Last weekend my fiancé and I went to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s new movie: The Walk. The movie is based on a true story of Philippe Petit, the legend in human wire walker history. He is the only person challenged wire walk in between World Trade Center– at time it is the tallest building in the world, in the morning of August.7, 1974. He did a lot crazy things on the wire such as turned back and forth three times to trick those police officer who was trying to arrest him and  even laid down on the wire by one knees and stand back by himself. Trust me, it is hard. I tried to do that by myself on my carpet and of course, I failed.After his breath-taking performance on the sky he was arrested by NYPD. One interesting I saw on one article says that when the judge ask why you doing so in the court, he answered as “when I see three oranges, I juggler. When I see two towers, I walk”. His charges were granted after he did a performance for children for free in the Central Park. His behavior was breath taking and both my fiancé’s hand and mine were sweeting heavily. It may seems little bit overreaction to you all but when you sats down watch a crazy dude walking on a wire on the top of 1,358 feet tall sky without any protection you will know what I’m talking about. 

The movie “Man on Wire” is a documentary movie for Philippe Petit’s work. The movie showed us a more realistic, more comprehensive version of how he practiced for August 7, 1974. We can easily get a picture that with lots of efforts and failures he devoted in made him confident enough to do the performance.  While after saw that movie and came down from the excitement I questioned myself why it is so hard for human to balance ourself, especially after one day I was driving along the highway and a group of birds are standing along the sign board. Scenes like this in which shows how good animals are at wire walking are many, for example, our grandma’s cat; the squirrel on a wire (by the way it is safer for those squirrels to walking on a wire than walking on the ground), so on and so forth. Why though?

We know that squirrels are using their big tails to balance, if noticed, they are swinging their tail all the time when they are on the wire. Interestingly, things are different for cats. Cats are considered more “similar” to human beings than squirrels since they are also mammals. Cats’ balance is controlled via the inner ear–which connects to the middle and external ears to tracks movement and regulates balance, as other mammals. While there are lots of myths that whiskers plays a role in controlling a cat’s balance. But it is not the true. Whiskers indeed play an importance role for a cat since they are sensory organs to them, not like human friends does. It is mentioned in an article published by an Ireland Newspaper that “If whiskers are removed from cats, it may put them into significantly danger situations, even wounds and surgical sites”. Cats need their whiskers to sense the width of the road so that they know whether it is possible to pass though or not(There are cats got stuck since they gain too much weight and the whisker does not gets longer). It is also known to us that whisker sometimes are also as an expression of their mood. The most acceptable theory to me why cats could do so much better job at balancing themselves than their human friends do might is their lower center of gravity. Since without gravity, balance on an altitude wide is meaningless.

References:

“‘Man on Wire’.” Pittsburgh Tribune Review. (August 22, 2008 Friday ): 314 words. LexisNexis Academic. Web. Date Accessed: 2015/10/22.