Cats have the widest hearing range of nearly any mammal”not only can they perceive sound in what we define as the “ultrasonic” range, they can also appreciate all the bass Dr Dre can throw at them. They can swivel their whiskers forwards while hunting to provide a kind of short-range radar.And they can see exceptionally well in the dark thanks to a reflective surface behind the retina that bounces lightback, giving it a second chance to hit a photoreceptor. They see more distinct images per second than we do.
Dog partisans will appeal to the dog’s allegedly superior intelligence — though if that were the primary criterion for choosing a pet, one would expect to see a lot more crows and squid on leads around town. In fact, cats are rather cleverer than commonly assumed, as the biologist and animal-behaviour expert John Bradshaw shows in his new book.They can even be trained to an extent which was news to me Bradshaw’s book mixes pellets of cat lore with accounts of feline evolution, anatomy, genetics and development from newborn kitten to adulthood, plus descriptions of cat-psychology experiments in the laboratory, many of which he has conducted himself. Some of the most interesting parts indicate holes in our current scientific knowledge. “Many mother cats try to move their litters at least once before they wean them,” he observes, “but science has yet to find out why”. No one knows why cats go crazy for catnip, nor why they are able “to classify shapes according to whether they are closed or open.” Kittens, meanwhile, “may also use special movements of their tails to signal playfulness, but so far no scientist has been able to decode these”. As far as potential research projects go, decoding the tail-language of playing kittens must be about the interesting unsolved problem in science.
The cat is an apparently phlegmatic beast, but Bradshaw points out that cats experience strong emotions, and sometimes might be suffering in silence. They aren’t part
A.Doing cat-psychology experiments
B.Decoding playing kittens’ tail-language
C.Discovering why cats can classify shapes
D.Investigating why cats go crazy for catnip