I’ve often wondered how my cat apparently has earned this luxury. He slept six straight hours with me today and then spent a couple of hours doing important cat things like eating, pooping, and removing the entire contents of my underwear drawer. Now he’s totally zonked out again.
I’ve always assumed it had something to do with smaller animals having smaller hearts which beat faster, resulting in a higher metabolism that makes them need more sleep. This theory, however, is based upon nothing more than a guess pulled entirely out of my ass.
Really, tossing socks around a room doesn’t seem like very exhausting work to me. Then again, I’m not a cat. So why do smaller animals require so much sleep?
Lions and other big cats do it to. My understanding has always been that a predator like a lion saves up all its energy and spends it in one big chase, which may or may not take down the animal but if it’s successful it brings in a ton of food.
Not sure why house cats, which in the wild eat bugs and lizards and stuff, have the same metabolism, though. Of course, they are more suited to a crepuscular existence - they see better in the dark, etc. So maybe they’re just waiting for the evening.
It would make sense that a cat’s sleep patterns are a holdover from the days of hunting large prey to survive (as opposed to hunting houseflies because it’s fun.) I suppose this could also apply to dogs and their ancestral heritage. But then we look at something like a hamster that doesn’t hunt but instead forages for, well, whatever it is that hamsters forage for. I remember the hamsters of my childhood nearly sleeping around the clock save for the time on the noisy wheel when I was trying to fall asleep. Although to be fair, quite often they weren’t really sleeping – they were just dead.
Now as I think more about your theory of needing to save up to expend great amounts of energy at a moment’s notice, it really does apply to a hamster. After all, it’s the hamster that the cat is hunting. I know that I would want to be well rested in case of such an event.
I’ve always assumed it had less to do with their metabolism, and more with how they eat. Once a wild cat has a full stomach, there is nothing to be gained by being active. They would just be wasting energy. Once they start to get hungry again, they get more active. House cats have the benifit of very being well fed. My cat is most active right before I feed him. He starts climbing on things, digging throught things, generally being a pest.
Presumably this is also because the herbivorous prey needs to forage for an age to get all the calories, protein etc. while the predator gets all theirs in one nice meaty package.
It also has to do with diet. Elephants aren’t predators, and, as far as I know, adult elephants aren’t predated upon (except by humans). They can’t sleep a lot because they have to always be eating.
If you had a pet snake which you fed regularly, it would probably sleep just as much as your cat (granted, it’s hard to tell if a snake is actually sleeping, or just lying there). What else is a snake going to do, besides procreating? I bet that feral cats probably don’t sleep as much domestics.
It’s a character issue. Cats are evil, and slothfulness is just part of the tapestry. Plus, they need to save energy to steal the breath of human infants.
