About Hearing in Cats

The mechanism in a cat’s inner ear is very similar in principle to the instrument in an airplane called the "artificial horizon" or "altitude indicator". This is the gauge that interprets the position of the plane's wings in relation to the horizon and reports this information to the pilot. When a cat loses its balance and actually takes a spill, the vestibular apparatus kicks in. This helps the cat register which direction is up and triggers the "righting" reflex that cats rely on to turn themselves in midair, adjusting the orientation of the body so that they land squarely on all four feet. However, recent studies disprove the old wife’s tale that cats will always land on their feet. It seems that falls from a shorter distance to the ground are actually more dangerous in terms of injury to the cat than falls from a longer distance to the ground.

The vestibular apparatus, along with the tail acting as a counterbalance, enables the cat to jump with an almost military-like precision, reaching into the air to catch onto a tree limb, catch flying prey or physically change it's location from a solid, stable surface to a non-stable surface. The Manx, a tailless breed, is thought to have an especially sensitive vestibular apparatus to compensate for the lack of the tail's counterbalancing properties.

Cats, like humans, can also experience hearing problems or even total deafness due to disease, infection, outer-ear trauma, inner-ear damage (from excessively loud noises) or simply old age. The cat's ability to detect high frequencies particularly declines as the eardrum thickens with age. This condition not only affects the cat's hunting skills; it also can compromise the feline's ability to heed noises signaling danger. In domestic cats, however, deafness is most commonly hereditary. Although inherited deafness has not been genetically related to specific breeds, the dominant gene responsible for producing white hair is sometimes associated with inner-ear abnormalities that often lead to deafness. Incidences are highest in white cats with blue eyes; white cats with eyes of different colors are often deaf only in the ear on the blue-eyed side.

Imagine that your hearing was amplified 4 times over ... that you could hear so well that you could hear electrical currents. Can you imagine how noisy your world would be? A cats hearing IS amplified 4 times greater than ours. When you plug your hair dryer into the wall, your cat can hear the electrical current before you even turn the hair dryer on. Amazing! Cats have 20 muscles in each one of their ears, and they can hear really high frequencies that even dogs can't hear. Maybe this is why cats sleep so much - to tune out our noisy world!