664
Cats can drink salt water
(lemmy.world)
The fact that you need to tell people not to intentionally give their cat salt water is telling of how far we've regressed as a society.
Humans are naturally curious and lean towards the scientific method, that's why we always need a disclaimer, don't TRY this, they still will.
“Scientific method”?
Most people’s “method” is YOLO/HMB for lols. Thank goodness cats have nine lives.
Yeah or when something has been proven by the scientific method and they want to feel special so they specifically do the opposite of the beneficial thing
load more comments
(3 replies)
Still, that's pretty impressive. Cats are absolutely incredible animals. I'm thankful the "worst behaved cats" still love me for whatever reason because I've been able to see some of the crazy shit they do.
My parents have an entirely blind 18 year old cat. She can navigate the entire house eats fine, plays a bit. Hops up and down furniture, finds the sunbathing spots, uses the litter just fine. You do have to keep an eye out for her if your moving around as she can't smell fast enough if you step in front of her path.
I'm trying to imagine the world from this cat's point of view. Relying on smells, sounds, touch and vibration. I bet she can hear and smell small critters just fine, but would she be able to successfully hunt them?
She can still hunt rabbits somehow.
Not that they let her. They just discovered this by accident. She's an indoor cat that roams their high fence backyard when they're out there.
load more comments
(1 replies)
please don’t go out of your way to give salt water to your cat
Advice to live by.
Don't tell me what to do! /s
Hey, look a feature every mammal may need to evolve in the near future!
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop fucking cats.
When was the right week?
Same week they started or ideally the one before that? 🤷
I've been fucking the dog for decades.
We need you back in the fight soldier, we need to make cat girls (and boys) a reality.
load more comments
(1 replies)
They can drink salt water when times are tough but it still wouldn't be good to drink it for a sustained amount of time.
I'm sorry, have you looked around recently?
Last time cats drank this much salt water was the Hoover administration!
load more comments
(1 replies)
Don’t cats often die from kidney disease? :(
Yes, but often as a result of a long diet with chronic dehydration from a kibble based diet.
The moisture cats consume is from their prey. The blood and juices of rodents and birds hydrate cats.
Canned/wet food cats tend to wind up with thyroid issues instead of kidney. (Well, sorta: there's evidence the BPAs in cans and mercury from fish as a reason for that.)
Well this is partially true. I'm pretty sure even a cat on a perfect diet will still have very high chances of developing chronic kidney disease in old age because it is just common in cats.
Could be wrong but my understanding is that It's partially because their kidneys are so efficient that they often get kidney disease in late age. They're always under a super high workload.
yep, usually the first organ to fail in old cats, so the superpower seems to come with a drawback. edit: removed inaccurate statements
That's why they don't like taking baths
Old age, in and of itself, doesn't kill any living thing. There's always a system failure eventually. Seems like in cats that's commonly kidneys or thyroid.
More evidence that they are evil creatures
I'm my experience folks who call Cats "evil" usually don't have a very clear understanding of consent or non-verbal communication.
I like cats, but this argument is dumb. The people I know who don't like cats don't like them precisely because cats don't respect boundaries or consent the way dogs do.
People I know who don't like Cats don't like them because they expect them to allow them to cross all their boundaries like dogs do. You can't expect a basically wild predator to respect your boundaries, you can however respect its boundaries and that is where the folks I've met who dislike Cats fail. They try to hold it and get scratched because it didn't like it. They overstimulate it and get scratched because the cat didn't like it. I've seen SO many people who dislike Cats because they don't understand how to approach an animal with caution and respect, and think that because the wild predator responded to discomfort the way a wild predator would do, that Cats are bad or evil.
Edit, to clarify, my comment was about people who say Cats are evil, not about people who simply don't like them.
Yes, you can't expect an animal that basically tamed itself to respect your boundaries, and that's why dog people don't like them. They jump on the counter or try to break your coffee cup if it's too close to the edge of the table.
But overwhelmingly, in my experience as a cat shelter volunteer, people who have owned catsand do not like them feel that way, not because Mittens got overstimulated and scratched them once, but because they cannot cope with their boundaries being disrespected all the time. It isn't the cats fault, true. It's just an animal acting the way it evolved to act--but let's try to be understanding about why many people struggle with them as pets.
It really does take a certain personality to be okay with living with a cat.
Wow, you're completely right and I never recognized this before. I'm your quintessential cat person. I've lived with cats since the day I was born. They cuddled with me in my crib. My first word was cat. We joked that I was raised by cats. I'm just used to cats and don't often think about their behavior.
My partner is a dog person, so now we have a mixed family. When the dogs cross a boundary, we do something to correct their behavior and there is the expectation their behavior will change. If it doesn't, we adjust our response until it does. When cats cross a boundary, we still do something to correct the behavior, but entirely expect the cat will continue doing it and respond no differently when they continue with the original behavior.
I grew up in a mixed pet family. My dad loves cats; my mom dogs. It was exactly the way you describe it, too. I get why people adore cats and dogs both, but they do draw different personalities.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
You mean superior.
Found the cat.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Penguins too but its in a supraorbital gland in their beak
Gulls too
we're going to need to evolve this superpower if we want to avoid my grandkids and your grandkids killing each other in the global water wars.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Sort or related question, is that why their piss reeks like concentrated jenkem?
That’d be ammonia, a metabolic byproduct of their carnivorous diet.
Not trying to be that guy, but it's urea, which breaks down to ammonia due to microbial action once it's out of the cat. If a cat is pissing ammonia, it has big problems and needs to see a vet.
Other contributors to awful cat piss smell are mercaptans, the same compounds responsible for the scent of skunk spray, and pheromones and fatty acids released when the cat is spraying versus normal urination. It's all compounded by cats being adapted for arid environments so their urine is much more concentrated than human urine.
I love cats but they're gross little fuckers sometimes.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Dehydration is a common cause for cats to be 'ill' and brought to the vet,* so it could be that their piss reeks because they are having to concentrate it so much in the first place.
*source: a dimly remembered conversation with a vet friend when I asked her why she was adding water to the already wet food for her cat. She said her cat could never be encouraged to drink enough, so it was her way of staving off the annoyance of giving iv fluids to her own animal someday.
It's absolutely a thing, I've had several cats in my life look nearly on the brink of death before basically forcing them to drink or eat turned them around completely. They can be very stubborn. Fountains help a lot because in nature moving water is typically cleaner than standing water, so if your cat always refuses to drink, get a $10 cat fountain on Amazon, it works!
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Airid environment animals that could subsist on metabolic water and blood to an extent. In inland arid environments most standing water never makes it to an ocean, which means it accumulates surface salts and is brackish.
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
664 points (100.0% liked)
Mildly Interesting
22069 readers
171 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS