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Saturday, July 26, 2025

Scent Mark­ing in Cats—Part 2

Identifying territory

by

Guardian Media
2366 days ago
20190202

Kris­tel-Marie Ram­nath

Part 1 of this se­ries in­tro­duced the be­hav­iour of spray­ing as a form of scent mark­ing in cats, dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed this be­hav­iour from that of nor­mal uri­na­tion, dis­cussed the main rea­son for spray­ing, and ex­plained the use of neu­ter­ing as an ef­fec­tive means of re­duc­ing or elim­i­nat­ing the prob­lem be­hav­iour. To­day we will look at spray­ing as a nor­mal be­hav­iour for iden­ti­fy­ing ter­ri­to­ry.

Every cat has its own home base which is sur­round­ed by the home range and be­yond that the hunt­ing ter­ri­to­ry. The home base is usu­al­ly con­sid­ered to be the ac­tu­al house in which the cat lives, and for some cats in mul­ti-cat house­holds, it is re­duced even fur­ther to mere­ly a par­tic­u­lar rest­ing place. The home range usu­al­ly in­cludes favourite places for play­ing and sleep­ing and the ex­tent of it is de­ter­mined by var­i­ous fac­tors, in­clud­ing the num­ber of cats in the area, the food sup­ply and the sex, age and per­son­al­i­ty of the cat and its sur­round­ing neigh­bours. It is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered to be the gar­den sur­round­ing the house.

Be­yond the home range lies the hunt­ing ground and this is con­nect­ed to the home range by spe­cif­ic routes. These long, cir­cuitous paths go around the neigh­bour­ing ter­ri­to­ries which are de­fend­ed by oth­er cats. Time-sched­ul­ing ap­pears to play an im­por­tant role in the fe­line world, and cats that share ter­ri­to­ry bound­aries may es­tab­lish rou­tines where­by one cat has the right of way in the morn­ing while the oth­er has the right of way in the evening.

Cats de­posit very dis­tinc­tive odours in and around their ter­ri­to­ry. Such smells are known as pheromones, which are se­cret­ed in a fat­ty vis­cous form by glands placed all over the body. Pheromones can sim­ply be re­leased in­to the air, but are specif­i­cal­ly di­rect­ed to con­cen­trate scent on mark­ing posts. Urine and fae­ces are good vec­tors for dis­trib­ut­ing pheromones. The sig­nal may last for hours or even weeks af­ter its de­posit. Out­door spray­ing is a nor­mal ter­ri­to­r­i­al be­hav­iour in a cat. Cats ad­ver­tise their pres­ence in a ter­ri­to­ry by spray­ing vi­su­al­ly con­spic­u­ous sites. Cats “time share” ter­ri­to­ries, so the marks en­able the cats to space them­selves out so that they do not meet of­ten. It is when cats start to spray in­doors that, not on­ly is it a stinky prob­lem for the own­er, but it is of­ten an in­di­ca­tion of a deep­er-ly­ing emo­tion­al is­sue with the cat.

The ma­jor­i­ty of pet cats do not spray in­doors, be­cause the core to their ter­ri­to­ry is se­cure from chal­lenge by oth­er cats and our pets are most like­ly to be emo­tion­al­ly calm there. Own­ers are there to pro­tect them and they can rest with­out fear of dis­tur­bance. In the ter­ri­to­r­i­al sense, it would al­so be a waste of time and en­er­gy to mark an area al­ready de­fined as oc­cu­pied and safe.

The third ar­ti­cle to this se­ries will dis­cuss spray­ing in­doors as a means of cop­ing with stress.

Copy­right © Kris­tel-Marie Ram­nath 2019


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