Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition
Page 25
We can make what we like of such mysterious journeys. Desmond Morris, the British cat expert, thinks it is pointless and leads nowhere to look for parapsychological explanations of the marvels and mysteries of nature, thus stifling the curiosity of the inquiring mind. Ever since the times of the Ancient Egyptians, however, the cat has presented mankind with mysteries which are peculiar to itself and will put the abilities of any two-legged medium in the shade.
11. Although the eyes of the cat are among the greatest masterpieces created by the 'Blind Watchmaker' - evolution - those amazing organs are not much good at perceiving colour. As with primates (including humans), they face forward, and display their aesthetic beauty in some of mankind's oldest painted records. They are very large in relation to skull size and therefore absorb a great deal of light. In addition, the back of the eye is covered by the reflective tapetum, which throws back the 'used' rays of light. This amplifier of the residual light makes the cat's reflective eyes powerful tools for night vision, and military commanders have tried to make use of them in nocturnal warfare.
The light-sensitive layer of the eyes, the retina, consists of two kinds of photocells, rods and cones. The rods, which are far more numerous than the cones, react very sensitively to differences between light and dark, and are situated mainly in the outer area of the retina. The cones, responsible for colour perception and close-up vision, function only in daylight and are concentrated in the centre of the retina, in humans a circular pit or fovea. The feline fovea, containing only a few cones, is a horizontal line. Cats thus have very sharp eyes for spotting mice who happen to wander across their field of vision, but it would be hard for them to see the letters of newsprint properly, and they have difficulty in adjusting their lenses to the macro-area which shows close-up detail. Cats are therefore sometimes disorientated if the object of their interest is right in front of their faces.
Because of the small number of colour cones in cats' eyes, it was thought for a long time that they could see the world only in black and white. However, it was then shown that they can be trained, rather laboriously, to distinguish between certain primary colours. In time they can tell red, blue and white apart. On the whole, however, colour is not very important to them: all mice are grey at night anyway. But American zoologists have recently discovered that the domestic cat has a latent ability to see in colour at birth. The Spanish wildcat, which like many other archaic relations of our domestic cat hunts its prey in the bright midday sun, has about twice as many cones in its pupil and is thus fully able to perceive colour. When it is born the domestic cat, whose forebears at some point took to seeking food by night near human settlements, has just the same kind of colour-perceptive fovea. The ability to see colour, however, is soon eradicated by genetic programming. Probably this ghost of an ability in the cat's eye still exists only because it could be useful at some point if the cat were ever to revert to its old life-style.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Akif Pirinçci
Pirinçci was born on the 29th April 1959 in Istanbul. He began to write fiction at a young age, and published his first novel Tränen sind immer das Ende (literally meaning "tears always are the end") in 1980, at the age of 21. His next literary work, published in 1989, was the novel Felidae, a work of crime fiction with cats as the main protagonists. The novel has been translated into 17 languages and became an international bestseller. Due to the enormous success of the novel, Pirinçci expanded his concept of "cat crime fiction" and published several sequels to Felidae, out of which only one, namely Felidae II, has been translated into English. An animated movie based on Felidae, the script of which had been co-written by Pirinçci, has been produced in Germany in 1994, and was also dubbed in English. Pirinçci has published several other novels which were not set in the fictional reality of the Felidae series. He had a big success with his fantastic thriller "The Door" which was made into a german moving picture and will be remade by Hollywood.
Pirinçci currently lives in Bonn, the former capital of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Wikipedia
Visit Akif Pirinçci at Facebook and www.akifpirincci.blogspot.com