MADISON, WI—A ground-breaking study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) announced yesterday that Felis catus, or the common housecat, possesses only one life rather than the nine with which they have traditionally been ascribed. The study, which has been three years and over $650,000 in the making, represents the efforts of PhD candidate Alfredo Lampropoulis. He has been researching the regenerative capabilities of various animals, with the ultimate goal of human application. Past studies have involved lizards and worms, but this is the first of its kind to test the life-renewing capacity of domesticated cats.
"What we were really looking to learn from our work here is the mechanism behind cats' legendary restorative capabilities," notes Lampropoulis, 28. "Do they come back in the same body or do they respawn in a nearby area? Is their biology at all affected, including DNA, antibodies, and disease resistance? Well, those are the kinds of things we set out to learn anyway, but the truth has a way of coughing up a hairball on your bed sometimes, so to speak."
The results of the study confirmed that cats do not in fact have more than one life, which left Lampropoulis and his team in shock. "At first we thought that maybe we had just gotten a bunch of cats that were all on their last life coincidentally. We double-checked with our animal providers who confirmed that each cat was only on its first, maybe second life. Then to be sure, we increased the sample size to over 10,000, and the results were the same. We had a team of undergrads committed to killing cats for an entire week and not a single one showed any signs of additional life." The "life-ending stimuli" that researchers employed did not appear to produce any effect on results either. They tested electrocution, burning, stabbing, drowning, and blunt force trauma, among other methods of culling feline participants, but the results remained consistent.
"This is definitely a huge blow to my research plans, but I want to repeat the experiment on a larger scale, something like 100,000 cats, to confirm the results. I mean, statistically, a p-value smaller than one one-millionth seems a little bit suspect, right? And there are still plenty of methods we haven't tried in renewing these cats' leases on life, like dropping them from tall buildings or extreme radiation exposure. Science demands we test rigorously, and I intend to be as rigorous as necessary."
When asked how his team disposed of the materials from the study, Lampropoulis simply stated that the remains were "donated," while cafeteria prices on UW campus have plummeted and the constant call for food donations at the local homeless shelter has ceased for the moment.