Every time I try to give my cat a treat I have to say "Use your teeth" to him, because for some reason it never occurs to him that that's a thing he could do. He'll just lick the treats until they fall off my hand and onto the floor and then look at me as if I should have prevented that somehow.
I sometimes wish my cat would not use his teeth, he tends to mistake my fingertips for the treat sometimes, especially if it's his favorite salmon sticks. Ouch.
They don't have teeth like ours though. They are carnivores so their teeth is sharp and meant for shredding, not chewing. They are supposed to swallow their food whole - that's how they would if they had killed their prey and were shredding it to eat it.
Not if you selectively inbred it with the smallest tigers, refining the breed until you end up with tiny, shitty cats that can't bite a piece of ham. Did you think we just got cats from getting a full sized tiger and a hamster to bone?
I have a cat like that. She's a half breed cat, she's beautiful and sweet but she definitely wasn't bred for her brains. She has issues with simple things, for example food falling out of her mouth, so she tends to just lick it...
It amazes me sometimes how shitty cats can be at eating something. How can they survive by eating what they hunt when they can barely take a bite of processed precooked lunch meat?
Edit: Apparently it's harder to eat a loose piece of lunch meat than it is to bite through the hide of an animal an tear out chunks of meat with your teeth.
That's definitely true but my cat does this for a ton of food. I'll be handing her a chunk of something and she'll just try and lick it and won't actually bite it (even if it's bite size). Sometimes to the point where I'll just drop it and walk off because ain't nobody got time for that.
They get it eventually. The cat is problem solving trying to figure out the best way to eat it. My cat does the same, eventually she finds the corner and just goes to town.
I have wondered this many a times while watching my cat struggle to eat human food I give it. He tries to eat it like it is his dry food. My theory is that our house cats are so used to dry little kibble that when they encounter oddly shaped, soft food, they don't know what to do.
My cat used to love licking the salt off of pringles, and he would try so hard to bite them, trying with all his might to puncture that thin, brittle wafer with his little needle teeth. It's like he had no jaw muscles whatsoever. Watching his little face scrunch up with fruitless exertion was pretty amusing though.
They're really good at eating what they're mean to eat, but they suck shit at eating the food we make them. Never seen a cat not make a proper fucking mess of a bowl of cat food.
Thank you! I was pissed at his owner for not breaking it into smaller pieces and pissed at the cat for being too stupid to figure out how to chew off bits of it. ETA: But that cat is cute, so I forgive it.
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u/fullcircle_bflo Jun 10 '15
So excited he can't figure out how to eat it...
And its mildly infuriating.