Dogs, you know, perceive the world first of all thanks to the smells, and are able to distinguish those of their reference humans from unknown ones. The cats, on the other hand? Even for them the sense of smell is an important sense, but so far we have not yet understood how “end” it was. Now a study published on Plos One show that the felines dHuman smells of family smells from those belonging to strangers, suggesting that they are able to identify a specific person only thanks to the nose.
The experience of the pipes. The experiment of the Tokyo University of Agriculture team involved 30 domestic cats, to which a very simple test has been proposed. Each cat was offered a plastic tube, inside which there were cotton balls steeped in the smell of some human: the owner, or a total unknown. The smells in question came from the most “sensitive” points of our body: in the armpits, behind the ears, between the fingers of the feet.
All thirty cats have spent much more time to smell the plastic tube containing traces of a stranger, and have done it with more attention; The most neurotic specimens (evaluation based on a questionnaire provided to the owners) have smelled the mysterious tubes with attention to the limits of the obsession, but also the most peaceful cats have dedicated more energy to unknown tubes.
“I already know this …”. Another interesting discovery is that, in front of a new smell, The cats explored it first with the right nostril, and then moved on to the left once they got used to the smell. The explanation could be neurological: to explore an unknown effluvium, the felines activate the left hemisphere of the brainwhile using the right when they now know it (something similar happens, which we know, even in dogs and in some birds).
The conclusion of all the experience, however, is very simple: Cats discriminate between human smells who already know new smells, to which more time and attention dedicate to better to identify them. What we still do not know is how precise their recognition skills are: do they know how to identify a specific human, or do they just distinguish between “I know this” and “this is new to me”?
