Taped cat

I think I could think of a reason for it. My uncle once did a trick with me that I would close my fist and he would hold my wrist really tightly, preventing me from relaxing the muscles and opening my hand. Something similar could be happening woith the cat because his muscles are always streched in a way when the tape is applied. Or it could just be a reallyu well trained cat!

I would have thought that the cat does this because the tape makes it painful or uncomfortable to do anything else, in which case this is a pretty low trick.

I think it's because the cat's instinct is to move away from obstacles when it's walking, so if it it feel that there's something on its side, then it go sideways to walk away from it. Just like if it feels something on top of it, it'll crouch, think that's it's going under something low.

A taped cat? This story doesn't involve Richard Gere, does it?

The cat presumably uses the sensory feedback from nerves in their hair follicles to detect where obstacles are, and in a normal situation, avoid them. When you provide a synthetic stimulus the cat responds as if there is an object there. This is certainly the case for cat whiskers. If a cat's whiskers are trimmed then they are at risk of getting stuck in a place where their head fits but their shoulders don't. The lack of sensory feedback is the problem here. The cat thinks that a gap is wider than it really is because the whiskers don't touch the edges of the gap and the cat has learned that their whiskers are, roughly, as wide as their shoulders so their shoulders should fit. The type of perceptual illusion in humans that best compares is a visual illusion where you stare at a pattern and then look away. For a short time everything that you look at will be warped because your brain has learned that the pattern is 'normal'.

Why the cat does this is obvious, and Ryan and Martin get it essentially correct. The cat is trying to move away from what it perceives to be an object that touches it.

I'll log another vote for what Ryan, Martin and Mark have already said. The cat thinks it's crawling under something, stepping over something, etc.

given some of the other examples i have seen of japanese television, i think it's caused by a television system that can't put together some quality programming.

It's a trained cat. It's easy to verify yourself: just put some tape on a cat. She'll either work the tape off or ignore it, if she even lets you put it on her in the first place. No wierd avoidance thing.