Are Cats Color Blind?

No, is the answer, however, his color vision is quite poor. In the first half of this century, scientists were sure that cats were completely color blind, and one expert reworked a popular saying with the words: “Day and night, all cats see gray.” That was the persistent attitude in the 1940s, however more measured research has been done over the past few decades and it is now recognized that cats can choose certain colors, but apparently not very delicately.

The reason previous experiments refused to show the existence of color vision in cats was because in discrimination tests cats quickly noticed subtle differences in the grayish stage of colors and then refused. to abandon these tracks when faced with two colors of exactly the same degree of gray. Therefore, the tests were negative. Employing more advanced techniques, recent fields of study have been able to show that cats can distinguish between red and green, red and blue, red and gray, green and blue, green and gray, blue and gray, yellow and blue, and yellow and gray. Whether they can distinguish between other color pairs is still in question. For example, one expert thinks they can also tell the difference between red and yellow, but other experts disagree.

Whatever the outcome of these investigations, one point is for sure: color is not crucial in the lives of cats as it is in bears. Your eyes are much more tuned to see in low light, where they only need 1/6 of the light we do to capture the same details of movement and shape.