Journal of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery Open Access

Description

A pets daily intake of essential nutrients is a function of the quantity of food eaten and the concentration of available nutrients in the food that is eaten is as important as the food nutrient and energy content. An unpalatable food will be rejected by a dog or cat regardless of the level or balance of nutrients that it contains. Similarly a diet can be palatable bt still not contain adequate levels of some nutrients. Contrary to popular belief dogs and cats are not capable of detecting specific nutrient deficiencies or imbalances in their diet until the physiological effects of the deficiency or excess cause illness or a reduction in food intake. Following this learned aversions to impales diets can develop. For example an arginine deficient diet rapidly leads to emesis hyperammonemia and severe illness in cats. When cats were fed a single arginine free meal they demonstrated single-trail aversive responses to the deficient food when presented with the food on a subsequent occasion.

In Animal related factors the palatability is defined as the subjective pleasure that an individual experiences in association with eating a particular food. Therefore palatability should not be considered to be an intrinsic property of the food and the tendency to select one particular food over another. His topically palatability in dogs and cats has been measured using food acceptability and preference tests.

A food acceptance test examines ideal response to new food and may also record the time that it takes an animal to taste and consume the new food. Because no choice is involved in this initial screening this test only provided information about whether or not the drug or cat finds the new food to be appealing and is willing to eat it. Factors that can affect initially acceptability response to novelty. Food upon the assumption that a greater intake of one food over another is an indication of higher palatability. Using this approach animals are offered the simultaneous choice of two foods for a predetermined number of days and intake is recorded.

One food will be ranked higher in palatability than a second food if a greater volume of the first food is eaten. However limitations of this approach include the confounding effects of satiety when foods of differing caloric density are fed and the inability to discern short-or long-term effects of novelty.

In recent years the assistance of food preferences and palatability in dogs and cats has become significantly more sophisticated as methods have been developed to measure animals responses to the smell taste and texture of foods. Because of highly developed olfactory acuity of dogs and cats, it is not a surprise that the order of a food significally influences food preferences in both species. When presented with more than one food choice cats first smell the foods and will preferentially consume the food with the most attractive odour usually without tasting the less attractive foods. Olfaction is intrinsically linked of taste which appears to be second in importance to dogs and cats during food selection.

For example when cats cannot discriminant among foods using olfaction, they will then use taste to make choice. The sense of touch is involved in food selection when dogs and cats react to a foods shape and texture. Together with the size of kibble pieces these sensations make up the mouth feel of a food. For example increasing the size of kiddle pieces because of their tendency to eat slowly and because they chew foods less thoroughly when compared with dogs. For example cats tends to reject kiddle pieces with sharp edges presumably because these pieces have an uncomfortable mouth feel, other animal-related factors that may influence a pets acceptance of particular food include past experiences age and breed The feeding environment and an owners behaviour can also affect pets response to a new food. Most reputable pet food manufactures recognize this and conduct controlled palatability tests both with kennelled animals and within a wide variety of home environments.