If you’re cat parent, no matter the breed or age, you’ve probably noticed his royal sense of smell and his taste for certain foods. Several factors influence their appetite for your cat throughout his life. First, gere are some facts :

The number of taste buds

The cat has only 20% of the total number of taste buds in humans and 4 times less than the dog. As mentioned in the article on Flehmen’s reaction, the cat’s sense of smell is closely related to its taste. Although it has only 473 taste buds, the cat has 20 million olfactory terminals (the human has only 5 million). The sense of smell plays a key role in the cat because everything passes by. Observe your cat and you will see that he always sniffs his food before eating it, even when it comes to the same daily food.

Your cat has an elephant’s memory

It can remember all past smells and connect them to a moment of pleasure, stress or bad memories and simply refuse to eat for that reason. So even if you are told that this or that food is the best for your cat, it will be up to him in the end to choose what he wants to ingest.

The distinctions of taste

SOUR

Cats can not distinguish sweet.

If they sniff and want to steal a piece of your favorite dessert, it’s actually probably the dairy substance it contains that attracts it.

The rough tongue

The cat has small thorns on the tongue that are used to brush their hair well and tear off the dead undercoats for good hygiene. These small spines also serve, in nature, to collect all the possible meat of a prey, a bone for example, which would have remained stuck. Lastly, the thorny tips would also serve to lapping more water during each sip.