I’m sure you’ve seen this image floating around describing the different ways that humans and birds see color:
It shows up on Reddit from time to time and on twitter pretty much every time it does numbers over there. Looking at that, I think “wow… birds are even prettier than I thought” and then I think about stuff like the peacock feathers we sometimes get for 99 cents at the extended pinky small batch artisanal pet store.
Prime Day came and went and I idly remember Maribou shouting down the stairs that 60 peacock feathers were on sale for about ten bucks. Ten bucks? Jeez. That’s a really good price for 60 peacock feathers.
Well, the pet store sells the yard long ones, these are only about a little less than a foot. That’s fine. You pull one out and show it to the cats, they start to get really ticked off about it.
Seriously, look at those claws.
It made me wonder “do cats see colors the same way?” and so I remembered something I learned in elementary school a million years ago, rods are good for movement and cones are good for color. The cones require more light which makes rods good for low-light vision. Rabbits, they say, only have a few cones but tons of rods because it’s very important for them to see stuff moving. Cats? Fuhgeddaboudit. Rods, rods, and more rods. A few cones, sure. But you mostly need to see it so you judge where it is and pounce it. The multi-colors thing uses up real estate in the eye that could be used to become an even better hunter.
When I googled to make sure, I saw this:
Which tells me:
Yeah. Cats don’t see peacock feathers the way that birds would. Which is kind of a bummer. But in the first few minutes we got four of them out of the package and showed them to the kitties, they immediately got pupils the size of saucers and started yelling at us and growling at each other despite the fact that there were more feathers available than cats to chase them.
So if *YOU* have a kitty… check those out. It’s not Prime Day anymore so they’re back up to $16 for 60 feathers but… that’s a really good price for 60 peacock feathers.
This weekend will be spent huddling up at home. Maribou will be recovering from one of her things, I’ll be recovering from one of my things, and we’ll both be taking care of each other and making noises about whether we should do fewer things that require recovering from. Oh! And I’m making crock pot chicken teriyaki.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is “The Feather”. Photo taken by Jaybird.)
The one cat my family had that seemed to have “preferred” toys (as in, ones she’d pick out of the basket not at random), all those toys were yellow. I always wondered if color perception had something to do with that.
I dunno. There’s a potluck on Sunday so I have to do what I’ve taken to calling “tex-mex pot roast” – it’s a modification of a Carne Machaca recipe from my Arizona Highways cookbook. It has the virtue of being able to be done in the crockpot (we’re going to get very hot again this weekend) and there’s minimal finishing steps at the last minute (you make a sauce of tomato, green chilis, onion, and lime juice to put on top of the shredded cooked meat). That’s the only real thing I have to do SaturdayReport
IIRC, cats’ brains also process shapes and motion very differently than humans do. Some things they see better than we do, some things worse.
Most of the weekend is going to be emotional recovery. Regular readers remember that I had to put my wife in memory care early last year. Today I had both our kids, their spouses, and the three granddaughters all get together to take pictures with my wife and me. My wife was having a good day: relatively cheerful and cooperative. Physically she’s gotten too slow to keep up with the granddaughters, and she’s losing weight again. She’s lost everyone’s names, and her working vocabulary is very limited.Report
Ah, jeez, Michael. That’s awful. I’m glad you guys got good pictures though. The names she might have lost but not the rumblings underneath.Report