I’ve been feeding a neighbor’s cats while she is on vacation. There are four cats. One of the cats has asthma and requires twice-a-day medication, so I must go in the morning and in the evening in order to mix her kitty meds with wet cat food. I try to spare an extra 5 minutes to play with the feline herd by dragging dangly toys along the ground, to mimic the movement of mice. Although the cats watch with interest, they would no sooner pounce on the “mouse” than I would hunt and spear a piggy bank.
There is something uniquely repugnant about wet cat food: The visceral smell upon opening the can, the squishy noise it makes as I mix in the powdered medicine, the slimy trace of congealed liquid left in the can that I must wash out so it can be recycled. My mind can’t even fathom the depths of the industrial food chain from where wet cat food comes. Below fast food, below USDA school lunches, below prison food, below Denny’s, there is a grade of meat made entirely of animal byproduct and presumably not fit for human consumption. But for kitty…
I wonder if the cats can discern a taste difference between the Gourmet Turkey Cutlets and the Roasted Beef Feast. Are they particularly gratified when I serve the Chicken Liver Supreme? Incidentally, it seems unlikely that, in nature, a cat would ever have the opportunity to eat cooked cow, turkey, or even chicken. You know the old joke… why isn’t there mouse-flavored cat food, anyway? (Oh, it probably is mouse-flavored, but not on purpose.)
One flavor is chicken and rice, and has actually rice grains floating in the fatty brown sauce. No way! Cats eat rice? Given my own current awareness of the diet that the human body evolved to eat versus the diet that human adopted upon the dawn of agriculture, I feed rice to cats with a little reluctance. Would you give bread to a lion?
But the cats eat it up, voraciously, determined, their little tongues and jaws attacking the meaty paste with primal vigor, shattering the stereotype of the finicky cat, and purring all the while with great yulping breaths in between bites. The table manners of a true carnivore.
