Chat to your Cat by Martina Braun

Author:Martina Braun
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: Cadmos Verlag
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

By squinting, cats signal their peaceful intentions towards each other. (Photo: Schanz)

Conditioned to a certain food?

Talking about sensitive phases in the life of a cat, I find myself confronted with the issue of food preference time and time again. Is there a conditioning effect regarding a certain food or not? I don’t think so, because a conditioning to prefer a certain food would not make any sense biologically, and even be counterproductive. If it were true, then it would be absolutely impossible ever to find a new home for cats from a cat home, without knowing what type of food they had been fed on before; and because, unlike dogs, you shouldn’t let cats fast for more than a day, they’d probably starve to death before anyone was able to find out what type of food they had been reared on – and owners of roaming cats would never have to worry about their cat free-loading at the neighbours’! Dr Mircea Pfleiderer, former pupil and respected successor of Paul Leyhausen, shares my opinion for the following reasons: African wild cats, the ancestors of our domestic cats, are forced to leave their mothers at the age of about nine months, and have to look for a territory of their own. In order to do this, they often have to wander into unknown areas, and this frequently means a change in the range of prey available to them. If they were, for example, exclusively conditioned to catch mice, they would starve to death in a different area where there may not be many mice, but instead other small animals, such as rabbits or rats.

Cats learn from experience what is edible and what isn’t. Many a young cat has to ingest a few shrews until he realises that these insect eaters are not digestible for a cat’s stomach, and that this is the reason why he subsequently feels sick every time. The fact that a cat may have food preferences that he has been cultivating for years, only to change his mind completely from one day to another, has nothing to do with conditioning, but is a result of the idiosyncratic nature that we so much adore in cats; and, of course, the fact that we humans allow ourselves to be manipulated and wrapped around the little fingers of those cute cat’s paws. I think it was Elke Heidenreich who once said: ‘The cat is the only animal that succeeded in domesticating the human being.’

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