Animals & nature · 2026
Can a new food smell get cats eating again even when their food stays the same?
Yes—in a feeding experiment with twelve cats, introducing a new food smell restored intake after it had declined with repeated servings of the same food, without changing the food itself. This supports a role for getting used to a food’s smell in reduced eating, but does not establish that smell explains every unfinished meal.
Details
Domestic cats often eat several small meals, and this experiment explored whether becoming accustomed to a food’s smell helps explain why they stop eating. Most of the twelve cats left some of the offered food even after sixteen hours without food.
Researchers compared intake over six ten-minute feeding periods separated by ten-minute intervals. Intake progressively declined when the same food was offered repeatedly. Offering different foods reduced that decline and increased total intake. Switching to a different food also restored intake, regardless of how appealing the new food was.
The key test separated smell from the food being eaten: a dish with separate compartments introduced a new food odor while the cats’ food remained unchanged. Intake recovered under this condition too. In contrast, continued exposure to the same food odor between feeding periods reduced subsequent intake.
Together, these results support the idea that cats’ motivation to eat can fall as they get used to a food odor and recover with a new odor. The experiment involved a small group and short feeding periods; it did not establish long-term effects on eating or show that odor is the only reason cats stop a meal.
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