boxes.  Paul verified my readiness as before, and lifted the lid.  This time, Glen freaked out, jumped up onto a book shelf, streaked past me like a fur bullet, and ran all the way into a small room in the back of the store.  We were starting to think we’d just have to smash him to be rid of him; this would have been much easier than what we were trying to do.

The room that the chipmunk ran into was so full of stuff that he could have easily hidden from us indefinitely.  Paul picked up an empty coffee can and lid and endeavored to scare the rascal out of hiding.  In one corner of the room is a mop sink on the floor, complete with a mop bucket brimming with water.  When Paul finally did move just the right object, Glen made a break for it.  He bolted out—seeming to literally scurry across the water in the mop bucket—and leapt from its rim through the air toward the door next to me.  In the blink of an eye, Paul caught the chipmunk out of mid-air, trapping him in the coffee can against the wall.  He then carefully slid the lid on, took the can outside, and once we were sure all the doors to the store were shut, we let him go.

Let’s see a cat do that.