Introduction

 

Nature has equipped your cat with refined special powers to be able to chase, hunt and survive throughout the generations. There are five senses that define your pet as a cat and each one plays an important role in how they perceive the world.

   Smell

 

Smell is one of the most developed senses of cats, specifically it occupies the third position behind sight and hearing; it can detect spoiled and even poisoned food with it.
They have twice as many receptor cells as humans, which means they can smell smells that humans wouldn't even register.
Their nostrils have about 19 million nerve endings compared to the 5 million that the human species has, being up to 14 times stronger than ours.

In addition to this, cats have a sensory organ on the palate called the Jacobson's organ or vomeronasal organ, which is known as the cat's sixth sense. This sense allows you to taste by smell rather than by taste and to analyze the composition of certain odors, particularly sexual odors or pheromones generated by other cats.

  View

 

Your cat's eyesight is extraordinary, especially peripheral vision. A cat's pupils can be further dilated to capture a panoramic view of the landscape. They are also specialists in detecting movement, a trait honed over thousands of years of hunting. Cats cannot see closer than 20 cm away, hence putting food in their mouths depends largely on their sense of smell. Your blind spot is under your nose.

The eyes of cats can capture even the smallest burst of light that exists. That light is then reflected in a "mirror" in the back of the eye, called the tapetum lucidum, which is why your eyes shine so brightly in the dark. While this structure improves night vision, it reduces visual ability in the presence of abundant light. When there is a lot of light, the pupil closes as much as possible, to reduce the amount of light that reaches the retina, thus avoiding damaging it and maintaining the notion of depth.

Here we leave you an accessory in which the cat will be able to use its excellent vision, it is the Cat Hammock Window, and do not worry about if you place it a little high, since as we saw previously, the cat will know how to fall from foot:

             

  Hearing

 

There are many sounds that are beyond the capacity of your ears, but your cat picks up them without problem. Cats hear even better than dogs.
Humans and cats have similar limits of low-frequency hearing, but when it comes to high-frequency sounds, cats get a big advantage. The mobility of the ears allows you to accurately locate the origin of certain sounds. The cat has a large number of muscles in their ears that allow them to move one ear independently from the other, rotating up to 180˚. The format of the ears of this species allows them to increase the intensity of the sounds, for that reason, they are able to hear better than humans. It is for this reason that cats do not like very loud sounds and we should not expose them to them.

In the inner ear we find the vestibular apparatus responsible for balance. This system becomes particularly important once the cats venture to investigate high places. Extremely sensitive to any movement, it is this device that prompts the cat to turn in the air before falling to the ground, thus landing on its four legs. In this way, guided by the incredible balance provided by their ears, together with their sensory whiskers, cats are able to perform real feats in the heights.

  Touch

 

Whiskers and paws do research work in a cat's environment. Cats have whiskers on the back of their front legs, as well as on their face. These allow them to appreciate the length of things and even, in the absence of light, to move without any problem.

   Taste

 

There's a reason cats don't necessarily eat whatever cat food you put in front of them. They only have about 470 taste buds. That sounds like a lot, but if we compare it with your own mouth that includes more than 9,000, it is very little. This is why they rely more on their sense of smell when it comes to choosing food.

When the cat ingests something with an unpleasant or poisonous taste, it generates abundant saliva to get rid of that taste. However, before eating any food, cats smell the piece perfectly, making sure that the food is not harmful, since it is very prudent in the event of a possible poison. Cats are sensitive to salty, sour and bitter tastes, but not to sweet tastes, which they only recognize in high concentrations. Some foods such as chocolate or grapes in large quantities can be toxic and even cause the death of the animal.

The roughness of their tongues allows them to scrape the meat from the bones of their prey, at the same time as to perform the hygiene of their own hair, thus helping to remove dead hairs and dirt.

                               

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