Saturday, June 11, 2022

It's the family scent, stupid human!

 


We cats live in a world of scent which you humans can never fully understand. You are nose blind to our smellscape! No wonder we are a bit of a mystery to you.

We can smell home. It smells of every human in the house (each with an individual scent signature), of every other cat or dog in the house, the regular cleaning fluids used, the regular food eaten - and our own scent. 

We apply our body perfume by rubbing against corners, skirting boards, human legs, other cats or dogs, and furniture. That mixture is important. It makes up the family scent and reassures us that we are in a safe place, our core home.

So when you humans ruin it, no wonder we get stressed. Strangers coming into the house to service the boiler: new cats plonked inside the home: new smells you bring home after being in hospital (yukk smells like vet surgery!), spring cleaning (oh no!), or a new boyfriend/girlfriend with a strong perfume habit, or you add a floral plug in (purrlease....).

It smells wrong. The mixture is wrong, wrong, wrong.... to sensitive cat. 

Try not to disrupt our important family scent mixture. It's our home, stupid.

1 comment:

Help for cats whose humans show behaviour problems.

This blog is devoted to the study of human behaviour. We cats, who live with this sometimes unpredictable and always feeble minded species, can benefit from seeing their behaviour in its proper scientific context. The study of feline dilemmas, training problems, and difficulties with humans, can only benefit all of us. All of us train our humans - to buy the right food, for instance, but many of us do not have knowledge of how to improve our training methods. The human species is obviously not as intelligent as the cat, but nevertheless can learn quite a lot - if properly managed. Topics of interest include the use of claw and order, purring as a human reward, rubbing your human up the right way, when to bite, spraying as a method of making our wishes known, ignoring the human, human harassment, human inattention and sheer human stupidity. I welcome your questions. Photos can be sent via my secretary's website, www.celiahaddon.com This blog has been chosen as one of the top 50 feline blogs by Online VetTechprogramms.org