Feeding & Nutrition

A reader in Bristol wrote to me last month with a question I get some version of every few weeks. Her cat, Mabel, adored a particular salmon pate. Adored it. Ate it with the enthusiasm of an animal who had been rescued from a shipwreck. Then on day four Mabel sniffed the bowl, gave her owner a long, wounded look, and walked away. The reader had bought a case of twenty-four tins.

I have been there. Most cat owners have. And the thing that helps most is understanding that this is usually not spite, not manipulation, and not the cat holding out for something better — although occasionally it is exactly that last one, and we will get to it.

Cats are what biologists politely call neophilic and neophobic at the same time, which is a way of saying they are drawn to novelty and frightened of it in roughly equal measure. In the wild, a small solitary hunter benefits from eating a varied menu of mice, birds and insects, because no single prey species covers every nutrient and no single prey species is available every week. So there is a built-in drive to try new things. But there is also a strong protective instinct that says: if you ate a lot of one thing and felt unwell afterwards, never touch that thing again. That second mechanism is called learned aversion, and cats form it fast and hold it for years.

Which is where the three-day pattern comes from. Novelty wears off. Sometimes a mild bout of nausea, a hairball, a dose of wormer or a stressful car journey happens to coincide with the new food, and the cat welds those two events together permanently. This is why vets are careful about introducing a new therapeutic diet while a cat is actively ill or in hospital. Do that, and the cat may reject the very food she needs for the rest of her life, because in her mind that flavour caused the misery.

Before doing anything about picky eating in cats, rule out the boring medical explanations, because they are common and they masquerade as fussiness. Dental disease is the big one. A resorptive lesion or an inflamed gum makes crunching kibble genuinely painful, and the cat will approach the bowl, look hungry, take a mouthful and back off. That is not fussiness, that is toothache. Chronic kidney disease produces nausea and a general dulling of appetite. So does gastritis, pancreatitis, and hyperthyroidism in its later stages. A blocked-up nose from an old herpesvirus flare-up matters enormously too, because cats decide whether food is food almost entirely by smell. Any cat who goes from a normal appetite to a reduced one over a week or two, or who loses weight, needs a vet before she needs a new flavour. A cat who eats nothing at all for 48 to 72 hours is an emergency regardless of the reason.

Assuming Mabel is healthy, the practical fixes are mostly about temperature, texture and geography.

Temperature first, because it is the easiest and the most underrated. Cats evolved eating prey at body heat, around 38 degrees Celsius. Food straight from the fridge at 5 degrees smells of almost nothing, because aroma compounds need warmth to volatilise. Stand the tin in warm water for ten minutes, or add a tablespoon of hot water and stir it through, and you have transformed the food from the cat's point of view without changing a single ingredient. Never microwave it to hot — patchy hot spots will burn a mouth and create exactly the aversion you are trying to avoid. Lukewarm, thumb-tested, is the target.

Texture is the next lever, and cats form preferences astonishingly early. Kittens who eat only one texture between roughly four and eight weeks of age often become adults who consider anything else inedible. If your cat was raised on smooth pate, chunks in gravy may register as suspicious. If she grew up on kibble, wet food may not even read as food. This is fixable but slow. Blend a chunky food to a pate consistency, or add a small amount of warm water to a pate to loosen it, and shift the texture in tiny increments across two or three weeks.

Then there is the bowl and where it sits. Whisker fatigue is a contested idea, but the practical advice behind it is sound: a deep narrow bowl presses on the whiskers of a cat with a wide face, and many cats genuinely prefer a shallow, wide dish or a flat plate. Plastic bowls hold odours and develop a film that smells stale to a nose thousands of times more sensitive than ours. Ceramic or stainless steel, washed daily, solves that. Position matters too. A bowl next to a noisy washing machine, in a busy hallway, or within sight of another cat is a bowl a cat eats at anxiously and abandons early. Cats also dislike eating right beside their water, which is a genuine leftover from wild behaviour, so separate the two by a couple of metres.

Now the part owners struggle with. If a cat refuses dinner and you immediately open something tastier, you have run a small, perfect training session, and the cat has learned that refusal produces an upgrade. Most healthy adult cats will not starve themselves out of stubbornness, but this is where cat owners must be more careful than dog owners: a cat going without food for more than two days, especially an overweight one, can develop hepatic lipidosis, a serious liver condition. So the tough-love approach that works fine with a dog is genuinely risky with a cat. The compromise is to offer a measured portion, leave it 20 to 30 minutes, remove it, and offer the same food again at the next scheduled mealtime rather than substituting something new. Two to three meals a day, nothing left sitting out going stale, and treats capped at ten percent of daily calories so she arrives at dinner actually hungry.

For the reader with 23 remaining tins: rotate. Keep three or four foods your cat accepts in circulation and alternate them every few days rather than feeding one exclusively until she burns out on it. Buy single tins before you buy cases. And if she has refused something for a fortnight, try it again after a month off — aversions do fade, and the food she snubbed in March is often perfectly acceptable again by May. Mabel, for what it is worth, went back to the salmon in about six weeks. Cats are not consistent. They are just cats.