Cat-watching

Cats are always uneasy in windy weather. Both my own and next door's felines look nervous and unsettled by the gusts today. It's easy to imagine why - all mammals, especially highly territorial ones like cats, depend so much on their sense of smell to keep them alive. Not only does their sense of smell help find prey and alert them to danger from potential predators, it also establishes their place in the world, delineating its borders and telling them when that world has been breached by competitors. To have the natural scents carrying all that information dispersed by gusts of wind must leave them as disorientated as we would feel if we were rendered temporarily blind in our own homes!