ls -l total bug?

[Feodor Trubetskoy]

Good day,

ls man reads:

  -l      <skip>  *If the output is to a terminal, a total sum for all 
the file sizes is output on a line before the long listing.*

But I have found that ls consistently put "total" in a first line even 
if output is piped or redirected. As an example:

ls -l | cat

Is it bug or I missed something?

FreeBSD 5.1 Release

Thank you,
--fedya