The World According to Cat - Part I
We may easily overlook the simple fact that cats live in a world that is subjectively speaking quite distinct from ours. We share just enough overlap between our different perceptions of the world to be able to relate to one another, each species having evolved its senses to fit its lifestyle.
We now consider each species as having evolved to fit a particular way of life; cats are good at being cats, because their ancestors evolved sense organs and brains to suit that role.
Because the domestication of the cat is still incomplete, that role is still in a state of flux, for example, cats are still adapting to urban living while their sense organs have remained more or less unchanged.
One major difference between cats and people is that cats have evolved genetically, from wild to domestic, while over the same timescale we ourselves have evolved culturally, from hunter-gatherer to city dweller.
Genetic evolution is a much slower process than cultural evolution, and the 4,000 years over which cats have adapted to living alongside humankind is not long enough for any major change in sensory or mental abilities.
Thus, cats today have essentially the same senses, the same brains, and the same emotional repertoire as their wildcat forebears: not enough time has passed for them to break
Free of their origins as hunters.
As far as we know, all that has changed in their brains is a new ability to form social attachments to people, while their senses remain completely unaltered.
Some cat behavior seems baffling to us, but it may stem from their ability to sense things around them to which we are oblivious and vice versa.
A complete understanding of cats requires that we try to visualize the world they live in, which is the world quite different from what our own instincts tell us it should be.
Indeed, I use the word “visualize” because that is how our imaginations work: we conjure pictures in our heads of past events, or of what might happen in the future.
Scientists doubt that cats’ brains work that way; not only is it unlikely that their brains are capable of such “time travel, “but also their world, unlike ours, is not based on appearance.
Smell is at least as important to cats as vision is, so even if they could imagine, they might well conjure what something smells like rather than what it looks like.
A few humans can do this professional perfumers and sommeliers, for example, but usually only after extensive training. This fundamental emphasis on other senses is not the only difference in the way cats and humans perceive the world.
Each of our individual senses also works differently too, so that, for example, a cat and a person looking out of the same window will see two dissimilar pictures.
