Do cats sweat?

Have you ever seen a cat whose fur was covered in sweat? In cats, as in dogs, heat turns into sweat only with difficulty, because the number of sweat glands has been cut to a minimum. Dogs seem to take no notice of this at all and tear about just as furiously in hot weather as in cold, only to collapse exhausted afterwards, panting heavily with their mouths wide open and their tongues hanging out in a desperate attempt to cool down. It matches their way of hunting. Wild dogs run their prey down, whereas cats stalk it.

One of the chief purposes of sweating is to cool the animal down: as a thin film of moisture evaporates it takes up heat from the skin, and cooling is the result.

A cat, paying more attention to its own condition than a dog does, will not simply run about in the heat. When resting, moreover, it tries to take up a position that rules out overheating, and so keeps a steady, relatively low metabolic rate. Control of body temperature is greatly improved by the cat’s choice of where to settle. On a warm day it will move again and again from sun to shade and back to keep itself comfortable inside. On the whole, the more careful care a cat takes of itself is repaid with a longer life than a dog’s.

The loss of its sweat glands is what makes such attention to internal temperature essential to the cat. Anyone who has watched a cat in the extremity of distress after overheating from a long spell in a hot place, and been unable to put its body temperature right by changing the temperature around it, understands this. The short, rapid breathing and the stare of those wide-open eyes are not easily forgotten.

Cats do have a few sweat glands, in such places as the cheeks and lips, around the teats and between the pads of the paws. They are also mixed in with the sebaceous glands in the region of the anal glands.

The position a cat takes up at rest can serve as a good indicator of the difference between its own temperature and that of the air around it. If the cat has curled into a tight ball, it is quite cold; if it is stretched out lazily, it is hot. The same is plain when it sleeps by the fire, or lies at full stretch showing its belly to the sun. Between these two extremes puss may curl up a little, or settle into a “half-ball”.

Over most of the surface of its skin, at the same time, a cat is entirely insensitive to heat or cold. It can bear a temperature that would be painful to people — walking about on a scorching tin roof, for instance.

The nose and the upper lip, however, are very sensitive to the slightest change of temperature, and may be regarded as the cat’s external thermometer.