I think the real rule for cats is, 'if your mother brought you it, then you hunt and eat it; if you feel sick in the hours after eating it, you stop eating it'.

I think the real rule for cats is, 'if your mother brought you it, then you hunt and eat it; if you feel sick in the hours after eating it, you stop eating it'. If you think about it, cats are such generalist obligate-carnivore predators, across such diverse changing environments, that they can't possibly have hardwired prey preferences. (In fact, Kuo in some interesting experiments way back in the 1930s showed cats won't even hunt mice that they are brought up with - they have to be shown hunting & killing mice before they will kill mice, and even then, that is only as long as that mouse was not their 'mother': https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/1930-kuo.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/1930-kuo.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/1938-kuo.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/cat/psychology/1938-kuo.pdf) But if you adopt a simple 'imitate your mother' rule (which is what kittens seem to do during their period of plasticity), then you automatically adapt to local prey in an efficient manner by vertical cultural transmission. (This has some drawbacks, however. Humans don't tend to feed kittens varied food, so their dietary preferences become highly restricted; and it is widely stated, although I couldn't find any good research empirically establishing this, that the reason elderly cats often go 'off their feed' or refuse to eat anything but a single specific brand of cat food which have been discontinued, is these learning mechanisms backfiring. If you learn as a kitten to eat only 1 brand of cat food, and then as an old adult you eat it and then get sick for unrelated reasons...)