Cat Chronicles—Two Outta Three Ain’t Bad

So tonight, at a really unnatural hour, I woke up (See, most people wake up in the morning. But then, MOST people didn’t find it somehow needful to stay up and watch BOTH showings of “The Music Man” the night before on cable. Even in these first few days of unemploymentosity, things are becoming increasingly clear. I am beginning to think that the universe is bonking me over the head with the notion of “um, HELLO, you’re not an office person, and every single solitary other time that you’ve attempted to be what you’re not, you’ve self-sabotaged in a truly epic fashion. So let’s not get too attached to the idea, shall we, of a ‘steady nine-to-five’? You’re a different creature, kid.”)

So tonight, at a really unnatural hour (sometimes you just gotta start over after a tangent like that) I got up and set about the business of feeding my cats for real.

Raw-feeding cats, while it’s not exactly rocket-science, is no joke either. First of all you have to sift through the roughly sixty-billion pounds of virulently-conflicting literature on the science of feeding cats. Then you have to get the ingredients—quite a task, when you consider that the ingredients are things like ground whole-carcass rabbit/chicken/turkey, with hearts and organs included. Which…okay, I’ll say this once: EEEWWWW. But when you take it out of the bag (the bag which was frozen-shipped directly to me, along with a bunch of other stuff, from www.hare-today.com, which I can wholeheartedly recommend), the rabbit meat looks like ground turkey or pale hamburger. It’s the additive—the chicken-hearts, needed for taurine—that are kinda squickworthy. But I once worked at a chicken franchise, in my younger days, and things went on there after closing that…well, let’s just say once you’ve had a raw liver down your back, organ meats hold no fear anymore.

So: rabbit, egg yolk, supplements (vitamins B and E and fish-oil), a few ounces of hearts—stir well, portion into bowls. Place bowls on floor, summon cats….

…hold breath.

We’ve been, as I think I mentioned, feeding chicken parts instead of dry food for a few days now. There’s a sliding scale of finickiness—Cassidy, easily the least-finicky; and then depending on the cat, the meat, the time of day, and possibly the zodiac sign, Bad and Snick. I was most worried about Snick, since he was the most-recently finicky of the two; all he would eat yesterday, it seemed, was bunny-ears. BadCat was doing reasonably well with drumstick pieces, less-well with chicken necks; Snick wouldn’t touch the necks and would only eat a little of each drumstick. So when I put the bowls down, I had a reasonable idea of what I’d see.

I was wrong.

Snickers looked at the bowl, looked at me, and then back at the bowl. And then he began what is, in a cat, the most accurate representation I’ve yet seen of a Dyson vacuum-cleaner. He INHALED that food. He was eating so fast that I was afraid it would come back up, as it often does when he snarfs like that. But it didn’t.

Meanwhile, Cassidy nosed the bowl a couple of times, then started munching at his usual leisurely pace. Only BadCat gave me the much-feared “PLEH, do not want” look and stalked away in search of something more-palatable.

I gave him a few minutes to make up his mind, then tried a trick I’d read about with the cat-food recipes: if they won’t eat it, take a fish-oil capsule, poke it with a pin, and give the food a little salmon-oil garnish. Apparently it’s very good for the cat, and will also sometimes entice the finicky.

I put the salmon-ized bowl down, and the Cat-Food Ballet began.

BadCat: (ambles over)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl)
CatMom: No, Snick. You had yours. (Picks up Snick and deposits him elsewhere.)
BadCat: (sniffs food)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl)
CatMom: No, Snick. You already had yours, I said. Let him eat. (Removes Snick.)
BadCat: (gingerly extends tongue toward food)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl, snaps up a bite)
CatMom: Snickers! No! Leave him alone! (Removes Snickers.)
Snickers: MEW! (zooms to bowl)
CatMom: That’s entirely too bad. You had yours. (Blocks approach)
Snickers: MEW!! (repeats attack)
BadCat: (looks on in bewilderment, occasionally attempting a bite of food)
CatMom: That’s it. You’re goin’ in Tim’s room, buddy, til Bad finishes his dinner. (Deposits Snick in Tim’s room, closes door.)
BadCat: (after some apprehension, licks food; then eats about half of what’s in the bowl.)
CatMom: (releases Snickers, after being sure BadCat’s finished)
Snickers: (zooms over to bowl, finishes all but two bites of what BadCat left; takes long leisurely bath)

So: Cassidy got a full meal; BadCat got less than I would have liked, but he did eat something; Snickers got about two meals’ worth and seems no worse the wear for it.

I don’t know for sure how they’ll react to the chicken- or turkey-based food, but so far, the Cat-Food Experiment is a qualified success. One less thing to worry about, at least.