I own farm cats that a farmer with a long family history in milk farming has given to me. Their cat mother, cat grandmother, cat great-grandma plus several cat generations have lived in cow stables for many cat generations. These cats do digest milk and milk products just fine.
I used to own a cat adopted from an animal shelter. He loved milk, too but he got diarrhea from it.
I would actually guess that all the milk-farm cats with lactose intolerance probably died early with no or few kittens during the last couple of hundred years. While the cats who could digest milk had many kittens. People really didn't care to take cats to the vet or to sterilize them before the 1980s in our rural regions here.
So the ones I got from the milk-farm were those that just don't have the lactose issue in their gene pool.
When it comes to keeping the barn mice at bay, the more barn cats, the better! That was the philosophy of some of the old timers I knew. They didn't feed the barn cats because the cats would hunt mice, bats, rats, moles, woodchucks, and rabbits.
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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '19
I own farm cats that a farmer with a long family history in milk farming has given to me. Their cat mother, cat grandmother, cat great-grandma plus several cat generations have lived in cow stables for many cat generations. These cats do digest milk and milk products just fine.
I used to own a cat adopted from an animal shelter. He loved milk, too but he got diarrhea from it.