Who Done It? Identifying a Cat from Its Paw Prints

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective is that if cat paw prints are unique, then I will be able to identify a cat from its paw prints. Methods/Materials In my procedure, I used six cats in this experiment. My parents let one of them walk across a piece of glass and eat some salmon. I did not know which cat it was. I lifted this cat#s paw prints using magnetic fingerprint powder, tape and a 5x7 card. I picked out the best paw print and drew a chart of the lines, marks & ridges on it paw. Using ink and 5x7 cards, my mother and I then got paw prints from each suspect cat. I blew up each paw print on our copier and drew charts of the lines, marks & ridges for each cat. I now had something to compare. Results I used a magnifying glass to visually compare the lines, marks & ridges of the Crime Scene Paw Print to each of the Suspect Cat Paw Prints. It matched Suspect Cat-A's paw print exactly. To double check this result, I drew the lines, marks & ridges of the Crime Scene Paw Print onto a transparency. I laid the transparency on top of each Suspect Cat Paw Print and again Suspect Cat-A#s paw print was an exact match. Conclusions/Discussion In conclusion, I proved that of the six cats in this experiment, it was Suspect Cat-A who ate the salmon. This shows that cats do have unique paw prints. In future research, I wonder what would happen if I used a larger cat population? Also, are the lines, marks & groves in cat paw prints are like the minutiae of human fingerprints? Can human minutiae be used for identifying cat paw prints?

Competition history

• CSEF 2008 Mammalian Biology · Entry J1129

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Animal Sciences projects
• CSEF Animal Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2008 project