Do cats love to eat fish? You may have misunderstood it

Friends with cats often have this experience: every time they bathe their master, it is like a difficult battle - not only does the master cry and howl, they will be covered in water, and even get scratched. But every time you secretly open the packaging bag of dried fish, the master starts to flatter and want to steal the delicious food from his mouth...

Even if you give dried fish during bathing, the kitten looks desperate, which makes people wonder, since cats are so afraid of water, how can they like to eat fish? Then how does it catch fish? What a twisted soul!

There are more and more shoveling cats now. Statistics in 2021 show that more than 20 million people in our country have cats, and many colleagues have raised them in our editorial department. Do you have a cat? You don’t have it, you can still enjoy watching it with relish! But if you want to talk about the originator of cat slaves, it is the Egyptians. Not only did they mummify cats, they even regarded them as gods. And why cats like to eat fish, there is a version related to the Egyptians.

We all know that ancient Egyptian civilization was built on the Nile River, and agriculture is one of the main local activities. As time passed, the Egyptians gradually noticed that mice would eat the food they depend on for their survival, so they hated them to the core. However, they knew that the wild cats near their residence were the natural enemies of these guys. If humans and cats join forces with each other, wouldn’t they be able to save food?

So the clever Egyptians lured wild cats with fish caught from the Nile, letting them walk into their homes step by step, and more than three thousand years ago, domesticated these allies into their masters today. Looking at wild cats, only fishing cats and flat-headed cats like to fish and eat them, while leopards and jaguars occasionally have records of eating fish. But today's science tells us that the ancestors of domestic cats were actually African wild cats. They were domesticated into domestic cats by people in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago.

And African wild cats live in the desert, with their staple foods being various rodents, including mice, and various birds. There is no option for fish in the menu. So why do cats have changed their sex and have a special liking for fish? There are two main reasons:

First, cats are opportunistic predators and will not refuse any meat they can eat. There are 35 to 80 million olfactory receptors in their noses, while there are only 5 million humans, so cats have much more sensitive sense of smell than us. The strong fishy smell means that it is fresh meat for them, and it is impossible not to eat it. The ancestors, African wild cats, do not eat fish, but they just can't get fish.

Secondly, although there is no fish in cats' regular recipes, it will take a lot of physical energy to go out to prey. After staying by the shoveler for a long time, there will be foods that come out of pity every now and then. Among them are fish, which is high in protein, fatty acids and amino acids. Who can bear this? Isn’t it good to dismantle the physical energy saved from eating fish several times? Therefore, it is not that cats love to eat fish, but that eating fish has the above two benefits for them.