Cats can communicate through urine - study reveals

• Published date: 12 April 2024
• Author: JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Female dogs urinate on the ground, while males raise a leg but don't spray it. Although spraying plays an essential role in the feline world, it often poses challenges for its owners because of its strong and pungent odor

Cat urine has a much stronger odor than that of dogs, whose powerful noses collect information from the aromas of other canines that had been outdoors like newspaper readers read the news.

Notably, sprayed cat urine has a more pungent odor on the human nose than normal urine in their litter boxes. While it is believed that sprayed urine contains additional chemicals possibly derived from anal sac secretions, scientific evidence supporting this remains unclear.

Researchers examine the reason for sprayed urine odor

Japanese researchers examined why the sprayed urine had a distinctive smell compared to their normal urine.They have just published their findings in the Journal of Chemical Ecology, titled "Sprayed urine emits a pungent odor due to its increased adhesion to vertical objects via urinary proteins rather than to changes in its volatile chemical profile in domestic cats."

The researchers initially compared the chemical profiles of volatile organic compounds emitted from sprayed urine, normal urine, and bladder urine collected using ureteral catheters.

Chemical analyses revealed a high degree of similarity in these profiles within the same individuals. Behavioral analyses further demonstrated that cats perceived the sprayed urine and urine remaining in the bladder after spraying as similar odors, whereas the odors of another cat's urine were perceived as different.

According to Prof. Masao Miyazaki, a leader of the research project at Iwate University, some 500 kilometers north of Tokyo, the data indicate that the sprayed urine originates from bladder urine without supplementation with chemicals from other secretory glands.

Given the high degree of similarity of volatile chemical profiles between sprayed cat urine and naturally normal urine, researchers examined why sprayed urine emits a pungent odor from another perspective.

They observed that urine samples easily adhered to the inner surface of plastic syringes when they transferred the samples into glass vials for urinary volatile analyses.

"This observation prompted us to explore the underlying mechanisms, " said Reiko Uenoyama, the paper's first author. Two decades ago, Miyazaki discovered that healthy cats excrete a substantial amount of a urinary protein named cauxin...