grunting and straining

My guinea pig once apparently jumped off the kitchen windowsill onto the floor, a drop of about three feet. She survived for several years after this but it often puzzled me why such a timid and disinclined-to-move-any-great-distance-at-any-great-speed creature went for the route which involved a drop into relative (for something only a couple of inches high) nothingness. I now often wonder exactly what Edgar intends to do once he's energetically wriggled out of a grip or hastened off an edge of something. He is quickly learning about gravity, the fallingness brought about by it and the means of rotating his chubby limbs about his body in order to keep his centres of rotation and centres of gravity well away from each other so it's slightly strange that he still seems keen on heading towards edges of things where he ought to be able to quite plainly detect an absence of any sort of solid surface within the sorts of distance over which he is capable of lowering himself. It's only slightly strange as the probable reason for repeated investigation of such drops is that he has not yet been allowed to experience the effect of proceeding off one, whereas falling sideways after standing up against something, picking a toy up with one hand then letting go with the other hand in order to investigate it more thoroughly has happened frequently enough for him to have worked out that he needs to take steps to prevent the falling-over part.