Scent Rubbing and Spraying
See also: Cat communication#ScentThis behavior is used primarily to claim ownership of something, each cat releases a different pheromone combination from scent glands found in the cheeks next to their mouths. They also have scent glands towards the base of the tail. Unlike intact male cats, female and neutered male cats usually do not spray. Neutered males may still spray after neutering, if neutered late. Female cats often spray while in heat, so males can find them. Spaying may cause female cats to spray through loss of female hormones, also making them act more like males, which is why some female cats start spraying after being spayed, but if they started spraying before being spayed, it is most likely caused by female hormones, and they may stop after getting spayed.
Read more about this topic: Cat Behavior
Famous quotes containing the words scent, rubbing and/or spraying:
“...there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grows old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they?”
—Bible: Hebrew, Job 14:7-10.
““... Ain’t it a caution to us not to fix
No limits to what rose in rubbing sticks
On fire to scare away the pterodix
When man first lived in caves along the creeks?”
“Marvelous world in nineteen-twenty-six.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)