Understanding Your Cat’s 5 Senses

Have you ever stopped to think about how your feline companion experiences the world? How do your cat’s 5 senses differ from ours? Kitty has precision hearing, eyesight built for hunting success in motion and darkness, and a highly developed, sensitive sense of smell, while their sense of taste is less developed than our own.

Your cat’s 5 senses help them navigate and explore their world. Understanding your cat’s 5 senses can help you take care of your cat and enhance their overall well being.

Hearing

Have you ever heard that your cat’s ears are similar to a satellite dish?  Many cat guardians and veterinarians make this comparison. What does this mean? It means cats have the most accurate hearing of any animal. 

• The range he can hear is much greater than a human or a dog.
• Cats are able to hear very high frequencies. Cats are able to pick up frequencies as high as 100,000 hertz compared to a person’s ability to hear 20,000 hertz.
• Kitty can move her ears 180 degrees independently. Humans only have 6 muscles in their outer ears compared to a cat’s 32 muscles. This provides cats with the ability to hunt mice and other small, quiet rodents. 

Watch Kitty when you talk and when he interacts with his environment. You’ll notice your cat turn their head and move their ears when you start talking or when they hear a noise outside.  

Learn more about your cat’s ears in this post

Vision

Cats see differently than we do. They see at 1/5th the intensity of a human’s vision. Our vision is “perfect” at 20/20. Cats see at 20/150. Their distance vision is better than their close up vision.

Cats see the world much like a person that is colorblind. Cats do not see the full spectrum of color. They see blues, yellows, and greens the best. Where you see bright colors, Kitty sees a muted world.

Although people say that cats can see in the dark. Technically that isn’t true. Kitty can’t see in pitch dark any better than you can.  But in very low light that leaves you in the dark, she is still able to make out distinctive shapes and movements. Cats only need one-sixth of the amount of light that humans do to be able to see. 

Cats are also able to see movement quicker than humans are.  A movement that may appear as nothing to us, is a movement that a cat can notice.  

Click this post to read more about your cat’s sight

Touch

Your cats are just like humans when it comes to their sense of touch. Their whole body has touch receptors. Kitty’s fur contributes to a heightened sense of touch as it’s always picking up sensory information. He can use his fur to show you he’s getting overstimulated by your touch. Rippling fur is a warning. 

Sensitive areas on a cat’s body are their nose, their tail, and their paws. No wonder they almost universally hate getting their nails trimmed. 

The most sensitive part of your cat’s body is their whiskers. They are as sensitive as a human’s fingertips. Kitty actually explores the world with his face. Whiskers are a cat’s trusted radar and work as touch receptors that help them measure distances accurately. They function similarly to an insect’s antennae.

Taste

Despite his reputation as a finicky eater, your kitty’s sense of taste is not as strong as the rest of his 5 senses.  In fact, cats are more likely to pick and choose their food based on smell, rather than taste. 

• Humans have about 9,000 taste buds and dogs have around 1,700. However, cats only have about 470 taste buds.
• Cats don’t taste sweetness but taste sour, bitter, salty, and umami flavors. This makes sense for an obligate carnivore that eats a meat-based diet rather than a diet high in carbohydrates.
• Bitter seems to be the taste cats have the greatest ability to taste. This can protect them in the wild as bitter tastes often correspond to poisonous plants and animals.

Smell

The real super power in your cat’s 5 senses is their sense of smell. This is the most heightened out of the five senses for your cat.  Cats have a much better sense of smell than humans do. 

Kitty can smell odors that humans can’t even detect. Cats have about 200 million cells in and on their noses that are odor sensitive. 

In addition to using smell as a way to decide which food to eat, cats can also use smell to determine if an environment is safe to enter.  Smelling is also a method of communication for felines. 

Kitty smells 14 times better than you! So next time you’ve slacked on litter box cleaning and Kitty pees on the floor, think about how bad it must smell to her. 

Understanding How Your Cats’ 5 Senses Impact Their Behavior

Now that you know how your cat’s 5 senses work, you can use the information to decode the behavior that your cat displays and the habits that they develop. You can use Kitty’s 5 senses to enrich the life of your indoor cat.  If your cat appears to lose or have problems with their five senses, you should consider scheduling an appointment with your veterinarian.

Interested in sensory enrichment for your cat? Read this post on the subject.