When you look around, you see various colors such as orange, green, blue, red, etc. while you are busy cherishing the colorful world around you. Your cat just hops in and that would be the time when this question kicks in, do cats see colors?
Can they see the world with the same lens? Well, how cats see color is a long-standing topic of research, but here we have jotted down the best part for you.
How Cat’s Vision Differs from Ours?
Field of View
The field of view refers to the area which can be focused at a single point.it also includes how and what your cat can see from a straight vision, above, below, and side. Cats have a slighter wider visual field of 200 degrees compared to the average human visual field of 180 degrees.
Humans with perfect vision have 20/20 vision, on the other hand, cats can have between 20/100 to 20/200 vision. It’s tough to understand the calculations in the real world, right? Let us simplify for you guys, this means that cats can’t see things that are too far.`
Distance
Cats are nearsighted, they can only see things that are closer, for an average cat with a vision of 20/100. It must be 20 feet (ca. 6 m) from an object to see it as clearly as a human with perfect vision could see the same object from 100 feet (ca. 30 m) away.
Cats have a clear and sharper close vision which helps them to small objects while hunting, in the wild cats, are able to easily distinguish their prey rather than anything else.
Night Vision
Cats’ eyes are far better at detecting light because they have a high number of rods in their retinas. Also, one of the reasons cats’ eyes glow at night. Tapetum, a structure which is located behind the retina is responsible for the glowing of your cat’s eyes.
Cats only need one-sixth as much light as a human does. the tapetum act as a mirror that reflects between photoreceptors and the rods and cones in the retina.
Saturation
What allows our world to pop and seem vibrant? The saturation, sadly cats don’t have the same level of saturation in their vision, so they can see things that lively which we do!
If you see the world with a cat’s eyes, everything will tend to be paper duller! Colors don’t appear in the same way, and the hue is also less for each color.
How Many Colors Can Cat See?
This is a tough question to answer, due to the mechanisms of cats’ eyes. Human eyes can detect colors such as red, green, and blue because they have cones. Other colors are a combination of these colors. Cats are also trichromats, with retinas that contain all the types of cones.
Though they can’t see reds the same as we do, there is no definite number to how many hue cats can make out! On the other hand, humans can differentiate about 10 million colors.
How Can Cats See Better in Dim Light?
If you compare your cat’s vision, they can see much better in dim light than us, one of the reasons why cats become so active at night, without bumping into the tables and chairs or any other element.
There is no doubt that your feline friend has some disadvantages due to its color-seeing abilities.
But these minor deficiencies are compensated with other visual advantages. Cats’ eyes are set more on the sides of their head, which means they can see more and a broader range of peripheral vision.
The elliptical pupils, dilate maximally of your cat’s eyes, help her to capture more light or as much as they could. One of the reasons why cats are pro at hunting.
Can Cat See Red Color?
Even though cats are trichromats, they can’t make out the difference between, pink, red, or purple. While purple can appear as a color blue to your cats.
Conclusion
So, do cats see colors? The short answer is yes. Cats sense colors differently than humans, thus the cat versions of these photographs appear less colorful than their human counterparts. Cats were once thought to be dichromats, meaning they could only see two colors, however, this isn’t the case.
While feline photoreceptors are particularly sensitive to wavelengths in the blue-violet and greenish-yellow ranges, it appears that they can also perceive some green. In other words, cats, like many of us, are largely red-green colorblind, with a smidgen of green slipping in.
References
- Cat’s color perception — Evergreen
- Do animals see one color — UCSB Science Line
- Color vision in domestic cats — PubMed