This hokey “news” story, Me-Ouch: Cat Survives 80-Foot Fall, describes a fairly common phenomenon:
Piper the cat may have used up a life or two but was unharmed after falling nearly 80 feet from a tree.She had been in the tree for eight days when a rescuer started up to save her Monday. But a scared Piper crept away until the limb underneath her snapped.
She fell 80 feet, twisting and turning in the air before slamming onto the ground. It looked like a catastrophe, but Piper wasn’t even dazed, scampering off before her owner Rodney Colvin could catch her.
Piper was found a few minutes later under a vehicle. Her owner said she had no broken bones and was only a little dehydrated.
Cats routinely survive long falls, because they have a nonfatal terminal velocity:
The truth is, after a few floors it doesn’t really matter [how far the cat falls], as long as the oxygen holds out. Cats have a nonfatal terminal velocity (sounds like a contradiction in terms, but most small animals have this advantage). Once they orient themselves, they spread out like a parachute. There are cats on record that have fallen 20 stories or more without ill effects. As long as the cat doesn’t land on something pointy, it’s likely to walk away.
I remember hearing about this 1987 Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association study:
Two vets examined 132 cases of cats that had fallen out of high-rise windows and were brought to the Animal Medical Center, a New York veterinary hospital, for treatment. On average the cats fell 5.5 stories, yet 90 percent survived. (Many did suffer serious injuries.) [...] When the vets analyzed the data they found that, as one would expect, the number of broken bones and other injuries increased with the number of stories the cat had fallen — up to seven stories. Above seven stories, however, the number of injuries per cat sharply declined. In other words, the farther the cat fell, the better its chances of escaping serious injury.The authors explained this seemingly miraculous result by saying that after falling five stories or so the cats reached a terminal velocity — that is, maximum downward speed — of 60 miles per hour. Thereafter, they hypothesized, the cats relaxed and spread themselves out like flying squirrels, minimizing injuries.
Of course, there’s an obvious — and literal — survivorship bias here. Cats that fell 20 stories and did not land just right were no longer recognizably cats and did not get brought in for veterinary care.