The Cat Who Lost Its Fur

I once appeared on the state merit list. As is custom in India, we celebrated by distributing pedhas—a sweet made of highly condensed milk—to relatives, family friends, and schools. Our home was filled with stacks of boxes. Anyone who came to congratulate me was offered a sweet. Our cats didn’t offer any congratulations, of course, but as members of the family, they received their share nonetheless.

They feasted upon them. Normally, cats are cautious eaters; they seem to know exactly when they are full and which herbs to chew to fix an upset stomach or a cold. Because of this natural wisdom, we rarely needed a veterinarian. While any child eating as many pedhas as those cats would have met a raised eyebrow and a confiscated sweet, the cats received different treatment. We assumed they knew their own limits and could fix any ailment that followed. We also knew they wouldn't have cared for our disapproval anyway—they knew their way around the house and were masters of their own lives.

However, we were soon proven wrong. One of our cats began losing its fur; another went blind. We rushed them to a vet, only to discover that both had developed diabetes. They passed away shortly after. My academic success unexpectedly left a trail of painful memories.

I eventually shared this story with my colleague John, a fellow cat lover who knows a great deal about them. He revealed a fact we hadn't known then: cats actually lack the sense of sweet taste. While they can sense proteins and fats, sugar is invisible to them. They ate the pedhas voraciously because they smelled the milk proteins, completely unaware that the sugar within was dangerous to them. Learning this eased my guilt slightly; had we known, we never would have fed them those sweets.

This realization brought back two other memories. At the time, commercial cat food was rare, so we fed our cats dried fish. Since we didn't eat fish ourselves, we knew little about it and relied on the cats' instincts. They ate the fish greedily, but soon began vomiting. A vet visit revealed the culprit: the high salt content used for preservation. We switched to unsalted dried fish, and they were fine.

The second memory was more gruesome. We had applied a special fertilizer to our coconut trees. It contained fish scales mixed with a chemical compound. One of our cats, attracted by the scent of the fish, ingested the fertilizer and was poisoned. Our belief that cats possessed an infallible instinct for what was safe had been proven wrong for a third time.

These days, we often hear of animals suffering from "psychosomatic" or human-environment diseases: pet dogs with high blood pressure, cats with diabetes, or tigers in zoos developing heart trouble. Perhaps one day we will hear of zebras with ulcers. In the wild, natural instincts are a shield. But once animals enter the human sphere, those instincts fail them. They cannot sense the hidden "poisons"—the sugars, salts, and chemicals—of a human environment.

Humans have struggled to cope with the artificial conditions we have created for ourselves, yet we continue to subject animals to them. True care is not about treating animals like humans; it is about respecting their biological boundaries. Perhaps, instead of trying to make them like us, we should try to learn something from them to solve our own problems.