Answer: Cats are able to see their surrounding more clearly then ourselves when the lighting conditions are poor. But in stronger light, the eye of the cat is not able to distinguish details as well as human eye can. The eyes of the cat are reasonably close together, like those of man, so that the image seen by each eye is particularly the same. This makes it possible for the brain to superimpose these two images to produce a stereoscopic effect, i.e. to give three dimensional impression of the surrounding area; this is called binocular vision. Objects are in sharpest focus when they are between six and twenty feet (2 to 6m) away. Undoubtedly, this is very important to cat in enabling it to judge distance actually in such activities as hunting and jumping. Animals in which the ayes are placed on the side of the head (e.g. the horse) see two separate picture with little overlap and therefore do not experience stereoscopic vision.
Some Siamese cats have difficulty in the superimposing the two images because of faulty transmission of the never Impulse from the eye to the brain. These animals experience ‘double vision’ and squint in an attempt to correct this effect.
At one time it was thought that cats like most domesticated animals, were color blind and sew things merely in black, white and shades of gray like the picture on a black and white television set. But following series of investigations, it has been demonstrated that, although limited in number, the once shaped never ending in the retina of the cat’s eyes are able to provide some degree of color vision. Cones sensitive to the primary colors green and blue, through not to red, have been shown to be present. However, the cat’s ability to discriminate different shades of color is clearly inferior to that the man.
