Your Cat Makes That Stupid Face At Your Shoes For One REASON

Bramble does it every time I come back from anywhere. He sniffs my trainer, then stops, opens his mouth, pulls his top lip back and freezes there for three seconds looking completely vacant. For years I assumed I had offended him. I had not. He was opening a second nose, and it is a real one. There is an organ in the roof of a cat's mouth, behind the front teeth, with two small ducts opening into it. It picks up chemical signals the ordinary nose cannot handle. That gormless expression is how air gets into it, and it has a name: the flehmen response. Once you know it you will see it two or three times a week — on a visitor's coat, on a bag from another house, on another cat's bedding, on you. The scale first. A cat carries ten to twenty times as many smell receptors as you do. Which means you and he are not in the same house. Yours is a visual place with a few smells in it. His is a smell place, laid out in layers with an age to every layer, and he can tell you who was in the hall yesterday. The second organ is not a better nose, it is a different channel. The ordinary nose handles airborne smell; this one handles heavier signals animals leave deliberately for other animals — who, what sex, what state, how long ago. Closer to reading a message than smelling a room. The ducts are in the roof of the mouth, so he opens it and holds the air there. The curled lip is a valve, not an opinion. Then the thing he does twenty times a day that you have stopped noticing. Scent glands: cheeks, chin, lips, temples, base of the tail, flanks and between the toes. Rubbing his face on a door frame is signing it. It also explains the behaviour people hate — scratching the sofa leaves a mark and a smell at once, at a height anybody passing will meet. A signpost with a signature, at the entrance to a room. Here is the idea that makes the rest make sense. Cats that live together rub on each other and on the furniture until everything carries one shared smell. Your flat has one and your cat maintains it daily. You are in it, which explains what he does when you walk in: you come home carrying a day of other places, he winds round your shins and rubs his cheek along you, and some of that is affection and the rest is maintenance. Which is where it costs you. When you deep clean, you erase it. Every surface he spent weeks signing is blank and smells of lemon. A new sofa is a foreign object in the middle of his map. The fix costs nothing: do not clean everything at once, leave one blanket and one scratching post alone, and with new furniture rub a cloth on his cheeks and then on its corners. One cleaning mistake makes things worse: bleach on cat urine. It carries notes that read to a cat as something close to urine, so you have signed the spot yourself and invited him to answer. Use an enzyme cleaner. That swap has fixed more repeat-marking problems than anything else I know of. A fact about taste that surprises people: cats cannot taste sweetness at all. The gene for the sweet receptor is broken in the whole species. Appetite in a cat runs on smell, not taste — which is why a cat with a blocked nose stops eating, and why warming food to body temperature works better than changing brand for the fourth time. It releases the aroma. Now the whiskers. They are not thick hairs: each is rooted about three times deeper than ordinary fur, sits in a blood-filled sinus and is wrapped in nerve endings. And there are more sets than the ones on his face — there are whiskers on the back of his front legs, called carpal whiskers, whose job is to feel prey he is holding at a distance where his eyes cannot focus. The facial ones read air. Moving air bends around furniture and comes back changed, so a cat crossing a dark room is partly feeling it through the airflow. The claim about gaps is mostly true: whisker spread roughly matches body width. The catch is that whiskers do not grow when a cat gains weight, so on a heavy cat the gauge is out of date. Never trim them. You are removing sensors, and a cat without them is hesitant in the dark until they grow back. On whisker fatigue from deep bowls I will be honest: the evidence is thin. But a wide shallow dish costs nothing and some cats prefer one. Weak evidence, free fix. A note on health, with some weight. A cat that has stopped eating is an emergency sooner than people think — two or three days without food can cause serious liver problems, faster in an overweight cat. A day and a half is a phone call, not a wait-and-see. So is nasal discharge or constant sneezing, whiskers breaking off, and obsessive face rubbing on one side. I do not diagnose and I would never ask you to guess. Tonight, bring something in from outside — a bag, a shoe, a jumper — put it on the floor and watch for the open mouth. Then if the food dish is deep and narrow, swap it for a flat plate. Have you seen the face, and what set it off? Tell me in the comments, and give me their name. I read every single one.