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Cats' anatomy is designed by nature to be able to slip through tiny spaces, because they are prey animals. Other prey animals are the same. I remembered reading something about the way their shoulders are connected, by muscle instead of bone and a search revealed this article, which is probably the one I remember reading so long ago.
Cats are predators, they are strict obligate carnivores, but they are also prey animals.
And it's that fact that is responsible for many of their unique traits, most importantly their instinctive ability to hide all signs of pain and illness. Pain and illness makes them vulnerable to predators, so they instinctively hide any but the absolute worst suffering, so severe it cannot be hidden.
In addition, as prey, their anatomy which gives them the ability to slip through narrow cracks and spaces you wouldn't expect them to be able to, helps preserve their hides. A cat prefers to react to danger by flight rather than fight, if at all possible.
Rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks and other small prey also have this ability. I once startled a rabbit in my fenced in yard. She was heavily pregnant at the time as well. But as I was standing at the gate, where she had gotten in, she was forced to squeeze herself through the 2 inch wide fence holes. I simply stood there and watched in amazement as she pushed her entire body through!
Is that a ragdoll? We used to have a ragdoll who looked exactly like that, and he was like the liquid metal guy from Terminator. You could practically squeeze him out of a tube like toothpaste. He was dumber than a rock, but made of jelly.
Our orange girl has somehow found a way to get into the far back room in our basement, a place closed off by a door. She's done it three times. We guess that she must hear a critter and manages to find a hole in the concrete or get up into the dropped ceiling tiles (our house is old).
Last night, by chance I happened to need something back there. I opened the door and she shot out like a rocket. She'd been there all afternoon. (We would have found her eventually when she didn't come to eat.) But it's crazy how much effort she puts into getting there.
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