Happy Pets

The feline senses are generally far more sensitive than those of humans, but there is one that compares relatively badly to ours: the cat’s sense of taste. Although some cats are said to be fussy eaters, this has less to do with their ability to distinguish subtle nuances of flavour and is more concerned with the freshness of the food offered to them: they distrust the smell of stale, or even rotting, food, having the instinctive knowledge that it could make them ill. Another reason for the refusal on the part of Felis catus - a creature of habit - to countenance any food to which it is not accustomed is the legacy of its usually unvarying carnivorous diet in the wild. Indeed, many owners find that a cat that turns its nose up at a certain type of proprietary canned cat food will not be able to resist a morsel of fresh flesh of any type, be it meat, fish or poultry.

Its innate preference for fresh meat aside, there are also certain biological explanations for the cat’s likes and dislikes when it comes to food. The human palate, which boasts eighteen times more taste buds than the feline’s, is not only far more sensitive to different tastes, but more tolerant of the four cardinal flavours: sour, bitter, salt and sweet. This is because humans are omnivores and have therefore become accustomed over the course of many millennia to eating plants and other food stuffs, as well as meat. The carnivorous cat, by contrast, will shrink from the acidity of a sour citrus fruit and will wrinkle its nose at the bitterness of a particular herb — and neither flavour occurs naturally in meat — in addition appearing indifferent to salt, presumably because meat contains all of this nutrient that its body needs, and hardly seeming to register sweetness because sugar does not form part of a feline’s nutritional requirements.

Indeed, the only flavours that are pertinent to a feline’s nutritional needs are those of meat and fat, which supply it with tissue-maintaining protein and storable energy, and these are the ones that are registered by the cat’s taste buds, which are mainly located on the edges of the tongue. The centre of the tongue contains the papillae (tiny, backward-pointing hooks) that trap the water that the cat drinks when it is moderately thirsty or when only a thin layer of water is available. When a feline has a powerful thirst, however, or the water source is deep, it will form its tongue into a shape resembling a spoon, thus enabling it to ladle larger quantities of water down its throat.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 1:18 am and is filed under Cats, Fish, Foods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.