I read somwhere that a cat can’t taste sugar, or has the ability to taste things sweet.
How do they know?
IANA vet but one way you could do it is to setup a test where you provide a solution to a cat and train them to “select” a particular choice. You reward them with food when they make the correct pick, and not when they pick incorrectly.
For example, you have two bowls of water, one which is plain (with no flavoring) and one with lemon juice in it. I would think it would be fairly easy to train the cat to pick the bowl with the plain water in it and ignore the one with the lemon juice.
Now if you put two bowls down that both had plain water in them… the cat would randomly choose one or the other since there is no difference between them… and would be very confused.
If you put sugar in one bowl and not in the other… and the cat consistently picked the plain water (as they had been trained to do) then you could surmise that they can detect (taste) sweetness. If the cat randomly picked both bowls (and therefore didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference) you might deduce that cats can’t taste sugar…
Pure speculation on my part of course.
/hijack/
Dolphinboy, you obviously don’t have cats! For one thing, most cats don’t like citrus, so I think they’d stay away from lemon water. This is speaking from my experience only, having owned cats all of my life. I currently own 5 cats (yes, 5, that’s what happens when you work for a vet- you get all the castoffs), and one of the water dishes that I have for them is one of those 2-bowls-that-are-attached dealies. For some reason, for a while, everyone was only drinking out of one side of the dish and ignoring the other.
I know that some cats prefer to drink out of a variety of types of dishes (ie metal, ceramic, plastic). And it mostly goes by their whim at the time, which is of course subject to change at any time. One of my cats, when she was a kitten, was fond of putting her toys in the water dish (maybe she thought they were thirsty too?).
/end hijack/ (I hope I did that right) I know that cats are attracted to food by sense of smell. That’s why they like canned food so much cos it’s so stinky! My cats tend to be all over me when I eat meat, unless it’s spicy, then when they sniff it they wrinkle their noses. They don’t like fruit, esp citrus. I don’t know if cats can taste sugar- one of my cats tasted raspberry yogurt but she had just been weaned so the smell probably reminded her of kitten formula (and boy did it give her gas!).
Anyway, I think it also just depends on the cat. A cat we had when I was a kid would eat pretty much anything you gave her, whether it was sweet or whatever. The cats I have now all love meat, but one of them has no interest in fish. I read somewhere that pet food companies put fish oil/extract in all their canned food so that the smell will attract cats to eat it.I don’t know, hope this answers your question. Maybe some vet-type person will come on and have info from a study or something.