This question made me think of when I worked the night shift and slept from 6am to 3pm and one person wondered why I “slept so much.” I wanted to say, “Bitch, it’s not that I sleep a lot. It’s just that I sleep when you happen to be awake.”
Perhaps cats simply sleep all day, and then study advanced particle physics and work out with Cirque du Soleil when we’re asleep.
Cats sleep in the opposite pattern of their human servants. When we try to sleep, they chase each other around the house, knocking over Ming vases, and clattering the expensive crystal on the floor, before curling up to sleep and drool on our faces just when the alarm clock goes off.
Ask Jim Davis.
Here is a table of hours of sleep per day (Table 2) for a pretty broad sample of mammals. I can’t make out much of a pattern–big or small, predator or prey, it’s all mixed up.
I notice that the cud-chewers sleep the least.
“Cat-like reflexes”: n, the ability to fall asleep instantly when struck by a sunbeam.
That’s a fascinating site. So, it looks like Hoser doesn’t necessarily sleep as much as it seems to me that he does (hey, back in the day I could check out for twelve hours, too.) What I did not take into account is that unlike humans, cats take their daily twelve hours of sleep and spread them out throughout the day. Plus, while humans tend to optimize sleeping conditions with darkened rooms, earplugs, white noise machines, bed time rituals, etc. (a necessity for those of us who work midnights,) cats and other animals are prone to outside distractions which are not conducive to long, leisurely slumber.
My question hasn’t been specifically answered but I feel satisfied knowing that my original guess was pretty wrong.
I didn’t know hamsters were nocturnal or diurnal. When I had hamsters as a kid, it seemed that they would spend hours running in the wheel, day or night, which eliminates the theory that the size of the animal has anything to do with its sleeping habits.
I do know from my cats that they do have much higher pulses than we do–maybe that is size related.
“Just before the alarm clock goes off?” I think you mean 45 minutes before the alarm clock goes off, thereby spoiling the last 45 minutes of our sleep.
On the other hand, ours mostly sleep the same time we do, because they sleep nearly all the time anyway.
I also think there is more to it then just nature. I think pets get bored. I used to live alone and had one of them sleep 18 hours a days cats in an apartment.
I moved into a big house with 3 other people and my cat is now active. As soon as dusk hits he is out the door and into the yard. It’s kind of pathetic the way he chases birds he has no hope of ever catching (already twice I had to rescue him from dive bombing blue jays) but he is active now.
So I think there is more to it. I used to go to the park in the evening and see people walking and playing with their dogs. Now I see people out in the park and the dogs are on the leash sleeping while they talk on their cell phones.
I think some of it is simply boredom
Apparently I am a cat.
my pet weasel named Perfunctory sleeps like all the time.
eats shits and sleeps
Is it a zombie weasel?
I recall reading some years ago about studies of cat brainwaves that indicated that cats who are sitting alertly at mouseholes or otherwise lying in wait to pounce appear to often actually be sleeping with their eyes open. They apparently have the ability to set their “pounce” reflexes on automatic, and the ability to wake instantly to full awareness when necessary.
Just like dogs and their ability to wake from a nap eventually, saying, “Huh? What?”
That’s pretty fascinating. I now live (unlike four years ago when this thread started) in the country where there are many wild cats. Hoser still spends more than his fair share of the day sleeping (but then, so do I) while I’ve noticed the feral cats in the tall weeds out back acting very similar to what you recall reading. It’s like they can stay that way undisturbed far longer than I can stand at the window watching them.
And sure enough, at the back door of the barn where we feed the ferals cheap-ass cat food, I’ll occasionally find a few bloody feathers or half a mouse as an offering of some sort. If I pretend I don’t see it, then I don’t have to touch it.
Cite?
If I were a scientist doing such a study, I would not conclude that the cat waiting to pounce was asleep, but that my brainwave machine needed recalibrating (or that my own understanding of what constituted a brainwave pattern indicative of sleep needed recalibration).
This has come up before, and each time, I Google around for the study I saw widely reported in the news, but am unable to find it. The study suggested that the amount of time an animal sleeps is linked to the amount of pressure that animal exerts on resources (prey and competing animals).
The theory seems to be that big cats, for example, sleep a LOT because constantly active big cats would eat so many prey animals that the environment would support far fewer big cats.
I don’t know how accepted this claim is but it sounded intriguing. Wish I could find that study.
Back in 2008, for example.
So Hoser, who sleeps maybe three feet from his food dish, and rarely exerts himself unless a moth gets loose in the house, basically can sleep his time away (unlike me, who wastes the day watching the food network because I don’t like the taste of moths. They tickle my mouth.)
I know a couple of small house cats whose environment would not tolerate a whole lot more activity, either.