Cat Vision

[Sparrow]

As many of us know, irl cats are colorblind to some extent. To what extent is somewhat difficult to find. Wikipedia cites a study that concluded cats can distinguish between red and green, but they are probably mostly red-green colorblind. In general their colors are dull and washed-out, because they have much lower cone densities than we do. This is in exchange for their spectacular night vision. How do you handle this? To what extent can cats distinguish between red and green, and how does this affect things like naming systems and language?

Cats also cannot change the shape of the lenses in their eyes, which means they cannot focus on faraway objects, but they do have a slightly wider range of peripheral vision. They are very good at detecting fast movement, but may not be able to see some very slow movement. Is this ever relevant for your cats?

For some examples of how cat and human vision differ: www.businessinsider.com/pictures-of-how-cats-see-the-world-2013-10


Personally, I have decided to make my cats mostly red-green colorblind. To reference what colors look like to them, I go to paletton.com and set the colorblindness simulator on Deuteranopia. This means that green looks dark yellow and red looks brownish - so brown cats may be named after red things. Oranges look very yellow, so ginger cats will never be named for red things, only for yellow or orange things. The dull yellow that green appears as is very common and distinguishable from the colors of cat pelts, so green things are not used for names. Blues of all hues may still be used for grey cats.

In my catlang, there are five words for color - blue, yellow, light, dark, and grey. Combining these, we can get things like yellow-grey and light blue. Brown or red is dark yellow, and green becomes yellow-grey.

[Gingercloud]

Personally I have my cats see the full range of color. I have no personal experience with color blindness, and I'm always hesitant to write what I personally don't know of or at the very least have a good grasp on.

I also feel that writing colorblind characters could be confusing- For both the readers and the writer. In another Fandom I was active in at one point, I read a fanfic written by a colorblind fan. I didn't know that the author was colorblind before I started reading the story, so I was extremely confused when the characters kept being described in colors other then their own. (For example, an orange colored character was consistently called tan in this story.)

Writing to me is all about making the story your telling come alive in your readers minds, and characters obviously play a big role in that. So describing the characters as consistently one color, while in actuality they're another color... Eh no, not for me. That breaks the picture I'm trying to paint, and that's a horrifying thought to me.

I'm also a fairly stringent traditional-namer, and coat color is the preference for prefixes. So again, having a disconnect between what a color means to the characters and what it means to the readers doesn't sit well with me. Especially since traditional naming is all about consistency, so if "Russet" brings to mind a dark ginger-reddish color, then it should be used for characters that are that color. Not characters that are an entirely different color.

So I consider it an acceptable break from reality to have my cat characters see in color vision, as it cuts down on confusion and keeps consistency.

For the record, I do write my cat characters as near-sighted. As I'm quite near-sighted myself, so theirs that personal experience that I "need" to feel okay with writing about such a thing. Plus given that cats are much smaller and lower built to the ground then humans, and as such their environment looks very different to them then it does to us... The near-sightedness might not even be all that noticeable to those reading.

[turtletail]

For my cats, i just let them have a full range of color vision. It's easier that way (for me) and this way, i can keep consistency.

That being said, i am /very/ near sighted, so i put that into my cats. they can see better than humans, to a degree, but after a certain point, things start to get blurry.

[Foxthroat]

I knew cats were colorblind to an extent, but I never knew quite how they did see certain colors. I have to say, it's not quite how I have them seeing in my own worlds, but they certainly do have a more limited color range.

I've gone with black/dark, brown, blue/gray/silver, yellow/cream/golden, white/light, and red/green as the colors they see. they don't see as many shades, and so blue/gray/silver is all 'gray' to them, and yellow/cream/golden is all 'yellow' and so forth.

With the red-green conundrum I really struggled there, as I do like having great accuracy, however, I do really agree with Gingercloud's point about how it can be confusing and alienating to have jarring color conflicts occurring. So, to an extent, they are red-green colorblind-- red and green overlap into a 'new' color to them, which they have and use their own word for, and it is used to represent the color 'red' when it comes to ginger cats and red prefixes. It also represents leaves, fire, etc., etc., anything that to us is red or green. I feel this might prevent too much confusion while also giving me some limits to play with.

I feel that for me it was a good compromise, and also opened some further world-building opportunities, with them having their own named color. It did shorten some of my available prefixes, since color-wise I'm going with Black-, Brown-, Gray-, Yellow-, White-, and Red-(green) in my cat conlang but overall I'm satisfied.

I definitely agree with the cats being nearsighted (I myself am quite nearsighted too!), and then mostly picking up on fast movement the further away things get. They can't really see much beyond 20 feet or so, save very large/distinctly dark or light objects, or fast movement. For this reason, they of course rely on their nose and ears the most in order to pick up things their eyes can't see. However, they can't see things very close-up either; they become blurry and indistinct.

[Sparrow]

Gingercloud The disconnect with the actual color is a good point! I certainly may need to edit my system for that reason as I see how it works in practice. But for me, it's an interesting challenge to think about how this would affect my writing and worldbuilding.

I also do think that unless you want to really spend a lot of time wrapping your head around something like this and working through all the implications, simplifying things drastically or just going full-color is definitely the way to go. I'm not much of a writer and am more digging into this type of thing for my own enjoyment, but if I were to try to use my system in a story it would definitely need to be changed. Right now I'm thinking the orange=yellow can stay but red=brown needs to be at least changed for simplicity's sake.

[Stormheart]

For NAW and all writing since I made that system, I basically generalized it to "anything green = yellow" and "anything purple = gray" with a side of "pink, cream, and the dilute modifiers are all just generally pale." The last one is mostly because it can get kinda hard to distinguish what a coat color is genetically if you're not dealing with purebreeds bred for bright colors and standardized appearance plus really quite random genetic mixing. Cats reproduce so quickly that family trees can get convoluted fast, and if there's no relative in living memory with a similar appearance they'd probably be looking at a recessive appearance like "I dunno... I heard Moth-heart's great-grandma looked a bit like this, but I never knew her" rather than "Ah yes, Moth-heart's grandmother was lilac, so clearly Cedarclaw carried it down to Ashstar... so this kit is genetically lilac rather than cinnamon or temperature-dependent albino."

Honestly I forget all the time that cats have such bad distance vision... I do actually like describing/writing about their reliance on scent marks, though, so hopefully that makes up for my forgetfulness in my fics.