Current mood:

nerdy

Question #3

Why in the fuck do cats eat earwax?

Some of you may not even know that they do, but yeah, grossly enough, cats loooooove the earwax.  Why?

Here's the first big reason.  A human tongue has 10,000 tastebuds, and a cats has 500.  So to begin with, cat's delicate palate isn't quite as discerning as a human's, hence why they'll eat brands of cat food that smell like wet ashes.

However, a cat's sense of smell is a lot stronger than a human's, and they can pick up subtle cues in a scent that we can't.  When a cat smells earwax, they smell the fatty acids and the dead skin cells (mmmmm).  So they think, this must be a tasty treat (also, one of my web page sources say they love scabs... *shudder*). 

So a human has a shitty sense of smell, but we're good at figuring out what tastes good; for cats it's completely reversed.  To quote another source, "something... has to taste fucking awful before [a cat] won't eat it."  Which seriously leaves me wondering, what tastes worse than scabs and earwax....