How Many Cats Would it Take to Pull a Dog Sled?

Last night Faye and Jake and Chad and I launched into a discussion Chris D. and I have had occasionally in the past: How many cats would it take to pull a dog sled*?

I find this conundrum to be an especially intriguing thought experiment. How many cats does it take to pull what a typical dog can pull? 50? 100? I argue that a direct ratio of cat to dog pulling power is problematic, as my feeling is that cats cannot pull with as much torque compared to body weight as dogs can.

Anywho, we had a laugh about it last night and then Faye posed the question to Google this morning. She emailed me the following incredible Web site on which the above photo can be found: SledKitty.com.

Quoth the anonymous Northern Virginia resident who I admire for his/her sense of humor and desire to see a ridiculous project through to its absurd end:

One day, reading about how even small dogs can pull sleds, I got an idea. Sled cats! More specifically, sled cat. One of my cats, Socky, is a very special animal. He, unlike most cats, has been trained to do a variety of activities…Anyway, if small dogs can do it, I thought, why can’t Socky? So I set about training the world’s first sled cat.

Don’t miss the site, which contains additional hilarious photos of Socky competing in the “Hallditarod.”

*I am well aware that felines are much less obedient than canines. To those who say, “But Newley, you dumbass, cats would never pull a dog sled like pooches would — they’d all take off in different directions,” I respond thusly: The question is not if they’d be willing to pull the sled, but rather how much power they’d generate if they did. Besides, I believe cats might be made to all head in the same direction if you implemented a sort of catnip-and-stick apparatus, which would be, like, a big long stick with a sack of catnip hanging off the end.