Elaina Mack.

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There’s lots of anecdotes about how dogs will sometimes watch TV with their owners but cats can’t seem to care less - but there’s lots of gifs and anecdotes of cats chasing a cursor across their owner’s laptop’s screen. It turns out there’s a reason for that!

As you probably learned back somewhere in middle school and then promptly forgot, videos/tv are actually just very quickly changing still frames. This works great for humans, because our eyes process things about about 15-20 frames per second - if the frames move faster than that, we see a video, not flashing stills. Dogs see things at about 70 fps, and cats (being the super-hunters they are) see things at 100fps or so. So for a long time, old TVs probably looked like a strobe to dogs, but as the technology got better, flicker rate went up and now lots of dogs will interact with the TV or videogames. 

Cats, however, see super fast, and unless you have a really high-definition TV, it’s still going to look like still frames. Even if you do have a fancy TV that can do high fps, most broadcasts aren’t that high fps, so the cat is going to still see still photos. 

Laptops and ipads, however, have the potential for a really high flicker rate - I think most are around 120 fps now as their refresh rate - which means that it’s much more likely your cat will see a video instead of a bunch of still images. That’s where videos like this come from, or the popular ‘cat playing a version of ‘whack a mole’ on an iPad’ one. There are actually, I believe, games and TV channels aimed specifically at engaging with cats. 

A side note - birds also see things very quickly (upwards of 100 fps) and so having them in the room with a TV or monitor that appears like a flashing strobe has the potential to be super stressful, so keep an eye on your bird in those situations (and maybe move the cage into a room without a TV).