> Probably not in a straight race over flat ground. A human's stride is
> so much longer thah a housecat's they have to exert far less effort
> to move with the same speed. However cats rarely enter the 100m
> sprint against humans. The perception that the cat is faster comes
> from its agility, ability to accelerate from a standing start etc.
... and the higher velocity part too would form a significant part of the perception. I can't give you top speeds for a domestic cat (or what would be handier still, a lynx), but I'd bet money that it has a higher "top speed" than a human (even using the usual fiction of defining the latter by Ben Johnson (or whoever it is that matched that time "legally" (coff, coff) and the former by whatever specimen someone manages to train a radar gun. Humans are amazingly slow, really: we can be outsprinted (not outdodged, out-accelerated, or out-reflexed mind, but outsprinted) by for example rabbits (which are on the small side, last I checked), or on the other end of the spectrum, by elephants, who don't really even have a running gait at all.
Puffing his way slowly down to the shops, Alex.
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