Originally published at: Incredible catch: A woman springs to action and saves her dog from second-floor fall | Boing Boing
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Dog, “Again! Again!”
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Not again!
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I take it dogs aren’t like cats? Because a cat would have totally walked away from that fall with a shrug, and probably would have been pissed about getting grabbed mid fall.
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They are not. And it’s not a given a cat would walk away from a fall of that height uninjured. I was house sitting for my parents one summer when they went on vacation, and their cat fell off the roof one day. It was a one story ranch. She didn’t break anything, but she definitely hurt herself. She limped inside, found a dark quiet corner, and didn’t move for about a day. Then she was fine. And before anyone asks why I didn’t take her to the vet, she was…a lot. I couldn’t get close to her to pick her up or even touch her, much less try to get her into a pet carrier to take her to the vet. If I got within a foot of her, she got … upset. She had injured me before. I was surprised, though, when by the next day, it was like nothing had happened.
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“Lady, what’s your dog’s name?”
“We call him Dumbassio…”
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Two factors are at play: most dogs are heavier, more compact. And that leads to the other factor, that dogs do not have the flexible spines cats do to twist into a better landing position.
Dogs are almost like humans of same weight, really.
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A little bit of a wag right when she grabs the pup. As if to say “Are we playing now?”
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That lady is from Krypton!
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Delivery guy “What the hell just happened?”
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It is raining dog.
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She did a much better job of catching the dog than that group of 6 people from the previous dog-window-jumping video.
Sometimes committees fail while one person gets the job done.
But in both cases we return to the basic question, wtf was the dog thinking?
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C/W terrible things happening to animals and people; suicide
There was a very horrible incident in my neighborhood recently in which an emotionally-distressed man threw three pets out of the window of his fourteenth-floor apartment before jumping after them. The man, his cat, and one of his dogs died; the sole survivor was a second dog, which broke two legs and suffered a spinal injury, but – after receiving medical attention – is expected to make a reasonably full recovery.
My money would have been on the cat, but it seems that there are limits to cats’ legendary ability to cope with falls. The dog that lived was a toy dog of some kind, and I believe that small body mass helps; lower mass relative to volume (or surface area?) means lower terminal velocity. Even so, I think its survival was a fluke.
TL;DR: Cats probably have better chances than dogs, but after about the fourth floor there are no guarantees any more. And freak outcomes can still happen.
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Two more factors:
Cats have a “go limp” instinct when their maximum safe fall distance is exceeded. This has saved many a cat life (or perhaps all nine).
Dogs by and large have really terrible joints. There’s hardly a breed that doesn’t have knee, foot, or hip problems. This is from hundreds of years of purebreeding. Dogs are worse at surviving falls than people by quite a bit. Dogs regularly break a bone falling off the couch. One of our dogs was paralyzed by slipping on linoleum.
Source: All of my immediately family are veterinarians. Seriously, all of them. I like computers. 
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Wow! All in all she made less fuss than I do when I stub my toe.
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“WITNESS ME MEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
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I think we finally have the answer
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My neighbor’s dog jumped fell from his 18th floor balcony and survived with no major injuries. It was pretty shocking.
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This is why you should only ever let your cat fall out of windows.
