Milk. Ice cream. Sour cream. Cheese. Every cat I’ve owned has been interested in as much of any of these dairy products as they could eat.
Thankfully, most of my cats have been lactose tolerant, or my fits of kindness would end in big stink.
However, given that so many cats are lactose intolerant, why do they as a species love dairy products so much? Is it just the fat content – in which case, why so gonzo for my skim milk? Or is there something more to dairy that brings out the raspy feline tongues?
Cats are funny beasts. They’re just as whorish for fish, despite the fact that their ancestors were desert-farers and thus were nowhere near the fish population. And anyway, most cats are pretty hydrophobic so they wouldn’t be able to catch them anyway.
There is a theory however, that cats like being stroked because it reminds them of their kittenhood when mother would lick them clean. My WAG would be that milk may be related to the same principle – suckling at mother’s teat.
Re. vestigial attraction to milk – perhaps, although in our own species, most of whom are breast-fed in infancy, many adults who love cheese and ice cream find the very prospect of drinking milk disgusting.
That hardly explains a cat’s mania for cheese, though, let alone “American” cheese slices and similarly dubious “cheese food” products high in vegetable oils.
It makes for an amusing spectacle, though, when you open the fridge door (and the cats perk up), followed up by lifting the dairy case door (and the cats go batshit).
There are fish in waterholes and rivers in the desert, and these occasionally have a habit of drying up to very small, hugely overpopulated pools, before drying up completely leaving the fish high, dry and stinking in the sunshine - a rich food source to whoever gets there first… I have no idea if this scenario has featured significantly enough in the ancestry of the domestic cat to have affected their tastes permanently, but it’s a nice idea and not immediately implausible.
One of my girls goes insane when I pour a glass of milk; of course I must let her have the first chance at the glass while it is still full and she can lap up a few teaspoons full off the top.
My other girl is crazy about yogurt. She simply must have it if I am eating it.
The first point to note is that the ancestors of cats were not by and large desert dwellers but rather semi-arid savanna creatures.
And Magetout points out in those environments fish were regularly available in vast quantities, often at times when other prey would have been limited.
Moreover fish were avialble year round in permanent water. Cats can’t live without standing water, and as such must have had acccess to fish environments every day. Rememeber the world’s longest river, the Nile, as well as the Euphrates, Tigris etc. all run right through the heart of the home range of our domestic cats. No shortage of fish.
Many domsteic cats are hydrophobic. Wild cats can’t afford to be so finnicky and will fish whenever they need to. Ever seen a cat swiping at fish in a fish tank? That instinct did’t just evolve last week.
OTOH it’s hard to imagine wild cats as the ancestor of the chupacabra.
When I’m over at my parents’ house, I’ll sometimes share a bowl of ice cream with their old ginger tabby. Me and that cat go way back. He doesn’t even beg because he knows I won’t mind. I get most of the ice cream, of course, but he gets some licks in, and I’ll let him lick the bowl after I’m done.
Okay, so why does my cat go for ear wax? If I stick my finger in my ear and give it a wiggle, my finger becomes a cat-lollipop. This is the first cat I’ve ever seen do this.
In the interest of not grossing people out, I’m just talking about invisible wax residue, nothing you’d step around if you saw it lying on the sidewalk.
I had a Chartreux who was a moderate whore for dairy, but a psycho nut for melted cheese. He’d go crazy and bounce off the walls until you gave him some off your nachos.
Not dairy, but cucumbers also made him wig out. He never tipped over the garbage unless there were cuke peelings in it.
And then there was WATERMELON!:eek:
He’d go completely out of his mind. Pawing at you, meowing super loud (an otherwise silent cat) running around, jumping off the furniture. When he finally got some he’d eat a huge chunk and pull the seeds off his tongue with his paw. I shit you not.
No, if you were a *real[/]i cat person, you’d be coughing up a furball.
Seriously, I just don’t get how anyone can stomach (for example)a glass of milk that has been slurped by an animal that uses its tongue to clean its arse.
In my experience Marmite (yeast extract) also acts like kitty crack. I used to have to give our cat a dab on her nose before spreading any on my toast. Otherwise she’d be trying to lick the knife, the toast, the jar lid or stick her head in the jar.
Licking her nose clean would occupy her for the necessary minute or so to let me get things done and get on the other side of a closed door to enjoy my toast.
