Of course, all these
writeups fail to take into
account the
sheer impossibility of
strapping
anything to a
cat.
I have been owned by cats which could slip out of a custom-tailored, woven-titanium, glue-filled, impact-riveted straightjacket without trying.
A more practical use for felines in heavy industry would be to harness their innately liquid properties and create one of the following systems:
- cooling
I have yet to see a cat sweat. Some people tell me this is because cats are covered in fur, but I usually tell those people to go play in traffic. Cats somehow stay cool in hot weather. It stands to reason that enough cats, properly aligned in an open grid, could provide cooling power for smelting or manufacturing.
- lubricating
Anyone who has ever tried to hold onto a panicked, cranky, or unwilling cat knows that when in distress, cats' skeletal structure transmutes to a gel, enabling them to pour out of your arms, squeeze through barely opened windows, or escape elaborate cat carriers. By placing one or two distressed cats between high-friction objects, the resulting cat-based lube will allow free movement. For the objects. Not the cats.
- hydraulic (catdraulic?)
The aforementioned tendency for cats to become as water when worried can be used to power giant, cat-filled hydraulic systems for use in cranes, elevators, and jet-launching catapults (aha!) on aircraft carriers. While cats can willingly reduce their size by a factor of 300 when comfortable, under duress they enlarge and cannot be compressed by man nor machine. Thus, an excellent (and inexpensive) medium for hydraulic applications.
As an added
benefit, cats are
nonpolluting,
self-cleaning, and are exquisitely
cute...always a help when the
EPA wanders through on
inspection.