Cats are animals that are surrounded by many curiosities, both their species itself and their behavior. For example, the fact that they “torture” the mice before eating them, their characteristic snorts or their ability to groom themselves by licking their fur.
If you have one or more kitties at home, it is likely that they often carry out actions that arouse your curiosity. Why does he lick me and then bite me? Why does he sharpen his nails on the sofa instead of the scratching post? Why is he obsessed with looking out the window? Where do you go when you go out? These are frequent questions among cat caregivers, a domestic animal with which many stereotypes are also associated, such as that they are not affectionate, which is not always true.
What concerns us here is another curious action that cats perform. Perhaps you have noticed that when they sniff something, they open their mouths slightly. And if you have never noticed it before, you will see it clearly from now on if you look closely. No, they don’t do it because they’re hungry or because they’re going to bite you. Let’s see why they do it and what this gesture means.
Although their sense of smell is not as powerful as that of dogs, cats also have a highly developed sense of smell and make use of it constantly and instinctively. Thanks to it, they perceive a lot of information from their environment and from other animals. Hence, for example, they can tell if a female is in heat thanks to the smell of her pheromones.
Cats have a sensory organ called the vomeronasal, also known as Jacobson’s organ, which is located between their mouth and nose. This helps them in instinctive actions such as hunting and reproduction, being vital in detecting the scents they sniff.
The reason why cats open their mouths when smelling something lies in the Flehmen response, whereby they raise their upper lip and inhale air to facilitate and propel the arrival of the scents they sniff at to the vomeronasal organ. Thus, they capture smells and through these they recognize the environment, food, others of their species, other animals, people or any other substance to which they have put their small but avid nose. In this way, the vomeronasal organ is responsible for the sensory information that the cat receives, in a combination of smell and taste.
