When a cat bats your cup, it's rarely mischief

The full narration of the video.

When a cat bats your cup, it's usually not being naughty. It walks up to the table, stares at your glass for a while, reaches out one paw, and gives it a gentle tap. The glass wobbles, so it taps again. Before you can shout, the glass is on the floor.

A new cardboard box, a bug on the floor, the chopsticks in your hand: it has to touch each one with a paw first. Why the paw, of all things? It goes back to the cat's old line of work. The cat's ancestors ate by catching small animals. A mouse lying still might be dead, might be frozen with fear, or might turn around and bite.

Going in with the mouth is risky; a tap with the paw is far safer: if it moves, pounce; if not, tap again. Your glass is no mouse, of course, but the habit of tapping first to see what happens is still there. Here's something stranger, though: some cats dip a paw in the water before drinking, then lick the paw.

Water can't run away, so what's the tapping for? The clue is in its eyes. Cats are great at spotting movement in the dark, yet things right in front of their face are hard for them to see. Too close, and the eyes can't focus; it's all a blur. Right under the nose is a spot they can't see at all.

So for things up close, a cat has to look another way: sweep with its whiskers, feel with its paws. It's a bit like a robot vacuum. It has a soft bumper on the front; when it hits a chair leg, it knows something's there and steers around it. A cat's paw is far more sensitive than that bumper. One tap tells it whether a thing is hard or soft, whether it moves, whether it tips.

In the bumper, a switch sends the signal. In a cat's paw, the messengers are called touch receptors. Squeeze your cat's soft paw pad: they sit just under that skin and can pick up the faintest vibration. The paw also leaves something behind. There are scent glands between the toes, so whatever it touches carries its smell, as if to say: checked this one.

And some cats learn the trick: tap the glass, and you come running. That tap might be meant for you. In the end, a cat tapping things is getting to know the world in front of it with eyes that can't see up close and a paw that feels everything. That's not the whole story, and every cat is different. But here's a spot many people miss: on the back of a cat's front legs, near the wrist, are a few more whiskers.

When a paw pins something down, the eyes can't see underneath it, so these whiskers do the feeling. Have you ever found those whiskers on your cat's front legs?