Can Your Cat Can Identify You by Smell Alone?

Being a cat owner is often not easy. Most of the time, the cat very much seems to want nothing to do with you or even acknowledge your existence. One thing cats undoubtedly excel at is ignoring us.

But appearances can be misleading. Cats are not at all oblivious to who their owner is. We already know, for example, that cats are very good at recognizing the voice of their owner and telling it apart from many other human voices, and they react differently to their voice. A new study, published last week at PLOS One, shows that cats can also identify their owners by smell alone.

These findings are somewhat surprising inasmuch as cats seem to rely on smell much less in their social interactions than, for example, dogs do. We know that it is not olfactory or auditory, but visual clues that play a crucial role in the social life of cats. That is why the best way to connect with your cat is not by using baby talk, but by doing the slow blink. Nonetheless, a new study shows that even just by using smell, cats can tell their owners apart from anyone else.

The design of the experiment was simple. Cats could sniff cotton swabs that were infused with the odor of various people, including one with the smell of their owners. And they spent systematically less time sniffing the cotton swab with their owner's smell than with any of the other smell samples.

It is important to emphasize what this experiment does not show. It does not show that the cats have a different, and more positive, emotional relationship to their owners (although that is probably what the owners would hope). Time spent exploring a stimulus has long been considered a mark of surprise and curiosity. This assumption has been widely used not just in animal experiments, but also in experiments with prelinguistic children. If the baby or the chimp is looking at a stimulus for a longer time, this is an indication of surprise and or curiosity. The cat sniffing experiments do not, strictly speaking, show that cats consider their owners to be special. A less positive spin would be that they consider them to be less interesting or less surprising than others. Someone not worth lingering on.

All the experiment shows is that the cats can tell just by sniffing who their owners are. Just what they do with this piece of information is another question. Much of the time, it seems that they just blatantly ignore it.

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