Senses

Cats have amazing night vision and can only see one-sixth the light level required for human vision. This is partly because of tapetum lucidum. Tapetum lucidum reflects on any light that passes through the retina, thereby increasing the eye's sensitivity to dim light. Another adaptation to dim light is the large pupils of cat's eyes. Unlike some big cats, such as tigers, domestic cats have slit pupils. These slit pupils can focus on bright light without chromatic aberration, and are needed since the domestic cat's pupils are much larger, relative to their eyes, than the pupils of the big cats. At low light levels a cat's pupils will expand to cover most of the exposed surface of its eyes. However, domestic cats have poor color vision and (like most nonprimate mammals) have only two types of cones, optimized for sensitivity to blue and yellowish green; they have limited ability to distinguish between red and green.

Cats have a great sense of hearing, they can hear higher-pitched sounds than either dogs or humans, detecting frequencies from 55 Hz to 79,000 Hz, a range of 10.5 octaves, while humans and dogs both have ranges of about 9 octaves. Cats can hear ultrasound, which is important in hunting because many types of rodents make ultrasonic calls. However, they do not communicate using ultrasound like rodents do. Cats' hearing is also sensitive and among the best of any mammal,in the range of 500 Hz to 32 kHz.This sensitivity is further enhanced by the cat's large movable outer ears (their pinnae), which both develop sounds and help identify the direction of a noise.

Cats have very few taste buds compared to humans, ( around 470 or versus more than 9,000 on the human tongue). Cats have a distinct temperature when it comes to food, they prefer their food with a temperature at 100°F (38°C), similar to that of a fresh kill and routinely rejecting food presented cold or refrigerated (which would signal to the cat that the "prey" item is long dead and therefore possibly toxic or decomposing).