Your cat is not weird, there is a scientific reason why they never finish their food
My cat Oliver starts his day with a full bowl of food that I put in front of him because I love him and this is one of the many ways I show him that I care. He retaliates by taking a few measly bites and then walks away licking his lips like a gluttonous Roman emperor after feasting on a whole pig. He didn’t make a noticeable dent in the pile of food I gave him, but by this time tomorrow, the bowl will be empty.
Why? Why do cats do this?
According to new research published in Physiology and behaviorthe answer may lie in a cat’s biology.
Researchers studying the eating habits of cats found that cats do not stop eating because they are full. Their appetite is mostly influenced by smell. When presented with the same food repeatedly, even after a 16-hour fast, cats gradually lost interest and ate less with each portion. But introduce a new food, or even just a new smell, and their appetite returned almost immediately.
It’s called Olfactory Habituation, and it drives cat owners crazy
It’s all part of a mechanism called olfactory habituation. Cats very quickly become desensitized to familiar smells, which reduces their motivation to keep eating. But when you change the scent, you trigger dishabituation, which is a renewed interest in the food that has very little to do with how hungry they currently feel.
In experiments, cats would become excited about food they had previously disliked simply because it was a change of pace from what they had been used to.
This helps explain Oliver’s bizarre eating habits, the start-and-stop style that many cat owners and I instantly recognize. Unlike dogs, who more often than not will eat so enthusiastically, so violently, that they will clean their bowl and make you worry that they might start eating the bowl itself as if it were an ice cream cone, cats that are not descended from pack hunters, gobbling up food when it’s available, are used to being solitary, caring hunters who don’t eat anything during the day and don’t eat anything beforehand. because that means they’ll have to hunt for some more, which can be hit or miss. It looks like finicky, but it’s a built-in pacing system.
The researchers say that cats are not alone in exhibiting this behavior. We do it too. We can easily get bored eating the same thing over and over again, preferring an occasional dip in novelty to change things up. The big difference is that cats do it mostly by smell, whereas we do it by taste.
Oliver is not a picky pain in the butt. He’s just a lot more like me than I previously thought. He doesn’t want to eat the same thing every day and I can’t blame him.
