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Your Cat Isn’t Being Weird, There’s a Scientific Reason They Never Finish Their Food

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My cat Oliver starts his day with a full bowl of food that I lay before him because I love him, and this is one of the many ways I show him I care. He reciprocates by taking a few measly bites and then walking away, licking his lips like a gluttonous Roman Emperor after having feasted on a whole hog. He didn’t make a noticeable dent in the pile of food I gave him, yet by this time tomorrow, that bowl will be empty.

Why? Why do cats do this?

According to new research published in Physiology & Behavior, the answer may lie in a cat’s biology.

Scientists studying feline eating habits found that cats don’t stop eating because they’re 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 serving. But introduce a new food, or even just a new smell, and their appetite came back almost immediately.

It’s Called Olfactory Habituation, and It Drives Cat Owners Insane

It’s all part of a mechanism called olfactory habituation. Cats very quickly become desensitized to familiar odors, thus reducing 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 feel in the moment.

In experiments, cats would get excited about foods they had previously not liked, simply because it was a change of pace from what they had been used to.

This helps explain Oliver’s bizarre eating habits, that start-and-stop style that many cat owners and I immediately recognize. Unlike dogs, who will more often than not eat so enthusiastically, so ferociously, that they’ll clean their bowl and make you worry that they might start eating the bowl itself like it’s an ice cream cone, cats, which did not descend from pack hunters that gorge on food when it’s available, are used to being solitary hunters that catch and eat a small prey throughout the day, careful not to consume anything in one sitting because that means they’re going to have to hunt for some more, which can be a hit or miss venture. It looks like pickiness, but it’s a built-in pacing system.

The researchers say that cats aren’t alone in exhibiting this behavior. We do it too. We can easily get bored with eating the same thing again and again, and prefer the occasional dip into novelty to change things up. The big difference is that cats are doing it mostly by scent, whereas we do it by taste.

Oliver isn’t being a fussy 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 for it.

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