Cats Recognize Their Owner's Scent, Study Suggests

Here’s something every cat lover probably suspected but never had the science to prove—until now. Your cat knows exactly what you smell like.

A new study out of Tokyo University of Agriculture has found that domestic cats can tell the difference between the scent of their beloved human and that of a total stranger. And how do they show it? By giving the unknown smell the extra sniff test.

Researchers conducted a pretty straightforward experiment. They rounded up 30 feline participants and presented them with three tubes. One held a cotton swab rubbed with their owner's scent (gathered from under the armpit, behind the ear, and between the toes), another had the smell of a stranger of the same sex, and the third was a clean, scentless control.

So what did the cats do? They barely showed any interest in the tube that smelled like their human. But the unfamiliar scent? That one got the full sniff-and-investigate treatment.

The researchers say this shows cats can distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar people based on scent. 

But it doesn’t necessarily mean they can pick you out of a lineup based on smell alone. In other words, they’re not quite at police-sniffer-dog levels yet.

Lead author Hidehiko Uchiyama explained it like this: “The odour stimuli used in this study were only those of known and unknown persons. We still need more behavioral experiments with multiple known-person scents to figure out if cats can really identify a specific individual.”

Translation: It’s one thing for your cat to say, “Hey, this is familiar,” and another for them to say, “Ah, yes, this is definitely Steve from Apartment 4B who feeds me chicken treats.”

This isn’t the first time science has looked at the mysterious ways cats recognize us. Earlier research has shown that cats can distinguish human voices, read our facial expressions, and even pick up on emotional cues through our body language and smell.

The Tokyo team also noticed something else kind of interesting: after giving those unfamiliar swabs a thorough whiff, many cats rubbed their faces on the tubes. 

Cat owners will recognize this move—it’s scent-marking. So the sniffing might be part of a bigger process of cats getting familiar with new things in their environment.

But not everyone’s ready to crown cats as scent detectives just yet. Serenella d’Ingeo, a researcher from the University of Bari who studies animal behavior (but wasn’t involved in this study), had a few notes of caution.

She pointed out that we still don’t know how cats are feeling when they’re sniffing these tubes. Are they curious? Cautious? Grossed out? Hard to say.

Plus, because the samples were presented by the cats’ own humans, who were standing right there smelling like themselves, there’s a chance the cats were even more interested in the new smells just because of the context. 

“Of course,” d’Ingeo said, “if owners present other odours that are different from their personal one, in a way they engage the cat more.”

Still, the researchers concluded that yes, cats do use their noses to tell us apart from others. 

So next time, your feline roommate gives you a sniff and a head bump, take it as a compliment. 

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