(A Lack of) Curiosity Killed the Cat
Pet owners today have more nutraceutical options to support their pets’ health than ever before. It's a growing industry built on the goal of using nutrition and nutraceutical supplementation to help pets live longer, healthier lives. But that goal requires that scientific research is used to understand what an animal’s nutritional needs are and how they react to the foods and supplements we create for them. And for cats, there are still surprisingly large gaps in what that research can tell us.
We have a long, complicated history with cats — from stalking us in the shadows to loafing atop our kitchen cabinets. Big cats were predators of early hominins and may have shaped the psychology of what we find scary today. Later, descendants of wildcats [1] that began frequenting early farming settlements to hunt rodents served as pest control, protecting grain stores, ships, and homes from rodents, and possibly curbing the spread of rodent-borne disease.
Cats may have benefited us in other ways, too. Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, kept more than 60 cats and recommended a small pet as “an excellent companion for the sick” [2]. Later research gave some support to her view, with studies finding pet companionship, including with cats, to be associated with reduced stress responses and better cardiovascular health [3,4].
As cats became household companions, many began living strictly indoors and eating food we made for them, rather than living off scraps and the small wildlife that tends to live near human establishments. Unfortunately, our early attempts to feed cats ourselves went very badly.
Unlike humans and dogs and many other animals, cats have a very limited ability to make their own taurine [5] — an amino sulfonic acid their hearts, eyes, and reproductive systems depend on. Before we started making cat food, cats consumed taurine through animal prey, whose tissues naturally contain high concentrations of it. Early commercial cat foods seemed to provide what cats needed, but differences in the way cat food was formulated and processed could affect whether cats actually got enough taurine. Heat-processed food altered digestion and gut microbial activity in ways that increased taurine losses, meaning that even foods containing seemingly adequate amounts of taurine could leave cats deficient [6]. Veterinarians began seeing cats mysteriously dying of dilated cardiomyopathy, a serious and often fatal heart condition, and, in 1987, a UC Davis team traced the problem to taurine deficiency [7]. As taurine was added back into cat food, rates of the disease dropped dramatically.
Today, commercial cat food generally supports cats living long, healthy lives but that doesn’t mean we’ve learned everything we need to know to take care of our feline friends. Many cats now live almost entirely indoors, in an environment that wasn’t designed for them, and we still don’t fully understand the consequences that this radically different environment may have for their wellbeing. Feline hyperthyroidism was first noted in 1979 and is now their most common hormonal disorder; one long-running hypothesis points at flame retardants in household dust that cats may swallow while grooming, but more research is needed to understand what exactly is going on [8]. And, of course, simply treating and preventing disease isn't the whole point. The veterinary profession's own environmental guidelines call meeting a cat's needs essential, not optional [9]. To meet those needs well, we need research to understand them and the solutions we develop.
Plus, the benefits of feline research extend beyond cats themselves. Cats can also be valuable models for understanding human health. Through cat studies, we’ve learned that many feline cancers are genomically similar to ours [10], and that aging cats develop several of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's on their own, without any genetic engineering forcing it [11]. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), the most common heart disease in cats, looks so much like the human version that an existing human drug — repurposed and tested in cats with the condition — became, in 2025, approved (conditionally) for feline subclinical HCM. Feline HCM continues to attract interest as a naturally occurring model useful for understanding the human disease [12,13].
Yet important gaps in feline research remain. Veterinary guidelines have explicitly noted a lack of basic disease-incidence data needed to guide evidence-based feline care [14], while recent reviews continue to identify major unanswered questions in areas ranging from cat cognition and behavior to nutrition, chronic disease, and the feline microbiome [15-17].
So, given how much there is to gain from feline research, why aren’t cats studied more?
Cats can be particularly sensitive to unfamiliar environments and handling, and stress can substantially alter their physiological measurements [18]. These realities create challenges for researchers trying to measure cats under laboratory or clinical conditions. Cats can also be picky eaters and can show pronounced food neophobia, especially when a new food differs substantially from a cat’s previous feeding experience or when a food is introduced under stressful circumstances [19]. This can make dietary interventions especially tricky (did you know they may not even taste sweetness?). Those practical difficulties may be one reason researchers more often end up studying dogs [15], and why protocols designed around canine participants do not always translate well to cats.
Cats are also built to hide signs of illness — behavior often understood as an adaptation to their evolutionary history as both predator and prey [20] — so illness can sometimes be relatively advanced before we realize something is wrong [14]. Cats seem to receive less veterinary care as well; U.S. data suggest cats visit the veterinarian about half as often as dogs [21]. Ask any household with both, and getting the cat into a carrier is rarely as simple as getting the dog in the car. The combination of less noticeable signs of illness and fewer trips to the vet means later diagnoses and less clinical data available for researchers to work from. It also means that supporting cats’ health at home is especially important.
Human cultural factors may play a role, too. Cats have long been stereotyped as aloof, antisocial, difficult, or even as bad omens, and researchers studying feline behavior have argued that those misconceptions may themselves have contributed to some gaps in what we've chosen to study [15].
So where do we go from here?
Towards more feline-specific research!
We need research methods built around feline nature, and scrutiny on what goes into the products made for them. The pet nutraceutical industry is ramping up, so now is a great time for us to start ringing the cat research bell.
The taurine tragedy is a case study in the risk we take when we change an animal's environment or diet faster than our understanding of its biology keeps up — an example of how important it is to understand a system before you try to alter it. Nobody set out to harm cats. The problem was that we did not yet know enough about their unique nutritional requirements — or how food processing could affect them — to recognize the risks of our meddling. Cats have their own unique biology and needs, and we've pulled them out of their evolved way of life and into ours, which means the opportunities to get it wrong are many. Understanding their needs and how what we do impacts them is the least we can do.
P.S. This blog was inspired by International Cat Day (August 8th), which was founded by the International Fund for Animal Welfare in 2002 to raise awareness for cats and feline welfare.
References
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