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Scientists Discovered How Cats Use Urine to Identify Each Other

Researchers found unique fatty-acid signatures in cat urine that stay stable over time and help other cats identify exactly who was there.

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If you share a home with a cat, you already know two things: they do whatever they want, and they’re annoyingly good at it. What you probably didn’t know is that every time your cat pees outside the litter box or marks a corner of the yard, they’re leaving behind a chemically encoded message that other cats can read like a name tag. Scientists just figured out how.

A study published August 19 in Current Biology identified the compounds behind this system—a group of chemicals called branched-chain fatty acids, or BFAs, that give each cat a unique scent fingerprint in their urine. The signatures hold up even after the cat is long gone, and for an animal running its entire social life through scent, that’s the........

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