Your cat is lying peacefully by the window when suddenly, without any warning, he gets up and starts looking at the ceiling, as if a bird had just flown in through the window. But no matter how hard you look, there’s nothing flying around your living room, which makes you wonder if your cat has gone crazy!
Then, kitty suddenly stops and stares at the wall in front of him for several minutes, as if someone were projecting his favorite movie (The Lion King, of course) onto it. Once again, you scan the wall for clues, but to no avail. You see nothing to explain his sudden interest in the wall.
Many claim that cats’ keen senses enable them to see ghosts or spirits. But before we declare in black and white that kitty can see Casper, let’s take a look at how his senses work and explain this behavior in, shall we say, a less vaporous way.
The cat’s eye view
When a cat looks in all directions, we think it’s looking for something with its eyes. And maybe it is. Kitty might have seen a furtive reflection or a fly swirling around near him. However, it’s important to remember that, although cats have excellent night vision, their daytime vision is much poorer than ours.
Indeed, he can only see in two colors, whereas we can see in three. In fact, it has sacrificed this third color in order to be able to see at night. The cat sees the world only in shades of blue and yellow. What’s more, they can’t see clearly what’s very close to them, at a distance of less than five centimetres, or what’s very far away, more than eight metres from their nose.
Cats are excellent predators. Their vision is very sharp in the center of their field of vision, enabling them to stare at their prey, but blurred around the edges. However, when stalking prey, cats never rely on sight alone. They also rely on two other senses that are far more acute than ours: hearing and smell.
Cat hearing
Our perception of the environment is very different from that of our cat. Did you know that he can hear frequencies four to five times higher than we can? It’s therefore possible for him to perceive the ultrasound range which, for us, is inaudible because its frequency is too high.
So when your cat seems to be frantically staring at something invisible that’s going every which way, he may not be trying to see it. He may be trying to find the source of a noise. It could be a bat flying around outside, emitting ultrasonic sounds to help it find its way. If kitty often acts this way at the start of the summer season, now you know why!
A cat can hear a mouse strolling across the lawn more than ten meters away. We’re not talking about a mouse in tap shoes dashing across a hardwood floor. Think about that for a moment. Could you hear a mouse wiggling in the grass ten meters away from you? Of course not. Your cat has superhero hearing, which allows him to hear sound frequencies that are totally out of our range. When kitty stares at your living room wall, it may be because he hears a squirrel strolling across the roof, another cat under the window or a neighbor playing a musical instrument in his basement. With hearing this powerful, anything is possible!
If this explanation isn’t enough to convince you, the following will. Yes, cats have excellent auditory acuity, and their ears are specifically designed to determine where a sound is coming from. Humans locate the source of a sound with a margin of error of around 20 degrees. The cat’s margin of error is just 5 degrees. What’s more, they can also pinpoint the source of a sound in the vertical plane (height), something we’re incapable of doing.
By moving his head and ears (as he does when he seems to be looking for ghosts), he can determine the exact source of a sound. This is made possible by the mobility and size of their ears, which act like the domes often used in spy films to eavesdrop on a plot from a distance. If they could talk, cats would make excellent secret agents. Imagine what they could tell you about your neighbors and teenagers!
