Eh, when I’m craving a candy bar, it’s not essential that I get that specific candy bar right this specific moment. But it is essential that I get enough Calories, and a candy bar is an easy way to get a lot of Calories very quickly. In modern times, we have an abundance of other ways to get those Calories we need, but evolution hasn’t caught up to that fact yet.
Deer and Elk love apples and will pick the ground clean, and stand up on hind legs to pull the branches down to eat those on the tree.
My first horse would eat SMZs from my hand. SMZ is extremely bitter and in most cases, it has to be disguised in feed, or dissolved in water and syringed into horse’s mouth.
Can’t help you with that one, my diabeetus cat is a brown tabby. None of my orange cats have had the sweet tooth, just this weird bugger. I will tell you, though, that dry cat food free fed is a superhighway to the insulin regimen because dry food is loaded with carbs and cats can’t handle those. A cat’s normal diet runs about 3-5% carbs (probably from whatever’s in the stomach of the critters they eat) but dry cat food can run up to 30% carbs. Add the palatibility ingredients they spray on the stuff to make the cats love it and put it out in quantities and you’re just waiting for the diabeetus to hit. I now feed the cats wet food only, no gravy style just pate, and they eat at regular mealtimes. It’s kept their weight right where it belongs and improved their activity level too. Wilford Brimley cat’s symptoms are very well controlled on 2 units insulin twice a day along with diet control. Good thing too because I was going broke buying cat litter to handle the massive amount of peeing he was doing before he got diagnosed.
Plain old grass – what a huge variety of plants that you are throwing together into that vast oversimplification!
Alfalfa, clover, bluegrass, fescue, ryegrass, bentgrass (putting greens), etc. They taste different*, and the taste varies over the course of the growing season. Then individual cows will have taste preferences, too. As will steers & bulls. And you haven’t even considered if you’re talking dairy cattle or beef cattle.
*Weeds taste different, too. Often the most successful ones have evolved to taste unappetizing to grazing animals.
That’s because gusto is naturally sweet.
Alfalfa and clover are legumes, not grasses. But otherwise, I agree. No such thing as plain old grass.
I remember reading in Mary Roach’s book GulpThat cats will devour anything flavored with pyrophosphate.
SWEET: I set sweet cough drops on conifer stumps here and watched squirrels run off with them. A prior cat used to lick-up spilled sweet sodas but not lemonade. Dogs like sweet chocolate but it can sicken or kill them.
SALTY: I dry-camped in desert mountains, stretched in a light bag, with my well-used hiking sneakers and leftover army cap alongside, and awakened to find the sweat-soaked hatband eaten by chipmunks presumably - but the sneakers were apparently too stinky for them.
SOUR: One reportedly catches more flies with sugar than with vinegar. I need no flies so I don’t bother. I haven’t tried catching squirrels with vinegar, either. Maybe Alka-Seltzer?
Wrong. They just haven’t tested the right cats.
My late kitty Ambrose chewed through plastic to get to both Angel food cake and chocolate chip cookies. There’s zero fat in an angel food cake, so what was he going after? The enriched flour? If it was a baked sweet, he was interested. He turned his nose up at steak juice. Go figure.
Our cat Benny stays faithful to his carnivorous heritage, but Tibby-cat is a shameless omnivore, threatening to go full-bore vegan.
The cat loves to stalk stalks of asparagus. If asparagus is on our plate while we eat in the living room with our attention diverted to the TV, Tibby slowly and stealthily approaches our plate, snatches a stalk of asparagus in his jaws then runs off to eat it with gusto under the bed.
Tibby’s favorite veg is corn on the cob. He goes nuts over corn. If I leave cobs unprotected in the kitchen, I will surely come home to a maize massacre—cobs stripped clean, bits and pieces of corn kernels strewn all about, like blood spray patterns at the scene of a violent homicide.
I wouldn’t mind so much if Tibby would just kill one or two cobs, but he wipes out whole bunches at a time (he’s a mass maize murderer). The last time I left a dozen cobs of corn in a bag on the kitchen table, I came home to find the bag ripped open and 12 partially denuded cobs on the floor, kernel entrails everywhere. It was a nauseating corn-bath.
My sister had a cat who loved onions. He was very sad when she was all “onions are bad for cats” and refused to let him have any. He figured out to unlatch pizza boxes and I found him once eating all the onions off my pizza after opening the box. Luckily He wasn’t hurt by them. He ignored the cheese and pepperoni. He was also a corn fiend. And cucumbers. And iceberg lettuce.
His brother had the fruit loving gene and ate every fruit we ever gave hi m except bananas. Oranges were a big favorite.
Angel food cake is mostly egg. That’s probably what was attracting the cat, not the flour or sugar.
On the Appalachian Trail in Grayson Highlands VA, I had a miniature wild horse come up and lick my legs for the salt as I ate lunch.
Rabbits do love sweet foods, such as bananas, though it’s not the best thing for them, and could kill them if they eat enough.
It tastes alot like poison ivy, but not as strong.
And it might taste like cashews.
Or mangoes.
Thought of that, but the urushiol is in the shells, and even “raw” cashews you buy have been steamed as well as shelled, supposedly to break down any urushiol left on the nuts themselves.
If heat DOES break down urushiol, MAYBE you could safely eat poison ivy / poison oak as cooked greens, but I certainly wouldn’t bet on it. Interestingly, when the stuff was brought back to Europe from the New World, with the rash producing properties duly noted, herbalists thought that anything that powerful must have some medical efficacy. There was some guy that did boil it and make a weak infusion for internal consumption. I don’t know what he thought it treated, but it apparently didn’t kill people.
Since it’s an allergic reaction, some people don’t get it. I once heard a story relayed of a park ranger we knew to who claimed not to be affected by poison oak, and demonstrated the fact by chomping on some. If so, he was being foolhardy. If you aren’t allergic, you can become sensitized. I fall into that category myself - until I was about 40, I gleefully ignored the stuff and waded around in it. I eventually did get a couple good cases of it, and had to start paying attention like everybody else.
(BTW, cashews - poison ivy / poison oak are in the cashew family and several other plants possess the allergans in some part of the plant - included are cashews, pistachios, mangos and the Japanese lacquer tree.)
Yeah, I wasn’t saying that cashews derive their flavor from urushiol; I was saying that the urushiol in both is evidence that cashews and poison ivy are related, and that the same flavor compounds (whatever they are) might be present in both.
I didn’t realize, though, that pistachios were also related. Maybe it’s not coincidence that they’re my two favorite nuts.
Don’t know what it’s all about, but I have seen cats nibble on barley and other green things.