Cat Hearing

Independently from cats seeing or not in color, there is no doubt that its hearing sense is very much more developed than ours. His ears have an unequaled capacity for receiving sounds and interpreting them after in the brain, due that they are formed by more than a dozen of muscles that facilitates the rotation of up to 180º for perceiving far away sounds. This permits him not only to detect the sound, but to localize its position and distance.

The cat's auditory mechanisms are capable of perceiving vibrations of up to 60 KHZ, inferior frequency threshold similar to that of humans.

The superior auditory threshold of cats is, however, much higher: about 65 KHZ, in comparison with the 20 KHZ of humans, a difference of more than 2 octaves.

Certainly, this means that the cat lives in a sound world completely different from ours, a world in which the sharp screeching tones of rodents and other small creatures are part of his daily life.

Many times, the barely audible mewing of kittens permit their mothers to find them after being lost.

This excellent capacity for detecting audible sounds of high frequency explains why, usually, cats respond better to women and children voices than those of men. It also makes it clear why sometimes we see cats turning its attention to sounds that we can't perceive at all.

The origin of the popular myth about cats with "powers" that detect vibrations far sooner than humans is probably bases in this superior hearing capacity, responsible, many times, for cats to appear in front of the house door to receive their owners when arriving in the car.

Car sounds must have, from the point of view of old cats, very high sound frequencies and, as such, far from human perceiving capacity.

Another peculiarity about the cats hearing is the amazing precision with which they can identify the position of the sounds. They are capable of distinguishing between two sounds 8 cms. Apart and being at 1 meter of distance from them. Its brain calculates skillfully the lapse of time that elapses between the arrivals of the two audible signals, skills owned by hunting animals that helps them determine the position of their preys.