My cat does not naturally crave twenty pound ocean fish

Nature's Recipe, a brand of cat food made by Heinz Pet Products, claims to make "a variety of complete and balanced diets... in flavors and forms cats naturally crave, including Chicken, Turkey, Lamb, Tuna, and Rabbit & Rice formulas."

As far as I know, considering the little guy has never seen the ocean and hates water with a passion, tuna is not one of the foods my cat would have access to if he was in his natural environment. In fact, being a house cat weighing roughly eight pounds, the idea that he could not only catch, but kill and devour an animal weighing more than twice what he does* is preposterous; adding to that the fact that he'd have to swim a couple hundred yards offshore before doing so is just icing on the cake.

I would believe that a cat might naturally crave a chicken or a rabbit (where the pot of boiling water needed to cook the rice comes from is another issue altogether). A lamb is pushing it--we run into that whole "cats are dinky" issue again. Saying that a cat naturally craves tuna is just absurd.

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It has been brought to my attention by both dem bones and stewacide that tuna can grow to be much more than twenty pounds in weight. It should be noted that the tuna mentioned in this node is the albacore tuna, which is a smaller fish, weighing between five and twenty five pounds. The friggin' huge tuna are the yellowfins, which can weigh more than 300 pounds, and therefore are much more than twice the size of my cat.

Information on the size of albacore tuna from:
http://www.afrf.org/NoPac/fishsize.htm
http://www.nebulae.net/calypso/albacore.htm

Information on the size of yellowfin tuna from:
www.freedive.net/feature/pickering_record.htm

Suggesting that a predator naturally craves the flesh of creatures that it couldn't possibly hunt in the wild doesn't sound very reasonable, does it? Housecats can take down big rats and possums and such, but that's about as large as their usual prey gets. Setting aside her potential (and natural) willingness to scavenge carrion like any other feline, Fluffy would have to learn to work a shotgun to get some beef. She'd have to get a diving suit and a harpoon to take down a tuna.

But we're not talking about natural prey. We're talking about the flavor of it.

Flavors can be tricky. My soy allergy gives me a pretty good sign that my ancestors didn't have any useful exposure to soybeans before my generation; I'm not genetically equipped to handle their beany proteins. But miso soup plugs into all the right spots on my tongue, and I find it delicious and entirely craveworthy, even if it does make me sick the next day.

And feline tastebuds don't work like human tastebuds. How else to explain the fact that my cats will spend hours licking each other's butts but turn up their noses at fish even slightly contaminated with tartar sauce?

So we don't really know what tuna, or beef, tastes like to your average housecat. Much as some people find that rattlesnake and frog's legs taste like chicken, cats may find that beef tastes like rats or mice.

I've met some cats who have been indifferent to tuna. But they are far outnumbered by the cats who go absolutely nuts for it.

Housecats are domesticated animals, and creatures of instinct; their ancient ancestors had to live by solitary hunting and fishing with no human assistance. In the millenia since the first wild cat crept close to a campfire to get some scraps, the world has seen a prodigious number of animal species disappear into extinction.

I wonder, then, if the ancestral wildcats who fished the shallow waters of rivers and ponds might not have favored a particular species of fish. This fish was savory, and easily caught, perhaps because it suicidally spawned in shallow freshwater like salmon. Consequently, early humans hunted it into oblivion long before a record could be made of its existence.

And while that fish is long gone, and most modern domestic cats (with the notable exception of uncommon breeds like the Turkish Angora, which is quite happy to dive right into a river after its prey) won't swim except in desperation, housecats' tongues remain tuned to appreciate the tuna that approximates its taste.