Mildly Interesting

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.

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.

please don’t go out of your way to give salt water to your cat

Advice to live by.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop fucking cats.

Are oceans getting saltier? The glaciers that are melting are pure freshwater

EDIT

I'm not an expert but from a quick googling it seems the oceans are getting LESS salty

https://www.llnl.gov/article/37921/atmospheric-warming-altering-ocean-salinity-and-water-cycle

I'm sorry, have you looked around recently?

Especially when kidneys are often the first part that craps out when they get old

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.)

yep, usually the first organ to fail in old cats, so the superpower seems to come with a drawback. edit: removed inaccurate statements

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.

Not a crab

kidney disease is one of the most common ways cats die of old age so super efficient kidneys dont come without a tradeoff. Cats have evolved to live in very arid enviorments where saltwater is all that is availible so the tradeoff might have been worth it. ability to drink saltwater only would work without kidneys being prematurely overstressed would be likely if animals had higher normal salt content but that would mean they would need a lot higher salt intake making living inland harder.

Evolution is considered a success if the animal lives long enough to successfully mate and nothing else matters to mindless evolution. At least cats don't have curly tusks that borrow through the skull if they live long enough like that infamous boar species I can't remember the name of.

That’d be ammonia, a metabolic byproduct of their carnivorous diet.

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.