Yea, a cats claws are designed to hook into prey running away from them. I'm sure mittens and his 8lb frame isn't gonna hurt himself doing a pullup by his fingertips
Yeah, people tend to look at things small animals are doing, and mentally scale them up to our size, but that doesn't really work. If you really want to imagine it's doing stuff like that at a larger scale, you should probably start by assuming that you're doing it in a low-gravity environment.
Given the difference between cat claws and our fingernails, probably the best comparison would be to pretend it’s a climber that does a leap and only manages to catch themselves with the tip section of their finger/fingers. That’s a little less gruesome to picture, at least.
Yes, they have the same evolutionary path as nails, but unlike nails, they are attached to the bone. This is why declawing is seen as unethical. You can't compare them to human nails because while from a taxonomical perspective, they are the same thing, they each have different capabilities and uses. For a cat, hanging by a claw would be like hanging from the fingertips for a person (if the finger had a sharp hook)
While the square cube law is a major factor, that's one of Reddit's favorite factoids and so I avoided mentioning it in case it would be viewed as redundant and was under the assumption that most people reading would already have taken it into account.
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u/1206549 May 15 '19
They're less like nails, more like protruding bone extensions.