Food freshness is important to a domestic cat

I ran a little tests today to see how critically important food freshness is to a domestic cat. My cat likes king prawns. I treat him with them from time to time. I have one packet which has three days left on its sell by date so they are perfectly fresh and edible. Food freshness is important to a domestic cat. Image: MikB based on image from Pixabay. Today I bought a fresh packet, straight off the shelves of Sainsbury's. I gave him some prawns from the older packet and he rejected them. I gave him some prawns from the fresh packet and he gobbled them up. Both were highly edible but he entirely rejected one and loved the other. And of course he checked them out with his nose. The first thing that a domestic cat does when eating food is to smell it. The cat's nose is the arbiter of whether food is good or bad, edible or inedible. This is why they will pick up the smell of a pill inside food and reject all the food or just the pill. I don't think humans have yet fully gr