- Vision is a cat’s keenest sense.
- Although cats are predatory and nocturnal, their visual field is smaller than that of men; in the meantime, they require 6 times less light than we do to see shapes and movements in the night.
- Cats have 200 million rods – cells involved in nocturnal vision – versus only 120 million in humans.
- Besides, the back of the eye is “equipped” with a membrane that reflects any light unused by the retina, saves it and returns it to the retina. This is the tapetum that you can see at night when a light shines into the cat’s eyes and you can see two green, fluorescent disks, which tend to frighten the children!
- However, adaptation to nocturnal vision has disadvantages: cats cannot clearly distinguish shades and they are much more sensitive to moving objects than to stationary ones.
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