One of the first sensations your kitten experienced was his mother’s tongue washing and massaging his ferry little body. Touch is a pleasurable sensation to cats, and it is important both physically and emotionally.  

Aroma identifies life for our cats; without scent, the cat would be lost. Newborns use scent to fine their mother, stake out a preferred nipple and return time after time to the same scent – marked plate. From birth on, Kitty is led around by the nose.

Sense of Touch

One of the first sensations your kitten experienced was his mother’s tongue washing and massaging his ferry little body. Touch is a pleasurable sensation to cats, and it is important both physically and emotionally. Petting your kitten not only lowers your own blood pressure, it does the same for the cat. Pleasurable touch promotes relaxation and reduces stress.

Tiny pressure – sensitive lumps are scattered over the cat’s body, making the entire skin very touch sensitive. Your kitten enjoys being stroked, but he can feel even indirect contact. A single hair being disturbed will trigger a response in the pressure point nearest that hair – and alert your kitten.

Sense of Smell

Aroma identifies life for our cats; without scent, the cat would be lost. Newborns use scent to fine their mother, stake out a preferred nipple and return time after time to the same scent – marked plate. From birth on, Kitty is led around by the nose.

The outside ridged pattern of your kitten’s nose leather is unique, like a fingerprint. His nose is part of the upper respiratory tract and includes the nostrils (nares) and the interior nasal cavity that runs the length of muzzle. Open spaces in the bone, called sinuses, connect to the canal cavity.

The nasal cavity is enclosed by bone and cartilage, and it is divided by a midline partition into two passages, one for each nostril, that open into throat behind the soft palate. The partition, called the nasal septum, is a vertical plate made of bone and cartilage.

Sense of Sight

Sight is probably the most important sense for cats. As hunters, cats rely on vision to find prey. In fact, cats have the largest eyes of any carnivore. If human eye – to – face ratio were the same as Kitty’s, your eyes would be 8 inches across!

Feline eye size and location provide almost 280 degrees of three - dimensional sight. A cat’s peripheral vision is sharper than his straight - ahead vision. Kitties are quite near – sighted, and they see motion more easily than stationary objects.

Cats see extremely well in the dark because they only need one – sixth the illumination level and use twice as much available light as people. Light reflects off the mirrorlike tapetum lucidum, a layer of cells at the back of the cat’s eye, and is reflected back through the retina to augment vision. It’s this reflected light that causes the eerie night shine we see in glowing feline eyes.

The colored area of your kitten’s eye is the iris, which is a figure – eight muscle that regulates how much light passes through. The iris is able to quickly open (dilate) the pupil into a circle when the light low, and to shut it tight into a fine vertical slit in bright light. Light passes through the pupil and pupil and is focussed by the lens onto the retina at the back of the eye. Light – sensitive receptors on the surface of the retina transfer signals through the optic nerve to the brain, where the information is translated into vision.

Resource: The Essential Kitten by Betsy Sikora Siino