Big Sloppy Kisses

Originally Posted by gizmocat

It's a little less sentimental but probably as good a reason as any.
But why, if Gizmo likes ear wax, doesn't she ever go 'for it' while she is sleeping in the bed right next to me? She only does it while I am carrying her to the living room in the morning.

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The principal constituent components of earwax are complex sebaceous fluids and sloughed off dead skin cells. The sebaceous fluids are composed mostly of triglyceride fatty acids, waxes and cholesterol esters.

A cat is not a spohisticated creature when it comes to its sense of taste. Where a human has close to 10,000 tastebuds, a cat has less than 500. However, they make up for this by having a higher concentration of olfactory receptors. (Estimates vary between breeds, but they have approximately 50 times the number of our 5 million or so odour sensitive cells.) Like humans though, they only respond to the four basic taste types of sour, bitter, salt and sweet - their response to sweet being the weakest. Most of our experience of flavour is actually due to smell - it is our sense of smell which determines why different food 'tastes' different. It is reasonable to assume that cats use a similar blend of smell and taste in determining the palatability of food.

Consider the following. Cats rarely reject a proffered piece of food on the basis of it's taste. They use smell as the discriminator to decide if something is likely to be good tucker or not. Using their sense of smell, the cats subconsciously realise that earwax has a nutritional value - specific olfactory receptors will be triggered by the scent of the fatty acids, the cholesterol, and also the dead skin cells (mostly protein). Cats are specifically attuned to the scent of animal proteins, hence their preference for meat - also the reason why cats hungrily devour earwax (and also love freshly picked scabs).

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