Hi John,

Smell may play a role in why felines are often good fire detectors. It is believed by some people that cats (and dogs) may be able to sense a fire or perhaps notice something different in the air before humans do.

Indeed, cats have an acute sense of smell--60 to 80 million olfactory cells, whereas, humans have 5 to 20 million. Keen hearing plays a role in fire detection, too. A crackling fire can ignite a cat's fight-or-flight response. Because of a cat's natural built-in nose detector it can sense novelty such as smoke from a fire and this will cause them to behave strangely. Both indoor and outdoor cats, in fact, can detect a deadly blaze. In fact, countless cats instinctively fled for their lives (or hid inside their humans's homes) to avoid the toxic fire fumes and to escape the raging inferno outdoors, as the black clouds of smoke hung overhead on October 20, 1991, during the Oakland-Berkeley Hills Fire.