Scent
See also: Major urinary proteins and Cat pheromoneCats can communicate through scent via urine, feces, and chemicals in skin glands located around the mouth, tail, and paws. They also use scent in order to mark their territory. If another animal tries to invade the cat's territory, it will fight for the territory, or the cat will scare the animal off. Urine spraying is also a territorial marking. Cats rub up against furniture or doorways to mark the items as "theirs". When cats rub people, they are marking them with their scent, claiming them as "theirs", in much the same way they would mark each other as neighbors in a natural setting. In addition, they are picking up the peoples' scents.
Read more about this topic: Mewing
Famous quotes containing the word scent:
“...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.
“I am ... willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.”
—Thomas Merton (1915–1968)
“The scent of wine, oh how much more agreeable, laughing, praying, celestial and delicious it is than that of oil!”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)