Why cats can't bear monotony

Cats are fussy eaters. Scientists have confirmed what pet owners have always known - feline diners demand variety and may turn their noses up at a dish if they believe their diet is getting too monotonous.

Field tests have revealed the animals' faddy eating habits, yet show they are quite unadventurous eaters.

The work by John Bradshaw, a zoologist at the University of Southampton, and colleagues at the University of Oxford and the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition at Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire, supports a theory that this fussiness is a relic of eating strategies evolved to correct dietary deficiencies. The research appears in the latest issue of Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

"Domestic cats tend to steer away from foods they have had in the recent past and will actively pursue the rarer of two foods," said Dr Bradshaw.

"It may explain why after a couple of meals of one flavour of cat food, they are strongly driven to seek out something different."

In the tests, 28 domestic cats from homes in Nottingham and 36 cats from three Oxfordshire farms were offered a choice of two dishes each night, variously canned meat, canned fish, raw beef, cooked beef, hard dry foods and soft dry foods.

The investigators found the farm cats in particular were less likely to eat foods that were similar to what they usually ate and preferred those foods that had become temporarily rare.

The house cats showed a wide range of individual preferences but no trends could be divined, possibly because their normal diet was nutritionally balanced.

However, the animals tended not to be daring - most of the house pets refused raw beef, presumably because they were unfamiliar with it, while the farm cats did not like the hard, dry food, perhaps because it was difficult for them to eat.

Dr Bradshaw believes the results fit with the theory that domestic cats effectively developed the strategy of varying their diet to receive all their specialist nutritional requirements as they cannot tell whether key ingredients are present.