The Secret Biology of Cat Claws

administrator your kitten delivery has arrived oh oh it's happening oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god you're gonna be so cute and we're gonna play and we're gonna oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god gotta touch guy i want to touch it gonna touch it okay and a pet guy and a pet okay and a pet [Music] this is the distinguished lady three jane marie franz tessier ash pool she is a five-month-old tortor shell kitten she's rambunctious and sweet and loving and cuddly and she has 18 little evil claws that i swear sharp enough to scratch captain america's shield oh my goodness my legs are shredded and so after buying extra band-aids for the first time in my life i had the thought why are cat claws so dang sharp well the answer is a biology that i think most cat lovers are actually unaware of at least i was when i started researching this episode so let's sink our claws into the science oh ow ow oh this thing's worse than getting uh scooped by game theory oh it's just a thing now entering the facility well alright we were already inside the whatever science is so often about questioning the common yes we know that cat's claws are sharp but do we know why they are sharp there must be some distinguishing biology there or else we'd never notice these claws among various other animal armaments so first the evolutionary function of cat's claws is pretty easy to suss out yes it's an actual word you among us dorks claws are great for climbing which cats are very proficient at and they climb to hunt and claws like cats have are great at piercing prey and holding onto it in a death grip and make no mistake cats are deadly in the u.s alone each year domestic cats are responsible for 20 billion small animal murders and recently are the culprits of dozens of extinctions cats and our kitties are true forces of nature and their claws have a lot to do with it now the closest thing that you have to claws are your fingernails so you may think that cat claws function and grow in a similar way but while some humans who work at whole foods may convince you that humans have claws we get a dude you play guitar without a pick cat claws grow in a very different way your fingernails made of the fibrous structural protein keratin push out from your cuticle as they grow in the nail bed notice how the nail and the matrix that produces it is separate from your distal or end digit cat claws on the other paw grow directly off of the bone from a growth center that is vascularized or has a blood flow if you look really closely at your own kitty underneath and through the semi-transparent kitty claw you can even see this red blood-fed tissue from which the murder grows growing right off the bone cat claws can form and develop in three dimensions instead of the two dimensions more or less imposed by your fingernails nail bed this results in a curved cone-like or conical-shaped claw that develops from the inside out and here is the real heart of the biological misconception that humans have about cat claws just how do cats keep these forms sharp oh oh it stings worse than having to suddenly start a channel from scratch that is not sound optimal does it not if you have a cat or you know anyone who has a cat you're probably familiar with furniture that looks something like this totally obliterated by claws and you never really get a new couch because you're lazy but most people would say that cats are compelled to do this because they are quote unquote sharpening their claws this is the impetus behind buying something like a scratching post but if cats were really sharpening their claws why would they be scratching on a very soft surface like this in a non-scratching motion if they were actually trying to sharpen the keratin that pokes out from their little peats they would be rubbing their claws against an abrasive material like rock or stone to put an edge on that keratin like you would do if you were filing down your nails with a nail file or if you were sharpening a knife but i've never observed a cat trying to sharpen their claws on something like a stone instead you see them always going for more soft material that they can dig into in a grabbing and pulling motion well this all starts to make more sense if you actually look around where your cat or kitten scratches most of the time and then find one of these yeah one of those stop clicking on my laptop no you're you're deleting everything you're deleting the script look around where your cat does most of their scratching and find one of these that's right if you did not know this before cats shed their claws when cats scratch they are not continuously sharpening the same structure and if we look closer with a simple smartphone microscope you can see this structure in detail i do not see any damage or scuffs that would indicate that cats sharpen their claws at all at least not in the way that most people would mean it our answer today well you're looking right at it cat's claws are so sharp because they don't sharpen them when they make this quote unquote sharpening pulling grabbing motion what they're actually doing is encouraging the keratin furthest away from the blood supply of their little toby of their little toe beans to shed always revealing a top of the line sharp as possible mouse shredding implement and when they're making this motion they're making sure their claws are always updated and of course they stay sharp thanks to the claws retractability i bet we're i bet millions of pet owners have this misconception and if you look at a cat's hind claws they are much duller than the front claws now if cats were physically sharpening their claws like knives this dullness wouldn't make a whole lot of sense rather these claws are likely just duller evolutionarily because they do not use them as much for the whole grabbing your leg as you walk by and jumping on your thigh and shredding your pants and murdering mice and putting them at your doorstep and you know it is nice but you know i'm not going to eat that but also just look at my cat oh oh she's so cute i want to put her whole head in my mouth forever if you're a cat owner you know what i mean it's not it's not weird you're weird so cat claws are like adorable and often annoying shark teeth but this only answers half of our question today so let's quickly address the rest of it what is sharpness in the first place why is something sharp well in engineering terms there's no actual agreed-upon definition but there are two options the first one is that the sharper thing has the smaller edge or tip radius it's a thinner cutting edge and that makes intuitive sense the more technical definition is that the sharper object between two objects is the one that takes the least amount of force to cut through the same material so for example an obsidian scalpel cuts through flesh much easier with much less force than say i don't know a plushie so obviously the scalpel is a lot sharper and we have whole machines to measure this now cat claws are obviously very good at cutting through stuff as you can see and they have small edge radii as we've seen from our microscope footage so put this all together with the fact that cats have ever regenerating bone grown claws and we fully explain why cat claws are so dang sharp holy crap cats are wolverine what cool is that that biology can come oh oh ow owl this thing's worse than being the least attractive hemsworth ah curse you robert in your disinfecting ways wow thank you but ow now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for the direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant roland bobeck and visiting scholar hugo rodriguez if you want to join the staff if you want to join the over 1300 members of the facility who get behind the scenes content who get to talk with me almost every day on discord who get members only live streams you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and join the staff today and hey if you support the facility just enough you get your name on here on aria each and every week and as you can see there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass that we should talk about one thing real quick that's near and dear to my heart so i've had cats my entire life and my first cats that i got and that my parents got for me were very young and we had no idea what declawing actually meant now everything we talked about today is the claw being attached to the distal digit the end part of their bone what decline actually is because the claws grow out from the bone the only way to prevent claws from going back is to slice off this digit entirely it is considered a major surgery and an amputation it is equivalent to cutting off the tips of your fingers and then having your cat walk on those tips for the rest of their lives i don't think it's ethical and if i knew what it was at the time i was you know 10 years old i wouldn't have had it done my cats now are not going to have it done so you know trim put tips on but don't declaw your cats they your your couch is not worth that thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 1,104,889

Rating: 4.9056511 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, cute cats, cat, cats, cat claws, kitten, kitty, claws, nails, declawing, cats claw, cat videos

Id: 1lj5MHzk2DY

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020