If you've observed two feline friends that are particularly fond of each other, you might have seen them grooming one another. They tenderly lick each other’s coats. But many cat owners wonder, what does it mean when my cat licks me?
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Cat licking has many different meanings.
To understand why your cat might lick you, let’s look at the social interactions among our feline friends. This helps us better grasp the role of the tongue in the social lives of cats.
Here are some reasons why cats lick each other:
Cats apply what they know from social interactions with others to humans. Here are some explanations for why your cat might enjoy licking you.
The most lovely and significant reason why your cat may lick you is that the cat wants to express its great affection for you. If you pet your cat and it then licks your hand while purring, consider yourself lucky. This means your cat likes you and enjoys your company.
Don’t be sad if your cat never licks your hand. Cats do this much less frequently than dogs. In a literal sense, licking loved ones is a matter of taste.
Affection closely ties with the next reason for the enthusiastic use of the tongue. Because your cat likes you, it wants to mark you: “This human belongs to me!” Cats have far more sensitive noses than we do. When your cat licks your skin, it leaves tiny scent particles, signalling to other animals that you belong to your cat’s territory. Licking thus expresses a claim of ownership.
A similar situation occurs if you petted another cat or dog before meeting your cat. The feline friend smells the potential competitor. By licking, it not only removes their scent molecules but also covers them with its own.
You are lying on a sun lounger at 30°C and your cat licks your hand? It might just appreciate the taste of your sweat. The slightly salty flavour is interesting for many animals.
It’s also possible that if you’ve eaten something tasty beforehand, the cat picks up those scents on your hand. No wonder it doesn’t want to miss out.
If your cat licks you out of affection, you might want to give something back. Pet your cat with your free hand. Many cats also enjoy coat care with a soft brush or a massage glove. If your feline friend is one of them, spoil it with extra grooming sessions. This will strengthen your bond with your cat.
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Parents of young children often wonder if cats can spread diseases by licking. Generally, it’s best to follow some hygiene rules. If your cat licks your hands, you should wash them afterwards. But with young children, hands often end up in their mouths beforehand.
Regardless of licking, if you have outdoor cats and small children in one household, you should regularly deworm the cat. Contact between cat saliva and small wounds can in very rare cases lead to an infection with the bacterium Bartonella henselae, resulting in “cat scratch disease”.
However, this disease is mainly transmitted through scratches, as the name suggests. The risk of cats spreading diseases through licking is small. For hygiene reasons, you should not let the cat lick the face of its favourite humans.
At the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen I was extensively trained as a veterinarian and was able to gain experience in various fields such as small animal, large animal and exotic animal medicine as well as pharmacology, pathology and food hygiene. Since then, I have been working not only as a veterinary author, but also on my scientifically driven dissertation. My goal is to better protect animals from pathogenic bacterial organisms in the future. Besides my veterinary knowledge, I also share my own experiences as a happy dog owner and can thus understand and enlighten fears and problems as well as other important questions about animal health.
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