Whether you’re a dog person or cat person, you’ve got to admit felines are the daintier drinkers.

Now, a group of four researchers, employing high-speed video cameras, have published the scientific reasons why in one of the world’s most prestigious journals.

It turns out the more slovenly dogs just use cruder physics than their cat counterparts when they take in liquids.

For dogs, drinking simply involves forming their tongues into ladles and scooping the water into their mouths, and often all over the floor, says Jeff Aristoff, a post-doctoral fluids expert at Princeton University.

Cats, whether lap or lions, rely on a much more complex set of physical principles relating to adhesion, inertia and gravity.

“For cats you have to imagine dipping your finger into a liquid and pulling it out,” says Aristoff, a study co-author. “The liquid would adhere to your finger and then when you pull it up, you’re basically pulling up the water that’s touching your finger and also some water beneath it.”

For cats, it’s the bottom of their tongues, curled up into a J-like configuration that makes contact with the liquid. As the tongue retreats, it pulls up a column of water or milk behind it that will linger in the air via inertia before gravity pulls it back to the bowl.

“So the cat basically has an idea of how this evolves in terms of the hydrodynamics,” Aristoff says. “And it’s able to close its mouth around this column before it breaks.”

Cats have also evolved a tongue speed that will maximize the size of that snatchable column in relation to their mouth size, Aristoff says.

“The cats have timed it . . . so they can drink the most liquid per lap,” Aristoff says.

Tongue-darting speeds for house cats reach about two miles an hour, he says, “which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is if you consider how small the tongue is.”

The study was released Thursday by the journal Science.

Aristoff says the cats curl their tongues in order to maximize the surface area making contact with the liquid they’re drinking.

“It presents a flatter surface to the liquid as opposed to just the tip of its tongue,” Aristoff says. “If you imagine you dipped a needle into the liquid and pulled that up you’re not going to get a whole lot of water as opposed to something that has a little bit more surface.”

One evolutionary explanation for this daintier delivery system is that it likely splashes less liquid on their whiskers, which are important sensory tools in all cats.

“If they were to drink like a dog then their whiskers would get really wet and that would disturb their ability to function,” Aristoff says.

Why did the researchers delve into this drinking style question in the first place?

Well, says study co-author Roman Stocker, it was simply curiosity about the cat.

“To be honest, the motivation for this one was really sheer curiosity,” says Stocker, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology civil and environmental engineer.

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“It was a desire to know how a natural phenomenon that was around us that we encounter in our daily lives works.”

The fact that cats used the bottom of their tongues to drink had been pointed out by scientists in the 1940s. But then they used still-shot technology to show this, Stocker says.

It took today’s high-speed video technology to discover the full, hydrodynamic nature of the drinking. Because it is hard to get a high-speed camera close to a lion while it is lapping, the researchers used a robotic tongue to look at optimal drinking frequencies in the bigger cats.