Caturday Blogging: The “Right” Way to Play With Your Cat
By Buckie Wells
Cats are weird, but get even weirder at certain times of the day. When they get a little crazy, apparently there’s a right way to play with them.
Cats are joyous little things. Part of the reason they make such great pets is because they’re relatively low maintenance and only do about three different things throughout the day: eat, sleep, poo. But by the time the sun goes down, suddenly, they become crazy little devils. Or at least, mine does. She zooms around the room and starts to climb up the curtains.
Usually, I combat this by playing with her. And by “playing,” I mean that I let her chew on my hand. But as I was digging through the Simon’s Cat archives, I stumbled on a video that addresses “crazy time.”
Check it out:
As explained in the video, cats hunt about 40 times a day in the wild. So house cats just go bonkers in response to an innate instinct to hunt and prefer to chase toys than to be given a toy.
But the video gets most interesting when we learn that cats don’t see well with things up close to their face. In fact, anything closer than 10 inches is difficult to see because they’re farsighted. Likewise, it’s just as hard to see things more than 20 feet away.
Additionally, cats have a wider range of peripheral vision with an extra 20 degrees of visibility compared to our 180 degrees. And their eyes filter light a lot differently than ours. Thanks to extra “rod cells,” they can detect movement in the dark better than we can. Of course, they’re going to play around in the dark if they can see just fine.
Related Story: Caturday Blogging: Should I Let My Cat Outside?
That wraps another Caturday! Have a good weekend, everyone.