These long hairs growing out of the upper lip, cheeks, and forehead of a cat are actually sense organs.  When someting touches the tip of a cat’s whisker, sensitive nerve endings at the base of the whisker are stimulated.  This allows the cat to feel things several inches away from her face.

Cats are active in the dark, where it is sometimes difficult for them to see everything, though they see very well in dim light or nearly dark.  Their whiskers gfive them another way of findiing out about their environment.

Because the whiskers extend to the cat’s shoulders, some people think they are used to let the cat know how much room she has to move in a tight space.  If a cat enters a dark tunnel with walls that brush both the left and right whiskers, that may tell the cat the tunnel isn’t wide enough for her to pass through. 

Cats also have a set of whiskers on the inside of each of their front legs above the paws.  Some people think these whiskers help the cat catch mice by giving her “touch information” about the prey animal.