Do Female Cats In Heat Get Attracted To Male Humans?

Cats are great pets. They are independent, clean and very friendly. Unfortunately, some female cats are friendlier than others, particularly when they are in heat. If your female cat is not spayed, she will go into heat. This is when she is fertile, and it usually begins around five to ten months old. Heat is a rather strange phenomenon, and it is part of the breeding process.

How Will I Know If My Cat Is In Heat?

When your cat reaches the age where she will start to go in heat, there will be a number of signs to let your know.

• Making strange sounds trying to attract a mate.

• Becoming more restless than usual.

• Grooming her private parts more often.

• Trying to escape outside to seek out a mate.

• Urinating in the house to leave her scent in hopes of attracting a mate.

• Loss of appetite.

• Crawling low to the ground.

• “Assuming the position,” which is where she puts her behind in the air with her tail to the side.

• Being more affectionate with animals, inanimate objects, and other people, particularly men.

Why Are Female Cats In Heat Attracted To Male Humans?

When a female cat is in heat, she will be more affectionate to everyone. (But some cats will be more affectionate to men mostly because they can probably smell the male pheromones). Cats have a typical sense of smell like humans, and they also have an additional sense of smell that is able to detect chemical messengers through the air, including pheromones.

Pheromones are present in body secretions (like urine, semen, breast milk, vaginal secretions, and saliva). Although the actual definition of pheromones has been redefined several times over the years, they are generally recognized as chemical compounds that transmit signals between organisms of the same species.

There are no clear-cut studies on whether our feline friends are truly capable of sensing when it comes to chemical scents that are undetectable to other humans like adrenaline and pheromones. However, what we are sure about is the fact that cats can smell chemicals and hormones that our bodies release.

The powerful nose of a feline and its 200 million olfactory scent receptors is capable of picking up any form of human scent in a heartbeat. For instance, some cats do have the ability to interpret human body language and smell pheromones—which can help them establish if the human in question is fearful, sad, happy, etc. A past story in the New England Journal of Medicine also highlighted how a cat named Oscar was able to accurately “predict” whether or not nursing patients were going to die by going to sit on their beds just hours before they passed away. Quite puzzling, but it is actually the chemicals that body the human body releases when it is dying that probably allowed Oscar to sense and smell the impending deaths.

So, when a female cat is attracted to a male human, it can be deduced that she is smelling and sensing bodily scents or chemicals that we typically can’t sense. When a man sweats, he releases high levels of pheromones, which a female cat in heat may sense. The same is true when a female cat is around a teenage boy who has just reached puberty. When she senses these pheromones, she may be naturally more attracted to a male human. This may make her flirtier with men, and she may give a male more attention than her favorite female human when she is in heat.

How Long Are Cats In Heat?

The heat cycle in a female cat lasts three weeks; however, the behavior that female cats exhibit when they are in heat lasts for one to seven days. This is the time that she may flirt with the men in the home after smelling their pheromones. If your cat doesn’t mate during this time, she will go into heat about three weeks later. When the cycle starts again, your cat may start flirting with men and exhibiting annoying behavior toward the end of her heat cycle.

What Can I Do About This Behavior?

Cats naturally go into heat, and you really cannot control how a female cat will behave when she goes into heat. The only way to stop this behavior is to have your cat spayed. Spaying is the sterilization process for female animals. During the procedure, the cat’s uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes would be removed.

After being spayed, the risk for uterine cancer and ovarian cancer is eliminated. The procedure also reduces the risk of breast cancer and uterine conditions.

More importantly, when your cat is spayed, she will no longer go into heat. This will prevent the annoying behavior that cats display when they are in heat like flirting with male humans. Your cat will still be able to sense the male pheromones in the house, but because she has been spayed, the pheromones won’t affect her the way they did before she had the procedure. After being spayed, pheromones won’t affect your female cat at all.

Female Cat in Heat Attracted To Male Human: Final Thoughts

If you notice that your female cat is paying extra attention to the men in the house and male visitors, don’t worry about it too much. It isn’t just your cat; it is all female cats. Even though she can sense human male hormones all the time, they don’t affect her in a strange way until she goes into heat.

If your female cat drives you crazy when she flirts with men in the home at least once a month, you should have her spayed. Spaying your cat will end the flirting and the other annoying behavior, making it easier to love your cat all year long.