I think that's the answer to the question TFA poses: because your cat's enormous ancestors also had efficient, fast brains. In order to not get got, we needed t

I think that's the answer to the question TFA poses: because your cat's enormous ancestors also had efficient, fast brains. In order to not get got, we needed to be similarly equipped, reaction-wise, and optimized for fuzzy analysis of high-speed, blurry objects. This, of course, shunts the question one level of abstraction away, but the standard evolutionary arms-race handwaving suffices here. So long as one side does it, by random chance or a side effect of sexual selection or whatever, the other side eventually does, too.