The domestic cat is NOT weird as stupid newspaper journalists claim

Online newspaper journalists have a tendency to claim that the domestic cat is "weird". It just plain stupid. Domestic cats behave as they instinctively have evolved to behave. They behave differently to humans and from a cat's perspective, no doubt humans behave weirdly. 

In fact human behaviour is far more weird than cat behaviour. Look at what humans are doing to the planet at the moment? They are destroying the planet upon which they rely for sustenance and for all their needs. If that isn't weird I don't know what is.

But a website called Your Tango says that cats are weird and they list 15 facts to prove it. So what are these facts? I will touch on a few of them to illustrate my argument.

Perspiration

The first one they list is that "cats sweat through their paws". What is weird about that?! That's perfectly normal. Cats can't sweat through their bodies because they have a coat which is highly functional. And they keep their coat clean all by themselves without having to go into the shower! Far more practical than human behaviour. 

Also when they groom themselves it helps to cool them through the same scientific process which makes sweating effective: the latent heat of evaporation.

Tasting sweetness

And they add that "cats can't taste anything sweet". So what? Cats are obligate carnivores. They've evolved to eat meat. They don't need to be able to taste sweetness. 

Look, if humans couldn't take anything sweet just like cats there would be much less human obesity. Around 40% of Americans are obese. It is a similar percentage UK residents. This obesity is nearly always caused by overeating and eating the wrong foods including foods high in carbohydrate i.e. sugars. Sugars and salt are addictive to humans.

Ironically, the only reason why domestic cats can be obese (and there are too many obese domestic cats thanks to poor human caregiving) is because of the high carbohydrate content in the unnatural dry cat food that they are given so often. Humans have passed on their obesity to the domestic cat.

Grooming exaggeration

Then Your Tango begins to get things wrong. They add that "cats spend up to half their lives grooming themselves". Wrong! Completely wrong! Cats are fastidious groomers but they don't spend half their lives grooming themselves.

Sleeping exaggeration

And they say that cats spend 70% of their lives sleeping. This is incorrect as well because cats, particularly full-time indoor cats, spend a lot of their time perhaps even more than 70% sometimes of their lives not sleeping but snoozing. That's because they've nothing to do thanks to full-time indoor living and a sterile environment. They are not sleeping in the proper sense. We know this because they leap into action at the slightest activity near them.

DNA

The journalist also adds that domestic cats shed 95.6% of their DNA with tigers. That's probably correct and there is also nothing weird about it at all. It's what you would expect because thanks to millions of years of evolution both the tiger and the domestic cat stem from the same ancient cat-like animal. 

Their evolutionary paths split millions of years ago but their ancient origins are the same. Nothing strange about that. It is all nature, evolution and scientific.

I won't bother to go on because I'm wasting my time. I've made my point. Online journalists need to be more careful and stop using click bait words and tactics. I've seen too much of it; too much stupidity and carelessness.

------------

P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

The reason why domestic cats are obligate carnivores (hyper-carnivores)

This article is going to be short and it is an extension of another article I wrote a few moments ago. It's a nice theory (a suggestion but a good one) proposed by James Sanderson PhD in his book Small Wild Cats (co-author Patrick Watson). In that earlier article I explained why the entire family of cats cannot taste sweetness. 

Cats evolved from a fierce sabre-toothed predator that prowled North America 42 million years ago, according to new research. San Diego Natural History Museum SWNS. Image assessed as being in the public domain. Wrong? Tell me please.

It is due to a genetic mutation which occurred very early on in the evolution of the cat which is why every lineage of which there are eight are affected by this 'defect'. 

In 2005, scientists discovered that all cats lack one of a pair of proteins required to sense sweetness. The missing protein was the result of a deletion, the loss of part of a chromosome or sequence of DNA in a gene. - Sanderson and Watson

This defect was caused after all by a genetic defect or mutation which resulted in the omission of some DNA which in turn resulted in the failure of the cat to have receptors in their tongue to detect sweetness although they retained the skill to detect bitterness which helps to protect them because often toxins are bitter.

Unlike humans and some other animals, cats lack the taste receptors known as "T1R2" and "T1R3," which are responsible for detecting sweetness. - AI computer Poe.

So the reason why domestic cats and all cats of all species are hyper-carnivores is because they can't taste sweetness. It is only plants that can taste sweet because of photosynthesis creating sugars such as sucrose. Cats can't enjoy the sweetness of plants and therefore they don't eat plants whereas cats enjoy the taste of flesh and became obligate carnivores.

That's the argument. It's a very interesting argument and one which states that the entire evolution of the cat species into hyper-carnivores can be put down to a single genetic mutation of chromosomes and genes in the very early evolution of the true cat which has taken about 30 million years or longer. The scientists are still working that out!

--------------

P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins.

Starving, diminutive kitten behaves like a tiger eating a freshly killed wild buffalo

@66supermandavid

kitten vs big steak

♬ original sound - 66supermandavid

Note: This is an embedded TikTok video. Sometimes they are deleted at source which stops them working on this site. If that has happened, I apologise but I have no control over it.

It is a cute reminder that kittens are born ravenous and carnivorous. A mentality inherited from their wild cat ancestor. It certainly pays dividends to remember that domestic cats are wild cats at heart; a whisker away from their wild ancestor in behaviour. 

And this carnivorous mentality is all apparent in the short video. In terms of mentality there is no difference between this cute little kitten and a big tiger on a reserve in India. They just want to bolt down the food as quickly as possible. I wonder, though, if this kitten has been starved a little bit to make sure that he behaves as you see in the video and as desired by the video-maker.

Starving diminutive kitten behaves like a tiger eating a buffalo

The video has been engineered to be interesting which it certainly is. But you wouldn't feed a kitten a raw steak like this normally. It is not a good lesson in how to feed your cat. Let's put it that way. 

Because that steak does not contain all the ingredients that a cat needs. It contains some of them but not all of them., In that way, therefore, this is a slightly careless video but we shouldn't snipe at it because it teaches us the lesson that domestic cats need a meat diet or one that replicates it accurately. 

In fact, it is bigger than that because when a wild cat eats a prey animal they eat more than just the flesh which humans call meat. In human language the word "meat" means muscle. Meat is a euphemism for the flesh of an animal. 

The video is duplicated below but it is from a different platform in case the TikTok video above fails. The one below may also fail 🤞.

Wild cats and indoor/outdoor domestic cats eat all the animal including the gut and the contents of the stomach, the fur and some bones et cetera. It is the whole which provides the balanced diet with all the requisite ingredients.

We exactly what ingredients are needed by domestic cats and can add them in commercially made food. If you feed your cat a raw diet you can buy a powdered supplement which contains these essential nutrients to add to the mix. 

See: RAW DIET FOR A CAT FOR A FULL EXPOSITION ON THE TOPIC.

Are felines carnivores?

I would hope and expect that 99.9% of the world's population know that felines are carnivores. They are meat eaters. It is stronger than that. They have to eat meat because they are what are called 'obligate carnivores'. They are obliged to eat the flesh of animals due to their evolution. They are specialists as genetic mutations have lead them to becoming dependent on the flesh of animals.

But it is not as straightforward as that. Although evolution dictates that they have to eat the flesh of animals they do also eat the stomach contents of the animals that they kill. The stomach contents will be vegetation because they prey upon animals that feed on vegetation i.e. herbivores. So felines also eat vegetation.

A lot of commercially prepared cat food is based on polluted carcasses of animals and therefore arguably plant based foods + added nutrients is better in quality. Image: MikeB.

Also, we know that domestic cats sometimes eat grass. That is a plant and the plant is not an animal! And therefore felines are not exclusively carnivores. They eat grass, it is believed, because grass contains folic acid which is missing in their diet. Folic acid plays a role in the production of haemoglobin, the oxygen carrying protein found in red blood cells. Although there are many theories about why cats eat grass.

The snow leopard specifically eats a certain bush i.e. vegetation and it is my theory that they do this because it increases the amount of oxygen in their bloodstream. It therefore enhances their ability to live at high altitude. I stress that this is my theory because no scientist has studied this. Although I have an article about the snow leopard being partly vegetarian! You can click here to read that article if you wish. Note: In Pakistan more than 22% of faeces of snow leopards inspected contained plant matter and in Ladakh (in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir ) more than 50% contained vegetation including willow and Myricaria bushes (Myricaria germanica)

Another point worth making about felines being carnivores is that there is a trend nowadays towards eating plant protein rather than protein from the muscle of animals. This is to help curb climate change. Therefore manufacturers have started to sell plant-based dry cat food for domestic cats. On the face of it this is not going to work but the manufacturers add the nutrients necessary to make the food balanced for domestic cats. You can make your own mind up about it but I believe that as long as the essential nutrients are present at a microbiological level then the food is nutritious.

There is a caveat to that last statement and that is this. A recent study decided that if you want to curb the hunting of the domestic cat (and a lot of cat owners do) you should feed them with a high quality grain-free entirely meat-based wet cat food. You should find that they hunt less. It appears that "complete and balanced" wet cat food normally available is not quite as complete as it should be and therefore the domestic cat decides to hunt mice in order to supplement what they might consider to be a deficient diet from their perspective.

This is a novel approach to curbing domestic cat hunting. Further work is needed on this. But domestic cat wet cat food and dry cat food can be quite deficient and too far removed from a natural prey animal such as a mouse. Dry cat food is highly artificial for example. It's convenient but there are deficiencies with it. And there's too much plant material to bulk up cat food and to keep the price down. But hundreds of millions of cats fed on this type of cat food and they survive on it but we don't know how much health damage it does to them in the long term.

To return to the question in the title: are felines carnivores? Yes, is the answer because evolution dictates that. They have become highly specialised due to their evolution and dependent upon a meat-based diet. In the wild they satisfy that evolutionary demand by preying on wild animals and sometimes livestock (e.g. the mountain lion). But in the human world, people have found ways to feed the domestic cat with plant protein and dry foods containing grain which is less than ideal.