Your cat probably knows your smell

Cats’ reputation for being aloof and truly not caring about their owners doesn’t really tell the whole story. They can form attachments and are likely able to tell when their owner is speaking to them. New research also indicates that they can recognize their owner’s scent. According to a small study published May 28 in the journal PLOS One, cats spend a longer time sniffing a stranger’s odor than their owners. This suggests that they can identify which humans are familiar to them just by smell. 

Felines use their sense of smell for a variety of purposes. It can help them identify other cats and communicate with each other–and the pungent odor of their spray absolutely lets you know whose territory it is. Whether or not they can use scent to tell humans apart had previously not been studied.

The team from Tokyo University of Agriculture in Japan investigated whether domestic cats can just use smell to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar humans. They presented 30 domestic cats with plastic tubes containing swabs. These swabs had been rubbed under the armpit, behind the ear, and between the toes of either their owner or a human that they had never met. 

The cats spent significantly longer time sniffing unknown odors than the scents of their owner or an empty tube. They were also initially more likely to sniff the unknown odors with their right nostril. Later, they switched to their left nostril as they became more familiar with the smell.

Next, the participating cat owners were asked to complete an online questionnaire to assess both their cat’s personality and the feline’s relationship with their owner. Male cats with more neurotic personalities tended to sniff each tube repetitively. By comparison, the males with more agreeable personalities sniffed the tubes more calmly. However, personality did not affect the behavior of female cats in this experiment.

[ Related: Are cats really afraid of cucumbers? We asked the experts. ]

While these results suggest that domestic cats can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar humans based on their odor, it remains unclear whether they can identify specific humans just with smell. According to the authors, the finding that cats preferred to investigate new smells with their right nostril suggests that they might favor different hemispheres of their brain for different tasks. This has previously been demonstrated in dogs, fish, and birds.

“We suggest that cats use their olfaction for the recognition of humans. Also, we record characteristic rubbing (marking) behavior occurring after sniffing, indicating that sniffing may be an exploratory behavior preceding the rubbing of odor (marking) in cats,” the authors wrote in a statement. “This relationship warrants further investigation along with the theory of whether cats are able to recognize a specific person from olfactory cues.”

 

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