Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [36]
Scent is sophisticated communication for cats. All of us, coming home, have been checked out by our cats and wondered if the cat may not know as much about where we’ve been as we do. Between cat and cat, smell is raised to an art form. Scent glands are stationed along the tail, on each side of the forehead, and on the lips and chin; a cat that rubs its face against you is marking you for its own. A possessive cat like Morgan marks everything she can reach, especially when it isn’t hers; at my mother’s house she claimed all the doorways and furniture and my mother as well, to the indignation of Mother’s own cat. Even the pads of the feet leave messages, as the cat walks through the world like a graffiti artist leaving his name on bridges and buildings.
Most cat marks are subtle, and invisible to the human nose, but spraying is something else again, a gross message even humans can read, though all it means to us is “cat.” Sniffing it, the cat opens its mouth in what looks to us like an expression of angry disgust, but what it’s doing is opening an auxiliary nose. This is the “flehmen reaction,” and it gets the smell’s information to the ducts behind the upper incisors that channel it to the vomeronasal organ for decoding. Some researchers believe a cat may leave a record, not just of its presence, but of its age and sex and status, emotional state, readiness for love, and individual identity. As much, in short, as a human can pack into a personals ad, and far more likely to be true.
A leopard, most solitary of cats, adds a postscript; he sprays a tree and then stands on his hind legs and claws the bark as far up as he can reach, meaning, “Back off; an enormous cat with very sharp claws lives here.”
Recent studies suggest that even we are more sensitive to smell than we realize. Maybe because we smelled so personally unpleasant for so much of our history we came to suppress olfactory information as both impolite and disgusting. Cats never smelled bad. They buried their excrement and cleaned their fur with a saliva that contains a cleansing and deodorizing agent, and left themselves open to the educational symphony of smell. Lend your cat carrier to someone else, and when it’s brought back your cat can spend twenty minutes with it, learning who knows what richly detailed nuances about your friend’s cat and its life and secret name. We’d consider it rude to sniff our friends for news, because until very recent times indeed one’s friends didn’t bear close sniffing; instead we stand well back and say, “How have you been? Are you feeling better? Are you happy?” and very likely get a lie in return. Cats can’t lie to the noses of other cats.
Once full identification is made the cats decide, on the evidence, whether to fight, or threaten, or separate, or pursue the acquaintance.
In a large household, a colony really, the size of my sister’s, there seem to be few close friendships or strong enmities, as if the sheer numbers re-created a solitary state; they are part of a whole, like soldiers in an army, and used to each other, but except in very cold weather they maintain air space in between. The disappearance of one or the arrival of another causes little comment. This seems sensible. Cats are not cattle, to huddle