To keep you busy while I make real posts (I’m not full of pep or intellectual energy today, so you might just get LOLs), here’s one of those awesome Russian cat videos, courtesy of Matthew Cobb and Jezebel. It’s an orange tabby devouring a melon. I’ve heard of melon-eating cats before, but have never seen the phenomenon. Cats, of course, didn’t evolve eating fruit, nor can they taste sweetness, so this is a mystery.
Readers should weigh in with the weirdest foods their cats ever ate, and a Russian speaker needs to translate the title of this video:
The title says more or less like it is: Crazy, hungry cat
I hope the cat did not get an upset stomach and cry – I would not want it to be melon colic!
Booooo!
lawl. I checked the video again – this cat wasn’t eating corn.
@Malgorzata – yes, these words exactly.
As to why this cat has such peculiar appetite: maybe this is genetically-modified watermelon with mouse genes?
A more realistic explanation would be that the cat is not hungry, but thirsty.
I’ll bet the cat liked the texture or maybe the coolness if it was refrigerated.
Like Dominic I do hope the has eaten melon before and is used to it. I’ve seen cats chew on plants with the same sort of relish this one is showing.
My dear, late Sagan loved broccoli. I’d usually slice off a bit of the stem and she’d chew away.
Plants may help clean the teeth rather than be due to sweetness? Particularly grasses with their silica content – ?
It probably tastes like a bird.
my current cat, the fat Plushie, is addicted to lemon grass, but a past cat – Mary-Jane – munched anything – she figured out how to open cupbiard and once opened a7 consumed a whole baf of chocolate biccies, ate broccoli, onions, garlic & her favourite toy was a string bean (new one every week).
My cat loves meringues. Whenever I have one (which is often, because I like nothing better than a mid-day meringue and coffee), she sits at my feet and meows. Then goes straight for my plate.
I wonder if anyone here knows what she’s after — egg or sugar?
Egg white is pure protein, this makes perfect sense for a cat to eat. But the sugar (which she can’t taste) may give her diarrhea and/or flatulence because she won’t be able to digest it very well.
My feral cats catch and eat wild things but never eat their kidneys. They often chew bodies until they are a pulpy mass. My house cats would not touch wild food and don’t like most commercial cat food. Is this huge difference in taste due to digestive bacteria?
My yard fox squirrels love water melon in the summer. Saw a PBS thing one time about current day Pima Indians which, if I remember correctly, focused on their corn agriculture. At harvest, they have a big feast. People, dogs AND cats all chow down on corn on the cob.
According to mycoworker it says, “Crazy hungry cat”. That’s it.
I wonder how / if the co-worker / cow-orker joke translates into Russian?
Come on now, I was typing on my phone with auto-correct off. It’s actually worse with auto-correct on. I can’t win. 😉 That said, my co-worker is a native Russian speaker so the translation (I assume) is good.
My wife is a Russian native too. But I’m suspicious of finding out that “to ork” is something rude and anatomically improbable in Russian.
Ha! My cat Zajchik is also extremely fond of melon. Apparently that is a little less weird than I thought.
Toward the end of the video I thought the cat might be showing a preference for the rind.
Does your cat eat both the fruit and rind? Does it show any preference?
Dunno. Never offered the rind.
Our cat loves flour tortillas.
Our first cat, Natasha, loved cantaloupe.
Our cat, Harry LOVED cantaloupe! (and Doritos )
Also had a cat who was crazy for cantaloupe. He’d dive into the sink to play with the pulp, and would give you no peace while you were eating any.
Around the same time we had a dog who loved hibiscus flowers. She’d pluck them right off the bush. I don’t remember whether she ate them or just chewed them like a tennis ball.
my one cat absolutely loved fruit juices. He’d grab at the glass any time my husband or I would be drinking such. Another licked all of the chocolate from a tube of Girl Scout tagalongs with no ill effects.
one of our cat is very fond of garlic hummus. She also enjoy croissants.
Ralph pretty much loves all of my cooking, especially pad thai and curries. But rice, eggs, veggie burgers, tofu, pretty much anything we’re eating he’ll try a bit.
He does seem to be able to sense capacsin. It generates quite a bit of chop licking, but he does come back for more.
My parents’ cat loves cantaloupe and gas eaten watermelon before. He also goes for butter/yogurt/ice cream if you offer him a lick. The weirdest thing he’ll do is steal a piece of iceberg lettuce out of a bowl if my mom is making a salad. I think he does it when he’s thirsty, because he will just chomp on the lettuce and leave it mangled on the floor.
My fatcat seems to go for salty things. He ate a Parmesan goldfish cracker out of my hand when I wasnt paying attention one day, he loves to lick salt and vinegar potato chips if given th opprobrium. He will also stick his nose in my face f I have tacos with sour cream. Cats are odd creatures!
How many mutations does it take for a cat to reacquire the ability to taste sweetness? The world may never know.
My cat becomes extremely excited at the prospect of Roquefort cheese, which she is most eager to lick from my fingers. I have recently learned that Boursin (the garlicky kind) elicits the same demands.
She is oddly indifferent to poached salmon. Who knows, with cats?
My has a limited appetite for fish or chicken. He’ll nibble it a bit. He seems to love American cheese. And bananas.
Cat, that is. The word was there when I clicked “Post Comment”, I’m certain.
My cat goes crazy for bananas, not quite tuna-level crazy but it brings him running!
The cat I grew up with – and many other I’ve known – had a strong liking for “Marmite”, a UK savory spread, best described as Vegemite-but-better to an Antipodean, and totally unlike anything I’ve met anywhere else i nthe world.
I’ve seen a number who are pretty much cheese connosieurs too. Very picky some of them.
One of my friend’s suggested that the Marmite thing is because of the high salt content – quite plausible, and would work for some cheeses too. But the high protein and fat content of cheeses are likely to get a cat’s attention in their own right.
Our cat won’t eat chicken or fish, but loves tomato sauce.
Being a scientist, I covered covered some chicken in tomato sauce to see which preference would win. But she just licked off the sauce and ignored the chicken.
One of our cats goes crazy for cantaloupe. She must smell it from the other room, because when we cut one she shows up. Typically, we scoop out the gooey seeded middle into the sink, and she’ll either try to eat it out of the sink or grab a chunk of it and take it to the floor to eat it. She also will eat the meat of the cantaloupe if we let her, but I don’t think she’s ever eaten the rind.
I had one cat that wouldn’t eat any “human” food – even chicken or fish – even if put in her dish. Proper cat food out of the cat food packet ONLY, thank you.
I’ve had two cats with odd food preferences:
One, a honey-colored longhair, who liked cantaloupe. I was preparing breakfast on a summer morning, had put a slice of cantaloupe on the table and turned to something else. When I turned back there was the cat sitting on the chair staring intently at said slice.
I offered a taste, and he went for it. Ever thereafter when I had cantaloupe, after I finished I’d put the rind (with adhering flesh) out on my sun deck and the cat would spend a good hour gnawing away at it.
Two, a black shorthair, who liked spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, pretty much anything along that general line.
Odd animals, to say the least.
My present pair show fairly pronounced preferences: both greatly prefer Eukanuba chow to the hypoallergenic chow Big Mama needs to prevent skin disorders; on Eukanuba, they gain weight, the last thing Big Mama needs.
Little Girl is an addict to “Temptations” cat treats. On occasion, the eyes widen, she drools, starts to paw, and will nip your fingers in her anxiety to Get That Treat. Big Mama likes treats too, but doesn’t show the same signs of addiction that Little Girl does.
My cat also likes pears, apples and bananas…
One of my cats ate used tea bags and cooked Brussels endive when he was a strapping young tomcat. He became one of the largest toms I’ve ever seen.
Now, if you could get a video of the cat cooking those Brussels, I’d be mightily impressed.
Mine likes pumpkin.
Our vet recommended giving our two cats pumpkin in order to get more fiber, when one had a digestion problem. We would bury a couple of kitty treats in a large tablespoon of raw pumpkin, and they would nom it right down.
Recently, our old cat wanted to practically stick her head in my mouth after I had been eating green olives. Now when I get into the green olives, I give her a couple, and she seems to really like them.
When I was young, I had a couple cats who loved cucumbers.
I can’t believe I’m the first person to point out that Rubin’s cat can eat a whole watermelon.
I have edited this to remove the video and inserted a link. Please, people, include the videos as links only and not as stand-alone URLs, as it takes up too much space.
Thanks,
mgmt. (CC)
My cat used to *love* Mandarin orange juice from those little cans you can get at Asian supermarkets. And peach yogurt – specifically *peach* yogurt. Oh, she’d eat other types, but it was peach that had her in your face to share.
She was fond of other…odd things too:
http://trolleyfan.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/boo.jpg?w=418
My Kotik used to go absolutely nuts for olives. As soon as he sniffed them, there was a battle going on in the kitchen. He always won. I got quite worried about him choking on a pip (me silly example of homo-not-so-sapiens, I know) and started taking the pips out before coming home. That way, if he would devour all of them before I had a chance, at least he didn’t have a collection of stones in his tummy. And he loved them all, green, black, calamatas… Ah, good old Kotik…
One of my cats lved to eat both popcorn and cantelope, and another would devour green olives, but only if the pimento was removed!
But how far can the cat spit the seeds?
I had to buy a bread bin to save the bread from Ginger (red Burmese) who would chew through the plastic wrapper and eat the corner of the bread, Burmese are always hungry. He ate pancakes too.
We had to do the same thing with our bread. And there were the rolls for Thanksgiving that my husband put on the top of the cupboards thinking they would be safe. He found the happy drooling cat and the rolls covered in cat spit on the kitchen floor.
Our cat Riemann gets yogurt as an occasional treat (recommended by our vet for tummy troubles), and prefers homemade to store-bought. She also loves corn on or off the cob, and popcorn, and has showed interest in baked beans.
Less appetizingly, Riemann has the habit of licking water off the shower stall floor every morning, and she goes nuts for earwax.
OTOH, she despises mint, wrinkling her nose every time she smells it (well, aside from catnip, which is in the mint family).
Cantaloupe seems to be a recurring theme – my cat Sicily (also called Satan due to her lovely personality)- adored cantaloupe. She also loved mashed potatoes and canned pineapple.
Our cat goes wild over garlic stuffed green olives. He’ll also dig the empty container out of the trash if he doesn’t get caught first.
I don’t know if he was intending to eat it, but when our cat Stitch was young, he once dragged half of a garlic baguette in through the cat flap. We never found out where he got it from.
My kitty Pearl loved watermelon. Whenever I was having some watermelon, she would hang over my plate like a vulture. I would give her little morsels that she would gobble down, and then she would lap up all the watermelon juice to finish it off. None of my other cats have this fetish.
I forgot to mention that Pearl also loved cucumber peelings and would drag them out of the sink, onto the floor where she would chew them up.
My kitten, Cooper, is inordinately fond of Quaker “Oatmeal to Go” bars. I don’t doubt he would consume melon, too, given a chance — judging from his relish for dried apricots. His all-time favorite treat, though? A chick pea. Crazy kitteh!
I should add that Cooper’s larger sibling (Bonzer by name) once stuck his paw into my scotch-and-soda to play with the ice, licked his paw to remove the residual moisture, and then promptly stuck his head into the glass in order to take a big drink of the scotch. Thankfully, the alcohol had a sedating effect, rather than exacerbating his already manic personality.
Cats like sweet tastes, which is why they get poisoned by antifreeze. I had a cat once who loved corn. she would hold on with both little “hands” to turn the cob, and ate it just like a little person. (which, of course, she was!)
Awesome! Please post pics!