--- title: Very Large Cats With Very Excellent Taste Get Their Licks With the Finest Perfume description: Cats love perfume and it's a well-documented thing but look at these cats obsessed with perfumes. canonical: https://time.com/5774365/cats-perfume/ author: Ashley Hoffman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2020-01-30T13:58:05.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T08:01:15.605Z og:title: Very Large Cats With Very Excellent Taste Get Their Licks With the Finest Perfume og:description: Pawing and tugging and rolling all over og:url: https://time.com/5774365/cats-perfume/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt04d2ed98fd71c01d/698a097e929fad590ebf59c9/BigCatsPerfume.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3225 og:image:height: 1814 og:image:alt: Tiger Standing At Zoo og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Very Large Cats With Very Excellent Taste Get Their Licks With the Finest Perfume twitter:description: Pawing and tugging and rolling all over twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt04d2ed98fd71c01d/698a097e929fad590ebf59c9/BigCatsPerfume.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Very Large Cats With Very Excellent Taste Need More Spritzes of the Finest 'Purrrfume' > Sponsored content. 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The Brief is available free at time.com/newsletters, where readers can select it along with any of TIME's other six newsletters. There is no subscription required to receive it. #### Is The Brief free? Yes. The Brief is a free daily email newsletter from TIME. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes The Brief? The Brief is led by editor Richard Hall and draws on reporting from TIME's newsroom. Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. by [Ashley Hoffman](https://time.com/author/ashley-hoffman/) ## Ashley Hoffman Jan 30, 2020 1:58 PM UTC  Getty Images/EyeEm by [Ashley Hoffman](https://time.com/author/ashley-hoffman/) ## Ashley Hoffman Jan 30, 2020 1:58 PM UTC If you have luxury fragrances lying around, there are some [animals](https://time.com/5768695/cat-hits-dog/) with expensive taste who would love a spritz of them. Banham Zoo in Norfolk, England recently announced that it was soliciting fragrance donations because the ocelots, the jaguars, and [cheetahs](https://time.com/5762380/woman-yelling-at-cat-meme/) simply can’t get enough of the intoxicating scents of perfume and [supply is short](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-51301815). The draw of a good perfume for both domestic cats but also [wild cats](https://time.com/5768746/cat-reacts-to-can-of-tuna/) is well-documented in various research projects. It can be positively enchanting for the big cats. Chalk it up to the civetone, a natural perfume ingredient that comes from the animal civet (a small nocturnal animal) that labs can manufacture now, according to the [Bronx Zoo’s testing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znbIkKXM2p8). These big cats at this zoo have an infatuation with “purrrfume,” as this video of the [majestic animals](https://time.com/5748791/cat-filter-reaction/) shows them cozying up to trees and logs scented with perfume. But stocks are low and they need more. “The keepers at Banham have noticed their stocks of old perfumes are running low and are hoping that visitors to the zoo might also want to drop off any old or unwanted scents when they visit,” as the announcement puts it. While the cats have a favorite scent, they are apparently open to different fragrances. “Our big cats definitely react positively when scents are used as part of their enrichment program. For some reason Calvin Klein perfume is a huge hit with all big cats but in all honesty, any perfumes work well and we do like to offer them a variety of different smells,” animal manager Mike Woolham said in the announcement. 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