Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Cat-human communication is a bit different from cat-cat communication, and while I mostly rely on the former I do intentionally include a few bits of the latter (I'm not as fluent in cat-cat as I am in cat-human, but like many (most?) cat owners, I've picked up a few useful phrases). Sometimes a cat, when faced with a human attempting to speak the cat's language, will look confused, as though thinking, "I know what it means when a cat does that, but what does it mean when a human does it? Is this human okay?" Other cats simply react as though to another cat, without being troubled by seeing the wrong species giving the signals.

One of the cat-things I do is the friendly "let's smell each other's breath" approach. I'm not sure exactly what it means to cats, but it does seem to reassure them (and can help to convince an unfamiliar cat that I'm friendly, if I'm allowed to get my face that close in the first place). This is, of course, done in the cat "I want to analyze this smell" fashion, with the lips slightly apart and very gentle, shallow, short breaths. (This is apparently related to "flehming", and aids delivery of the inhaled sample to the vomeronasal organ. I was about to add that although I thought this was a special feline organ, I did notice that I get different information when smelling things in this way -- but I paused to google it, and discovered that the vomeronasal organ (or Jacobson's organ) is present in several species, including humams, though it's apparently not connected to the nervous system in adult humans (I wonder how much of the change in food preferences between infancy and adulthood are explained by the shrinking and disconnection of this organ). Wikipedia says that "some researchers argue" that it's functional in some adult humans; this might explain my acting like a "supertaster" in some regards and not in others, or may be completely unrelated to how I perceive taste and why breathing with my lips parted and my tongue positioned to direct air across the roof of my mouth sometimes gives me more information than smelling things in other ways -- it could simply be the pattern of airflow across my tongue that matters, rather than flow to the spot where my vomeronasal organ may or may not still be, that matters. Ah, but I digress...)

Anyhow, one approaches the cat slowly and smoothly, head way forward, lips parted as though one's sense of smell/taste works the same as a cat's, and there's a good chance the cat will react in kind. If you're not sure how to perform this maneuver from my description, just watch two cats sniff each other's breath, or pay attention to how your cat does it to you -- even if you never initiate this, most cats will occasionally try to sniff your breath in this way if they're comfortable with you (and all the more so if you've just eaten something yummy, though very litle of what I eat is yummy to cats). Some cats do it more often than others.

But here's the thing: I suck a lot of cough drops, often containing menthol, to deal with airway irritation not quite severe enough that I want to use my albuterol inhaler but too annoying to ignore (especially when I'm trying to get to sleep, or on high-pollen-count days). I do not initiate the mutual breath smelling thing when I'm sucking on a cough drop, or have just done so, but sometimes Perrine chooses such a moment to initiate it.

And then she flinches back, eyes narrowed and ears back, as if to say, "Yeowch! What did you just do to my smeller?"

Apparently, menthol-breath is worse, from a cat's perspective, than the smell of hot coffee (which in turn is much worse than coffee-breath), but not as bad as the smell of a tissue soaked in rubbing alcohol.

(So, uh, yeah, the whole point of this long entry was the image of a cat trying to be friendly and getting a snoot full of menthol, and looking startled and confused by it. But I'm curious about other folks' sense of smell and how involving different parts of the mouth affects the amount or quality of information extracted from the air being sampled. And, of course, always welcome feline communication insights, and certainly don't mind providing yet another excuse for friends to post random cute cat anecdotes.)