Kevin M Lawson

 

 Another week of baseline data and the first tests of a new toy.

 

 

Observations:

• Several people who looked at last week’s data have pointed out that Snickers seems to go nuts from about midnight to 3 A.M. The same pattern continues this week. This definitely matches up with our anecdotal experience.
• Thursday’s daily breakdown shows what I initially thought was a swathe of pure laziness, but Thursday’s total step count is similar to that of other days. She was likely resting after an active night (of running up and down the hallway, batting cat toys beneath furniture, etc.).

Notes:

• Monday (24 Dec, at bottom) was once again charge-the-Fitbit day, this time from 8-10 P.M.
• Though I found a wonderfully-titled paper that would help in estimating Snickers’ stride length, I am still unsure how the Fitbit tracker’s steps correlate to actual cat steps, so the distance and step numbers remain dubious.

Toy: Undercover Mouse

Snickers has a few toys already: a scratching post, a toy mouse suspended from the ceiling with elastic, and a menagerie of other stuffed fabric playthings; usually mouse-shaped and usually missing ears or appendages. For this experiment I wanted a toy that would cause a noticeable bump in measurable activity. A buddy of mine recommended an Undercover Mouse.

Snickers’ initial impressions were less than favorable, probably due to the sound of the motor.  My wife was able to gradually introduce her to it later and now she loves it. But if we just left it on 24/7 she would likely grow bored of it fairly quickly. The best way to exercise a cat with this toy may be to turn it on several times during the day and let the cat play with it long enough to burn some calories but not long enough for the cat to lose interest. If you have an erratic schedule you could theoretically do this manually, but no one has time for such things.

As soon as some new parts arrive, the engineering phase of this experiment will begin.

 

It has been one week since I attached a Fitbit tracker to my cat. Let’s look at the data.

 

 

A few observations:

• Looking at the daily breakdowns, the general pattern would best be described as: “Sleep for an hour or two, goof off for a bit, repeat.” Sounds about right.
• Some cats can sleep up to twenty hours a day, and I would have expected Snickers to be on this end of the laziness spectrum. Even if we assume that 100% of her sedentary time is spent asleep, she still would not be able to log twenty hours. At least she is less lazy than I expected.
• When she is awake she is also much more active than I would have expected, playing for an hour or more on several occasions. Impressive.
• Friday and Saturday evenings usually mean guests, and therefore mean that Snickers will sequester herself in the basement or beneath a bed for the duration.  This does not appear to affect her activity level.

Notes:

• Walking on four legs may confuse the tracker, so I would not trust the step count. Distance traveled is surely way off, as this is calculated from steps assuming a normal stride length for a bipedal six-foot-tall human. Fitbit.com did not consider 9″ a valid height (nor 12.2 lbs. a valid weight) when I created Snickers’ account. Time active is probably fairly accurate.
• I am unsure how much grooming gets picked up. Scratching around the collar may, but cat baths probably do not.
• The tracker was removed from about 1-3 P.M. on Monday (bottom) to recharge it. Fitbit’s engineers deserve praise for designing a device that can be in absolutely constant use for over two years, and still have a 40% battery level a week after its last charge.
• No change was made to Snickers’ daily routine, nor did we change how much we play with her. The only exception was when she had not walked near the Fitbit tracker’s wireless base station in a day or so, so I shut her in my office for five minutes to allow the tracker to connect and upload its data.  She gave me a kind of bewildered “Why am I in here?” look when I opened the door to let her out.

Next

Snickers seems to have adjusted to the collar and Fitbit tracker fairly quickly, so now that we have a good baseline we should be able to start throwing some new cat toys into the experiment to see if they make her more active.

I’ve been wearing a Fitbit Tracker for about two and a half years now. Recently I replaced my original “Classic” tracker with a newer model, which has freed up the old one for use in answering a question I’ve had from day one:

What would happen if I attached this to a cat? How much exercise does an indoor cat get, really?

The Cat

Snickerdoodle (“Snickers” for short) is a seven-year-old domestic shorthair (mutt) that was found as a stray and nursed back to health by my parents when I was in college. I took her in a few months after getting my own house. Now that she’s an indoor cat, she no longer gets chased by Labradors, but she no longer gets to chase rabbits, either. Despite being on a low-calorie dry food for years, this decline in exercise has made her noticeably more plump than she was during her adventurous outdoor-cat days in the country.

The Setup

I configured my old Fitbit tracker and taped it to an adorable pink safety collar. My cat now has her own Fitbit profile.

The Plan

I am not sure what to expect from the data. Fitbit trackers were presumably designed only for measuring human activity, but I would imagine that when Snickers runs full bore down the hallway in the middle of the night, the tracker will pick up something.

Snickerdoodle’s usual experience with collars is that they are the immediate antecedent to a scary car ride and veterinary examination, so the first day or so may entail a lot more hiding and moping than normal; her activity may be a bit low initially. After a week or two of baseline I may try new cat toys to see how much they affect her average activity.