Can cats recognize their owners by sight?
Cats are fascinating animals. Unlike dogs, they typically don’t consider humans to be superiors. To them, we’re merely fellow cats who are larger in size. But their reputation as aloof creatures is undeserved. They actually make deep emotional connections when raised properly, and recognize their names when called (even if they don’t feel compelled to come).
Cats also hold grudges when mistreated. It’s an important survival tactic to retain long-term memories of people they consider dangerous. With all this attention to detail regarding humans, can they identify some of us by sight alone, without the benefit of their other exceptional senses?
Cat senses
Felines have blurry vision up close, but focused sight when viewing objects farther away. Despite their impeccable night vision, cats only see about 10% as well as humans in bright daylight. But their other senses are unusually sharp. They can tell which owner is petting them with their keen sense of touch. They have up to 80 million scent receptors in their noses, making their smelling 20 times more sophisticated than humans.
Their hearing is far more developed than dogs, humans, and most mammals, the fifth best in the animal kingdom. When it comes to high ranges, cats hear an additional octave above canines. Cats can isolate the location of a sound emanating from even the tiniest insect three feet away to astounding accuracy.
Recognizing their owners
With such acute senses, almost all cats can identify their owners’ voices when played audio recordings. They instantly recognize the sound and vibration of vehicles and footsteps, differentiating between their owners and - let’s say- the mailman. All cats can smell beyond cologne, perfume, shampoo, and lotion, remarkably detecting the distinct smells of their owners’ skin.
There are so many ways that cats recognize us. But sight is a completely different issue.
Visual recognition
Cats do not find human faces as important as their smell, touch, and the sound of their voice. Researchers believe this is hereditary as cats historically made the choice to join human society in search of food, not human affirmation. They didn’t care about the faces of those who fed them. Conversely, dogs were willingly domesticated by humans, leading some researchers to believe that craving our attention is hereditary for canines.
However, modern evidence seems to suggest that cats, at least the smarter ones, do recognize their owners by sight alone. In 2005, a study at two universities revealed that cats identified a photograph of their owners’ faces about 54% of the time. In the same study, cats actually recognized other familiar cats’ faces 91% of the time.
My experiment
Perhaps the two male tabbies I owned for 20 years possessed above average intellect. They passed the feline IQ tests I administered with flying colors. So I conducted an experiment based on sight. Instead of arriving home from work at 5:00 p.m., I broke my usual pattern and showed up at 3:00 p.m. (since cats memorize their owners’ routines). I parked a few blocks up the street so the car didn’t give me away, because they know the sound of each owner’s vehicle. I walked toward my house to see if my cats were sitting on the porch as they often did in the afternoon. And there they were, the two inseparable brothers hanging out together.
Since cats memorize the way their owners walk, I couldn’t just saunter by the house to assess their intelligence. They can identify their owners by gait alone. But the cats had never seen me running, because injuries stopped me from routine jogging decades ago. So I ran past the house at this random time in the afternoon with absolutely no way for the cats to identify me unless they could recognize my profile. Would they pass the test?
Rather than acknowledging my cats as I always did, I acted like I didn’t know them. I was 50 feet away. Only my peripheral vision allowed me to watch their reaction. At first, the cats seemed uninterested in this random guy running on the street two hours before their owner usually arrived home.
Half asleep on a lazy afternoon, squinting their eyes in content, loosely monitoring a man running down the road, only two seconds elapsed before they suddenly sat straight up. Did they recognize me? They studied me intently for another second or two before they bolted off the porch, breaking into an all-out sprint. Racing across the lawn, they ran to catch up, meowing incessantly and desperate for me to stop.
The ruse was over. I turned around, and stooped down to accept my little sidekicks as they nearly jumped into my arms. Seemingly confused by my missing car and sudden appearance, probably wondering why I couldn’t find my own house and kept running, they were quite excited to see me.
So I’ve concluded that (at least smarter) cats will absolutely recognize their owners by sight without the benefit of smell or touch, or the recognition of their gait, their vehicle, or their routine. Lesser intelligent cats may not recognize owners by sight, but all cats recognize you by smell. And they’re the most loving animals when raised correctly.
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