I'll try to get around to answering recent comments later. For now I'm still in babble-mode.
Something I was thinking about a week or two ago and forgot to mention here: I would be very interested in a picture of a cat, colour-coded to show the relative density of nerve endings in different areas of the cat's skin. (A black-and-white drawing with different shading counts as "colour-coded" for this idea.) I've got a couple of questions that such a picture might answer, and even if it doesn't, it'd be a really interesting picture. I wonder whether it's already been done (and is available some place less expensive than an advanced veterinary-school textbook). It would actually have to be an intricate pose or more than one drawing, because I want to be able to compare the top of a foot to the pads, for example.
Someone I mentioned this to said they'd seen a diagram of a cat with body parts enlarged or reduced to convey similar information, but from their description it sounded like the illusrations I've seen of "brain maps" which show something else (which may be correlated to some degree, but is, IIRC, a different question to start with).
Okay, sleep now; dizzy again.
(no subject)
(no subject)
They show how much of the brain is devoted to the body part in question - combining both sensory and motor processing. I'd imagine that both ears and nose would be a lot bigger, in such a map of a cat, than their relative size in humans.
And it would completely obscure the fact that, while a kitty nose is a sensitive organ of smell, the the skin at the tip of the nose is also quite a sensitive organ of touch.
Oh, So That Explains
(no subject)
There is a large quasi-coffeetable sized book, in hard & soft cover, called "The Book of the Cat" that has a cat version of the Sensory Homunculus.
I'm not 100% sure that this link goes to the right book-- the one I want has a white cover, with a big orange cat (photorealistic painting) on it walking towards the viewer.