The Kitty Letter Chronicles: Cleanliness is next to cattiness

I’m afraid there’s no gentle way of saying this, so I’m just going to come right out with it: Humans stink!

Please don’t be offended. I say it with love, and out of concern for your poor disadvantaged species.

As you know, I’m a true anthropo-phile and a keen student of human behavior. So I understand, I really do. It’s not your fault. I realise that you’re probably blissfully unaware of how much you honk, seeing as how your sense of smell is approximately 1/14^th of mine.

You only use have one organ with which to smell, so heaven help you when it’s suffering from an attack of the sniffles. Unlike my kind. The superior design of the feline olfactory system means that we don’t just rely on our noses to get a whiff of the world around us, but we also have an extra special smelling organ in our mouths.
(Now you know, DanglyMan. When I sit there looking at you with my mouth open, I’m not smiling – I’m trying to get a handle on way you smell.)

Every one of you has a different scent, and if that wasn’t enough, it changes - ALL THE TIME.

First thing in the morning is pretty dire – sweaty sheets, nighttime farts trapped under the duvet, morning breath and the all-over aroma of ‘don’t wanna get up’. That’s why we come and pat your face in a gently barbed wake-up call – to make you get up and escape the miasma that clings to you of an a.m.

That, and the fact we NEED to visit the sand box on the balcony and get fed.

My front row seat for the human rain dance show.

That morning honk usually follows you around until you visit the mysterious (and endlessly fascinating) Chamber of The Waters, where you sit on the porcelain throne a while, scrub and swill out your mouths, and then stand under a shower of rain for ten minutes. Perversely, in the process you insist in applying a bewildering array of unctions, lotions, potions and creams that simply add more layers of smell to what’s already there. I know, I’ve observed my humans from the side of the bath on many occasions.

Personally, I can see what all this achieves that couldn’t be done without a nice relaxing morning spent preening yourself with your tongue. But then I suppose you lot are far too busy constantly wagging your tongues with your endless chatter to use them for a more useful purpose.

Poor things, you don’t have the benefit of a pelt to cover your pasty, puffy parts like us, so you have a huge selection of rags that you wrap yourselves up in. 

Behind the scenes at cat TV

But what it took me a while to understand is that not only do you lot change them – ALL the flippin’ time – but you try to rinse of your stench of them (perhaps you DO know that you stink, after all?) by bunging them in what I had previously thought was cat TV. 

You know, that round-windowed, big white box that shows a soothing circular motion of suds every time it is switched on. It’s only recently, through my careful study of Big Red, that I made the connection between her emptying the bin of especially-stinky rags and the box being put to work that I realised what you use it for.

And as for the things you put in your mouths yourself with, and their inevitable impact on the household aroma?

Who NEEDS onions in their life?

Well, let’s just say:

a) are you mad?

and  

b) let’s just not talk about it.
(I mean, who NEEDS onions, or burning shredded leaves, in their life, really?)

So, my dear smelly bipeds, have pity on your poor house cat. By no choice of his own, he's an aristocat imprisoned in a bemusing kaleidoscope of scents that send his nose twitching and can even make him from his essential slumber.

Little wonder that we need to catch up on cat naps throughout the day.

Speaking of which….   (stretch, yawn, snap)….  I think it’s time to a little lie-down and some serious preening.
Watch carefully, humans, you might just learn something.