This is one of those long ago pictures of Drifter, my older son.

In this pic, you can see that he's the very lanky, teenager. In this case, it looks like he either laughing heartily or smiling one of those ear-to-ear smiles. In truth, it's neither; sorry to burst the Fun Bubble.

Cats exhibit what's called a Flehmen Response, much the same as horses and cattle and even candids, though it's not nearly as obvious as it is with some species.

For those of you familiar with snakes, you know that snakes (and a few other reptiles) stick out their tongue, wave it around a bit, and then take it back in and plug it into an organ in the roof of their mouths called a Jacobsen Organ. The "scent molecules" (for sake of better decription) are then analyzed by this organ, giving the snakes a sense of smell.

Cats (and a few other mammals) also have this same organ in the top of their mouths, and they use this in combination with their nasal sense of smell to essentially "hyper-analyze" scents. Obviously, there's a lot in a scent, and an animal having the ability to know what it all means is to their advantage. Here's how it works:

For a cat, there's two pores (or pits, depending on your school-of-thought) right behind the upper incisors (the teeth in the very front of the muzzle). The cat essentially flexes their face into somewhat of a grimace which opens up these pores, and then they can draw some scent into them. They can either draw it directly into the Jacobsen Organ, or they can get whatever scent it is - such as a scent-mark from another cat - onto their tongue, and then roll the tongue over the pores and take in the scent.

Obviously, until we learn how to speak Feline, we'll never know exactly what they can tell from all these scents. The theory is that scents are like a detailed sign, and the Flehmen Response is how the animals read that sign. So, we think they can tell an awful lot from these left-behind scents, such as the relative heath of the animal, its gender, its age, and if it's female, is it in season. There's probably even more to it all than just those things, but there's just no way to know.

So, this rather amusing pic of Drifter is actually Drifter doing a Flehmen, rather than smiling, even though I tend to smile when I see cats do this. There's actually a lot of truth to it being commonly called "The Stinky Face". In this case, Drifter is probably scenting a mark that he put there himself, but because it's one of those neat-o signs, he's gotta check it out, just to be sure. After all, one just can't take the chance of another kitty entering into one's turf! Can't have that!

I've got a few really good ones of Genesis doing a Stinky Face, and Bengals tend to be really dramatic about it. I think you'll find it amusing, so I'll do a follow-on post of one of those a bit later.

So here's Drifter with a smile...er...Flehmen. Don't forget to smile back!

This picture was taken somewhere around 16-May-02. It was taken with an old Kodak, consumer-grade digital camera (aka junk). I can't rattle of the specs, as this camera didn't record any of that info.

Disclaimer: I hate to have to put this on here, but the pic is copyright me. Please do not distribute, copy, alter, etc, without my permission. Having said all that, feel free to download and use it for your own inspiration.