Cats Eat with their Noses

Have you ever watched a cat eat?  I mean really? 

Sometimes it’s difficult to get your head right down to where they are and get close in, but Bella eats on a table, and I often sit with her, right at nose level, and watch.

Her nose goes right into the food.  Which is then why they have such long tongues to wash their noses with once they’ve finished!

But the reason that they eat with their noses is that they have only a minimal sense of taste, compared to us.  However, their noses are off the scale when looked at in human terms.  They get so much information from their noses. 

Ever watch while a cat examines a new thing?  They’ll come right up to it and look at it, but then will smell it.  That tells them so much more.  Their world around them comes in the form of wonderful and amazing smells packed with so much information.  Without their noses, they’d be almost blind, unable to make much sense of the world.

So when they eat, not much point in overdoing the taste, but pet food manufacturers go mad on the stuff that smells.  When you or I smell cat food it’s fairly yucky.  Well, it is to me anyway!  But all sorts of stuff (that we probably don’t want to know about) is added to their food to make it appealing to them.  (Although what I don’t get is the fact that human food, say roast chicken, is equally appealing, and doesn’t smell so bad to us, so why the awful smells for processed pet food?)

So their noses go in, and they drink in the smells all the while they’re eating.  Until they get bored that is, which is often quite quickly!!  A topic for another post I think.  As is the scourge of processed pet food – I shall need a high soap box for that one!