15 facts on cat bunting

Here are 15 facts about cat bunting. It isn’t only cats who employ this form of behaviour.

1. Bunting is sometimes described as head-butting.
2. Bunting is a form of scent communication (communicating through smell which is very important to the cat) and can sometimes take place after the cat has used their Flehmen response (a deep sniff 😎) to smell the scent of another cat.
3. Bunting is a form of scent depositing. The cat rubs their head against an object or another animal or a human, usually their caregiver.
4. The secretions of the cheek, submandibular, perioral, and temporal glands (see picture below) are deposited as scent marks when a cat rubs her face and head on objects.
5. You will see the wild cat species doing the same thing when they mark the boundaries of their territory. There is an excellent photograph of a snow leopard rubbing her cheeks against a large rock while she is patrolling her territory on a trail or path.
6. Domestic cats employed bunting to scent-exchange with their human caregiver. They will rub their head against their owner. And in doing so they receive the scent from their owner. This merges scents. It helps to bond the relationship and makes the cat feel more comfortable.
7. Sometimes, perhaps quite rarely, you will see domestic, stray and feral cats bunting another cat and also rubbing their flanks against the cat with whom they are friendly. There is no difference in terms of scent exchange between this and doing the same thing with their human companion except that because humans are much taller than cats the scent exchange takes place on the human’s legs normally. Sometimes cats push up on their hind legs to do some head bunting of their owner’s hand.
8. It is said that sometimes a cat will bunt objects as a form of territorial displayed towards a rival cat.
9. Bunting is a form of allorubbing which describes cats rubbing against each other for mutual benefit.
10. Sometimes when cats employ bunting on objects, they do so to make the place where they live more familiar to them which helps to ease their anxieties.
11. It is said that the practice of bunting comes from kitten behaviour when they are very young and seek stimulation from their mother by rubbing against her and kneading her.
12. Cheek rubbing is described as a specific form of bunting. The cat sniffs the target and then rubs against it along a line from the corner of the mouth to the ear to deposit scent from her cheek glands.
13. Depositing sent on to objects by rubbing their head against it is also described as rub marking and cats will top up the strength of the scent so deposited when they revisit the place again. The same happens with urine marking.
14. Male cats tend to rub mark more frequently than females or young cats.
15. When cats sniff each other they tend to sniff around the head region which supports the view that the glands of the head provide information which help to identify the cat.

Here is a head butt or bunting by an F1 Savannah cat, Titan. The woman is Kathryn Stucki who used to own A1 Savannahs with her husband Martin. She is a good woman who is now out of the cat breeding business.

Below are some more pages on scent marking.