It amazes me that the cats like to sit in the middle of all the dog toys, and then, one of them goes into the toy basket and finds a tiny catnip toy all the way on the bottom of the basket and brings it out to play with. How does Nine do that?

Did you know that cats might have better smell ability than dogs? There are 3 different scent receptor proteins in mammal noses. One of them is called V1R. This is believed to control a mammal’s ability to separate one scent from another. Dogs have 9 variants of V1R protein. Humans have 2. Cats have 30. These shows that scent probably plays a much more important role in a cat’s everyday life than we realize.

Clearly, the way to get a cat to do something you want would be by enticing them with highly scented food, like tuna. The trouble with cats is unlike dogs, they don’t give a darn about pleasing you, so training them, regardless of this revelation that they can smell really well, may be hard to leverage. Can you see Search & Rescue using Scent Cats instead of Dogs? I think it is a great idea.

I cannot imagine a life without cats!

Just another CATDogDaz morning at the zoo ❤