Any cat owner knows that getting your feline friend to eat their dinner isn’t always so simple as putting some food in a bowl.
While dogs might scarf down their meals in minutes, cats often turn their nose up at familiar favourites or simply refuse to eat.
Now, scientists have worked out why cats often leave piles of expensive food to waste.
And it is not necessarily because they have eaten enough.
Scientists from Iwate University, Japan, discovered that the real reason cats give up on their food is that they are bored with the smell.
Lead author Professor Masao Miyazaki, an expert on cats’ powers of smell, told the Daily Mail: ‘Our findings suggest that cats do not stop eating simply because they are full.
‘Instead, they gradually lose interest when they are repeatedly exposed to the same food odour, a process known as olfactory habituation.’
However, in good news for anxious cat owners, Professor Miyazaki has also discovered the simple solution.
Getting fussy cats to eat their dinner can sometimes be a challenge. But scientists have now discovered the reason that felines leave so much food to waste
Scientists discovered that cats go off their dinner because they get bored of the smell. By changing the food to a new type, cats can be encouraged to eat more even after they appear to be full
Professor Miyazaki says he first became curious about cats’ unusual feeding habits when he noticed the differences between them and his five pet Border Collies.
‘When I feed them, they finish their meals in about one minute. Cats are very different,’ says Professor Miyazaki.
‘As many cat owners know, cats often eat a little, take a break, eat again, and then walk away while leaving food behind.’
This is especially curious given that cats and dogs both share a common carnivore ancestor, suggesting the difference might lie somewhere in their evolutionary past.
To learn more, Professor Miyazaki and his co–authors fed cats in cycles – giving a bowl of food for 10 minutes, followed by 10 minutes in which the food was removed.
The process was repeated six times, weighing the bowl after each feeding session to see how much they ate each time.
As you might expect, the amount of food the hungry cats consumed in each feeding window declined over successive cycles.
However, when scientists swapped out the sixth bowl for a different type of food, the felines suddenly started eating more – even if the food was less appealing.
Compared to cats being presented with the same food (top), cats lost their appetite much more slowly when being given different types (bottom)
Using two–level feeders, scientists found that adding the smell of another food was enough to encourage cats to eat more
Likewise, when the researchers alternated through different types of foods throughout the six feeding sessions, the cats still ate less over time but at a significantly slower rate than those that repeated the same dish.
This suggested that there was something more complex than a full belly preventing cats from cleaning their plates.
In a second experiment, Professor Miyazaki fed the cats with a specially designed bowl that could hold one type of food in the top and a second in a hidden chamber below.
This meant the cats could eat one type of food from the top while smelling the odour of a different type in the bottom.
He discovered that simply changing the odour that the cats could smell while eating was enough to convince them to eat more.
Professor Miyazaki believes that this is because introducing a new smell helps fight the ‘olfactory habituation’ that drives bored tabbies to abandon their dinner.
‘In other words, novelty in odour makes the food attractive again,’ says Professor Miyazaki.
The researchers believe this stark difference with dogs, who wolf down their food regardless, comes from their different hunting styles.
Dogs evolved from pack hunters, which bring down big prey, fill up on large meals and need to eat quickly.
Cats, on the other hand, come from lone hunters who eat lots of different small prey throughout the day.
Normally, a cat’s fussy feeding isn’t a big problem so long as they are still meeting all their nutritional requirements.
But older cats or those recovering from illnesses can develop health problems if they lose their appetite for extended periods.
Older cats in particular tend to lose their appetite as their sense of smell and taste decline, preventing them from getting all the nutrition they need.
However, according to Professor Miyazaki, this discovery could be the key to boosting your furry companion’s appetite when they need it most.
He says: ‘Our results suggest that introducing different foods, or even just different smells, can help maintain or restore food intake.’
Adding a food topper, such as freeze–dried meats, or mixing small amounts of another food in with their meal can break the habituation and encourage eating.
Scientists suggest that adding different foods to your cat’s dinner can help boost their appetite, just like in this viral TikTok showing a cat enjoying a side salad with dinner
Likewise, Professor Miyazaki points out that some Japanese cat owners use bonito flakes, shavings of dried, smoked fish, to add new smells to their cats’ dinner.
If your cat is on a prescription diet, you can also use a two–layer bowl like the one used by the researchers.
This will allow owners to add a different food to the bottom chamber, changing the smell of their cat’s dinner without affecting what they actually eat.
Professor Miyazaki says: ‘Understanding the role of smell in feeding could help improve feeding strategies, especially for cats with reduced appetite, such as older or sick animals.’
HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR CAT? THE 13 SECRET SIGNALS FELINES GIVE THEIR OWNERS
Cats are often branded aloof and solitary creatures who spend their days plotting their human owner’s demise, but such characterisations could not be further from the truth.
In fact, our feline friends constantly communicate their feelings of affection to us, whether it be through their whiskers, tail, face or body language.
In her eye-opening new book Kitty Language: An Illustrated Guide to Understanding Your Cat, author Lili Chin – with the help of animal behaviourists – explains how to interpret your pet’s movements.
Below are some of the most common behaviours and what they could signal.
Our feline friends constantly communicate their feelings of affection to us, whether it be through their whiskers, tail, face or body language
