Monday, May 14, 2012

Cat Food Palatability

Palatability is one of those large words that describes something very simple. It describes how well an animal, in this case a cat, likes the aroma, texture, and flavor of a food. It might be assumes that taste and aroma are the most important part of a well-liked cat food. However, texture and shape are just as important to your cat. Let's talk about each component of cat food in the order your cat will appreciate them.

A cat will first smell the cat food. Does it have a scent at all? Is that scent overpowering or tantalizing? If it smells foul, the cat will walk away. The cat will make a snap decision based on the scent of the cat food. If it passes the sniff test, the cat will continue to check out the food.

When the cat finally tastes the food, there will be three things that will determine whether the cat will continue eating. Taste, texture, and shape will all be evaluated at roughly the same time. If your cat doesn't like the taste, he'll likely walk away after that first bite. It may take a couple more bites for your feline companion to evaluate the texture of the food. If your cat chews akwardly and has no medical problems contributing to this, then the shape is probably less than accepable.

If the food you're serving doesn't meet your cats expectations in regards to aroma, texture, taste, or shape, consider a different food. Sticking with a food your cat does not consider palatable is very like forcing someone who hates mushrooms to eat an entire plateful. Take your cat's preferences seriously and he'll thank you for it later.

1 comment:

  1. Hi.
    If you're really interested in the wellbeing of your cat, I recommend that you have a look at www.catinfo.org/
    It makes you think about giving a cat dried food.
    There are more sites where giving dried food to cats is questioned. Just google "dried food bad for cats" or something simular.
    Just think about it. Cats are bad drinkers. In the wild they get most of their moisture through the food. There's only about 8 percent moisture left in dried food + there's a lot of vegetable or grain based fillers in it that a cat can't digest. Despite popular believe, dried food hardly does anything for a cat's teeth. The best food would be raw food but for people who find that too much hassle, canned wet food, especially if you can get it without added grains or at least with a high meat content, is always better for your cat as it contains about 80 percent moisture.

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