. . . including the rind!
Does your cat eat anything weird?
h/t: Peter ~
Cat eats watermelon
October 21, 2014 • 12:29 pm
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Why do we like watching our pets eat things so much? I always find it cute and I remember seeing a reporter asking kids what they liked about pigs at a petting zoo and all of them said they liked watching them eat.
Ketchup and tomato sauce. She just loves the stuff. No pizza is safe.
We named our kitteh Butter for many reasons, including a fondness for butter. Now he turns his nose up at it. If there’s anything tomatoey around, Butter queues right up, and gets downright demanding. (only food he does that for, including his regular cat food)
Out of less than 7 cats I’ve known well in my life, Butter is the third with tomato frenzy.
I can’t help but think that this must be somewhat common out there… (anyone else?)
One of our cats – a rather plump, fragile rescue kitty called “Momma”, would take any kind of spaghetti sauce… with the onions & garlic & green peppers & mushrooms & whatever…
and suck it all down with the sauce, leaving a perfectly sucked-dry pile of whatever meat was in the sauce. Either little perfectly clean bits of hamburger or perfectly clean bits of Italian sausage (minus all the little pieces of cumin, fennel and whatnot… completely reduced to little clean meat bits).
We never got tired of this performance. And it never failed to amaze friends. Amazing pet tricks during parties… it’s all in the setup. We’d find our mark, then explain how we’d been training our cat to be a vegetarian. Again, it’s all in the presentation… you don’t say it quite like that, but you reel them in slowly, getting them to think you’re trying to cut down – that the rest of the family has been doing their part to consume less meat, etc… all the way down to training the cat to do the same.
Then when the sauce comes out, you have a conversation with the kitty, saying that you’ll give them the sauce, but only if they PROMISE to leave the little meat bits on the plate. Once Mama meowed in assent, the plate is laid down, and the rest of the trick just plays right out, all by itself. Every time, a neat little pile, right in the middle of the saucer. Too bad this was before Youtube.
Yup, ours will lick the spaghetti sauce off pasta and meat, too.
She won’t touch chicken or beef, and very rarely will eat fish. Crazy kitteh.
Same with Momma. To make matters weirder, if I ever put a piece of fish near Butter (incl. any fish “flavored” cat treats – anything having to do with the sea… oysters, doesn’t matter) — Butter will actually do a slow panic and run.
Nothing else that I know of elicits this response from this extremely mellow kittteh.
the sauce from spaghettios. We’ve had two now that will lick the bowl completely and utterly clean.
Maybe it’s just thirsty.
That plant in the back too.
Cat eats cactus.
http://designyoutrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/cat_cactus_1.jpg
and corn
That may count as flossing rather than eating.
I don’t know if it’s weird, but my cat gets two raw shrimp per day (one in the a.m., and one for dinner). She really likes that.
She likes to eat plastic, but we don’t encourage it.
She also likes to eat spiders and moths.
Haha, my wife and I actually refer to butterflies and moths as “Breakfast Moth” or “Lunch Butterfly” depending on their size or time of day
I had an Alaskan Malamute that loved cucumbers — left nothing but nubs in my mother’s garden.
My mom had a dog that liked cucumbers too, a small terrier. If she got in the garden, the dog would head straight for that one cucumber that mom had missed, pull it off the vine, and go to some remote corner of the yard to enjoy her prize.
We had another dog that loved sweetcorn and would go out to the field and pick her own ear. She ate a lot of other things as well, some quite unpleasant.
Our cats, on the other hand, mostly ate normal cat things. One did insist that dry cat food NOT be put in liquid. If you served him a dish of milk with cat food in it, he would scoop out a piece of food, drop it on the floor, shake the drops of milk off his paw, and repeat until all the pieces were out of the dish of milk. Then he’d enjoy them separately.
oops — forgot that should be d*g
Come to think of it, Boots (the current cat) likes to chew on the lemon grass that I grow in a pot.
If we’re including dogs (sorry – my religion is different – I can’t bring myself to say “d*gs”) that like to eat weird stuff, I imagine it will be easier with cats. Our staffy loves cucumber, too; we knew she was ill once when she wouldn’t eat her cucumber. Restricting my list to non-revolting substances, which limits me considerably, and including raw food only, she also loves apples, berries – actually, all fruit – although sometimes she’s lukewarm about citrus – as well as radishes, mushrooms and eggs. And once when she was barking rather hoarsely I worked out it was because she had found and eaten a cake of soap.
Our cat, like yours, is much more limited: her favourite treat foods are things which the dog goes even crazier over, like kangaroo and prawns.
…easier than with cats.
Well, my cat Boo used to love peach yogurt and Mandarin orange juice from those little cans. She also had a thing for tomato sauce products – but thirty years of Garfield & lasagna has made that almost “normal” as far as cat food goes…
David
All of my cats have been melon eaters. But they don’t care whether it’s ripe or not; for them, it’s not about the sweetness.
Our cat Grover comes running whenever he senses that mellon is being carved up. He loves to eat the seedy slop dumped in the sink.
Our cat Moses ignored all people food–milk, butter, fish, red meat, etc., for many years. Until he tasted salsa. That started him on the dark road to eating whatever we ate.
Yes, our cat will also try whatever “momma” is having, but I don’t count that because it seems to be more about momma than the food itself. With cooked tomato-based products, its all about the food.
Yes, cats don’t have sweet taste receptors.
I think it’s about the crunchiness. You could test this by trying an overripe, soft melon, if you dare.
My mother-in-law’s late cat, Butterscotch, was apparently crazy about cantaloupe, to the point where she would launch herself at the dining table and snatch it off someone’s plate.
Kenny will eat just about anything. He will steal chips out of the bag if we aren’t looking. Spicyness doesn’t bother him at all. He will even eat vegetables if they are fried, but not raw. He gets cooked egg yolks on the weekends, but if i am not careful and leave it un-attended he will eat raw egg. He stole a waffle from my hand once. Pretty much a bad kitty when it comes to people food.
My cat likes Old Bay seasoning and the shrimp or blue crab with we steam with it. He eats no other seafood, unless you count the water from my tuna can. We had a German shepherd who loved steamed blue crabs. We’d remove the top shell and claws, then give her a body half at a time, walking legs attached. We obeyed her vet and limited her to one.
“blue crab WHICH we STEAMED with it.” Sorry.
Raw broccoli and kale. Also lettuce. And canned pumpkin. I really don’t understand this at all. He eats all our moths and crickets, and I understand that, because he’s our mighty hunter, but we keep him cooped up in the house so that’s all there is to hunt. But what’s the challenge of broccoli?
Presumably for the same reason that cats eat grass – for the folic acid.
And I daresay that cats eat catnip for the frolic acid.
Very good! 🙂
I had a cat that loved cantaloupe and a dog that would eat corn-on-the cob in neat rows with his front teeth, rotating the cob with his paws as he went.
Avocado. And my friends’ cat drags avocado pits out of the garbage and they find them in the living room,
Whoops – sub
We have two; K’ehleyr Klingon Warrior Kitty will eat beef, chicken, pork, fish or lamb, with or without sauce or breading. Tiggie won’t eat anything that isn’t official cat food except the cheese on Okey-Doke popcorn.
Our lovely Josephine would chow down on shelled, but roasted and salted, pistachios, and her mom, Malachite, would gobble up raw mushrooms.
A few years ago we had a wild cat that roamed the neighborhood and her route took her through our yard. I normally compost my kitchen scraps, but in the winter, just toss them in the garden to let the birds scavenge anything they can.
One day I saw the cat out there eating the cantaloupe scraps. She was trying to separate out the seeds and eat just the rest of scrapings that came from the middle of the fruit. I knew she must be hungry to try and eat cantaloupe! Indeed, the weather was quite cold and the cat had gotten pretty skinny.
Of course, I felt sorry for her, started putting out cat food, and next thing you know, I had a semi-adopted wild cat. She would come in for food, and eventually a petting, but always left at night.
Miss that cat.
My old cat loved cheese. My current moggie will rip your hand off for thinly sliced ham.
Actually, a piece of folklore passed on by my grandmother, and not once contradicted by my experience, is that all cats and all dogs like cheese.
My dear departed Siamese cat would forage beneath my budgie’s cage and eat the oats which spilled from the seed tray. Not the millet. Not the panicum. Not the niger seed. Just the oats.
By the way, there is no truth to the rumour that I called my budgie Onan because he spilled his seed upon the ground.
Cooked broccoli, but just the small florets, definite reject on the stems, even if we cut them up.
My late cat Puppy killed and ate tomatoes. When my wife left tomatoes out on the counter to ripen he’d take one down to the floor, emit a couple of horrible noises and eat half of it. He also took tomatoes from the garden and left half-eaten ones on the stoop.
My late cat Earl Grey adored corn on the cob. He wasn’t after the butter, a freshly cooked ear of corn was more than good enough for him.
Wish I’d never given Winston hand-outs…now he’s a pest whenever I’m eating. The other day I was having a banana and he was right there in my face, mewling, so I let him sniff it, thinking it would probably repel him. He wanted to eat the skin!
(Knowing a bit about banana culture, I wouldn’t dream of letting him.)
I had one that loved citrus juice. he’d grab your hand when you were drinking and try to drag the glass to his mouth.
Our cats eat yogurt, crickets, any kind of oil.
I grew up with scatterbrained Irish Setters who would eat whole sticks of butter and brownies mixed with broken glass..yum.
I had a cat when I was young. This cat would open the cookie jar and steal chocolate chip cookies at night. It didn’t like ginger snaps or peanut butter cookies.
I had a cat called Louis who liked to eat olives and mushrooms, which I thought was rather sophisticated. In all other ways he was an intellectual disappointment (he was an inveterate chaser of his own tail, for example).
I.. am not allowed to eat pumpkin pie alone. T_T
My mom’s orange (neutered) tom once ate his way through a dishtowel to get to the pumpkin pie it was covering.
Yeah, I would never leave pumpkin pie, or even a raw pumpkin, out. It would just be asking for trouble.
I had a pumpkin loving feline once too.
I forgot this about our second German Shepherd, she was crazy about asparagus. Nothing added to it, just plain asparagus.
Interesting – I’ve read that Germans are especially fond of asparagus. Didn’t know that applied to the canine variety, too.
We were clearly the table and her nose went into overdrive as I lifted the bowl with a few pieces of leftover asparagus. I poured them into her food bowl to prove, to her, that she didn’t really want this. Every shopping day after this, “Buy extra asparagus for Aleekee.”
LOL!
Don’t ever give her caviar.
I’m glad we never had any in her life time, Diane!
Don’t you hate it when your plan to prove to your pet that he/she won’t like something backfires? My dog now loves black licorice babies. I figured she’d be disgusted, now she asks for them – pointing at them with her pointy nose – while they are sitting in a container on the counter.
Yes, hate the backfire, and it’s not the animal outthinking us. They simply like a variety of foods.
My trusty beagle-y dog Madison also enjoyed watermelon, including the rind.
He also learned to pick black raspberries off the plants out back, gently bearing his front teeth in the process.
My cat Raven loves cantaloupe. Especially the “guts” that I scoop out into the sink. When I cut it and the smell goes through the house she always shows up.
I had a cat who loved olives. He would dribble them around the kitchen like a soccer player for awhile and then eat them.
My current cat loves soy cheese. Every time she hears me start to unwrap a slice she comes running for a bite, eats one small piece and walks away, never asks for seconds.
Ginger loved eating bread, and I had to buy a metal bread bin to put it in so I wouldn’t get up in the morning to find the end chewed off the loaf of bread right through the plastic. He’d eat pancakes too. He was a Burmese, like Wookies, they think with their stomachs.
My friends’ cat opens their metal bread box – especially if they have cornbread.
I though it was sort of a known fact that cats like melon, especially watermelon. Most of mine did.
I always wondered, why? Cats can’t taste sweetness, right? Why would they eat melons?
The only human food my cat would eat was blueberry bagels with cream cheese. No other flavor of bagel, and not without the cheese.
My grandmother’s cat’s favorite was her homemade pasta with homemade sauce. My grandmother was so well-trained by her owner that, whenever he brought home a dead bird, she’d take it away from him, clean it, pluck it, and roast it, then give it back for him to eat.
Now, *that’s* service.
My twin tabbies, Bonzer and Cooper, absolutely love fruit. Canned peaches and pineapple especially, but even dried apricots will do in a pinch.
Positively unnatural. The world has become unraveled.
Mogga, my demanding Siamese master loves a bit of pre chewed banana and occasionally broccoli.
One of the cats of my sister loves Café au lait. Not that my sister is feeding it intentionally. But every time she makes one for herself and does not guard it properly she can be assured that only a few moments later the cat has her head in the cup.