Cats do have enhanced senses without any doubt. To understand why and how it works, it helps to understand why they have them. They are predators. A cat's senses are enhanced to help it hunt prey in practically any circumstance.



Vision is the first and foremost sense for your predatory fur ball. Simply put, it has excellent night vision to support its ability to hunt mice, rodents and elephants at night. During the day, that same vision is a hinderance as their vision is worse than ours.

To pull this increased vision off during the night, cats have an organic element of their eyes that reflects more light to the iris. This is known as the tapetum lucidum and you have seen it. It is the colored reflection you see in photographs of cats.

On the hearing front, you probably expect your kitten to have far superior hearing to you or I. On the lower end of the sound scale, they hear about the same as us. On the upper end, however, they can hear much higher sounds than either we or a dog can.

Your cat has a significant advantage over you when it comes to smell. Big surprise, eh? The facts are pretty startling. Your kitten has double the sensory cells you have, but has a sense of smell 14 times surperior to your own.

Finding your prey is key, but sooner or later you are going to have to touch something. Much of the cats sense of touch comes through its whiskers. It has them on its face, chin, legs, and ankle areas.

The odd thing about a cat's whiskers is the input they provide. A cat's brain will actually process the sense the same way as it will vision. As a result, scientists belive that cats more or less "see" with their whiskers.

Cats show no interest in eating plants and nobody was ever able to determine why. Well, now we think we know. It appears that cats cannot taste most sugars, so they have no attraction to plants or sweets. How's that for a sense of taste.

Does your cat have enhanced sense. Clearly it does, although probably in different ways than you anticipated. Should you be worried about these senses? Not until cats take over the world!