Why cats don’t care about sweets
Strict meat-eaters didn’t need a sweet tooth, so the gene withered away. Another reason not to feed cats cake.
Takeaway
The cat gene for the sweet-taste receptor is broken, so cats can’t really taste sugar.
What the study did
- The mammalian sweet receptor is built from two genes: Tas1r2 and Tas1r3.
- In cats, Tas1r2 has a 247-base-pair deletion and premature stop codons – it’s a pseudogene.
- No mRNA or protein is made from it, so cats lack half of the sweet receptor.
- Tigers and cheetahs carry the same defect – it’s shared across the cat family.
Limitations
A genetic and molecular study; it didn’t test taste preferences across many cats or breeds.
Citation
Li X, Li W, Wang H, Cao J, Maehashi K, Huang L et al. (2005). Pseudogenization of a Sweet-Receptor Gene Accounts for Cats' Indifference toward Sugar. PLoS Genetics. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.0010003
For general information only; it does not replace advice from your vet.
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