Happy Pets

Although how its food smells determines whether or not a cat will eat it, the feline nose is a for more versatile organ of smell than simply o food-identifier. Indeed, it plays a crucial role in feline relationships - both sexual and social - and if a cat’s sense of smell is impaired for any reason, it may start to behave in a most unfeline way.

Because their noses contain twice as large an area containing smell receptors (hosting around 19 million nerve endings) than humans (our noses contain about 5 million), cats are significantly more sensitive to smell than we are. The reason why many cats, to their owners’ despair, prefer drinking from unhygienic-looking puddles to the water bowl that has been provided for them, for example, is because they are repelled by the smell of the chemicals with which many water companies treat tap water (although they are barely detectable to us, if at all), and may also dislike the lingering odour of the washing-up liquid - another unnatural- smelling substance - that may have been used to clean the bowl.

And it is not just to the odours emitted by food and water that cats react strongly, the scent of a female cat on heat, for instance, attracting toms from quite some distance away, with the toms increasing their spraying rate in response. It is thought to be primarily sexual scent signals that are responsible for the peculiar face that cats of both sexes occasionally pull, whereby they raise their upper lip and open their mouths to expose their incisors, their eyes all the while displaying a distant, dreamy expression. Known as ‘flehming’, this unmistakable grimace enables a particularly tantalising scent to pass through a duct in the roof of the mouth behind the incisorsto the Jacobson’s organ, which consists of two sacs, opened by the cat’s flehming, that contain receptors that pick up the odour and report it to the cat’s brain for analysis.

When a cat rubs its head or chin against your leg or hand, it is not simply demonstrating how much it loves you, but is both marking you as its property and exchanging scent signals with you. Along with those situated on the feline’s temples, chin and at the corners of its lips, there are sebaceous glands at the base of its tail and around its anus that produce the cat’s own, unique smell. In rubbing against you, it is transferring its individual scent to your skin or clothing, and when it pulls away and embarks on a vigorous washing session, it is not insulting you by trying to remove all traces of your body odour from its fur as fast as it can — although it may certainly be trying to restore its own fragrant status quo — but is enabling the taste buds on its tongue to savour your personal taste. Such exchanges of scent are crucial in reinforcing the shared ‘family’ smell that makes a cat feel at home. Similarly, when a cat insists on sniffing your hand or clothes with rapt fascination, it is ‘reading’ scent messages that tell it where you have been, what you have been doing, and with whom. Sadly, we are largely oblivious to the richness of the cat’s vocabulary of scent and, indeed, find it difficult to imagine the extent to which a feline’s life is both regulated and enhanced by smell.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 1:03 am and is filed under Cats, Foods, Pets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.