No appetite for change

I have many sets of eyes following me around the house.

No, I am not a person who has gone crazy in a portrait gallery.

I am a person who has changed her cats’ food. Oh yes, I have achieved villainess status.

It started so harmlessly. I was at the local store buying cat food and saw – egad – the manufacturer has put out a second line of generic cat food. This one promises lower fat and higher fibre. Now, I have to say, as the chief scooper in the house, what our world does not need right now is more poop, smelly poop.

But my tubby tabbies, calicos, tortis, marmalades, petc. could all stand to lose a few pounds or kilograms.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

I don’t fill my cats’ food dishes full in the evening. If there is food there, I prefer they eat it throughout the night so in the morning I can refill with all fresh. So it was no surprise to me that first thing in the morning there was a small herd of them anxious to be my best friend, or master. However you want to look at it.

Downstairs I went to our basement to refill the twin bowls. (We have more than two cats, but they don’t have much to do during the day save line up for the food and litter box.) Shazam! The cat food bin was empty – time to start the new stuff.

Now, this ain’t my first rodeo when it comes to switching cat foods. I know you have to slowly “mix and move” or the cats will get very bothered. But my thinking was, it’s the same brand, only a little less fat and a little more fibre. They’ll never notice.

They did and they have. Twelve hours later they have gone from purring and giving me their “I’m so hungry” puppy eyes, to hissing and spitting at each other and glowering their disgust at me. If they could speak, they would say (punctuated by language that would make a cat on a sailing ship blush,) “And we thought you cared!!!”

The food bowls are still full. Our fattest cat is wandering from bowl one to bowl two and repeating the motion thinking that the magical full fat, potato-free food will magically reappear. Our fostered feral cat who is terrorizing our household (a story in itself) has come down from the ceiling and is bleating at me from atop the freezer, “What the Hades were you thinking!?”

My husband tries to explain it to me, “It’s like a husband who’s had his bacon and eggs breakfast replaced with vacon (veggie bacon) and tofu scrambler,” or “It’s like a husband who’s had his bologna and baked beans swapped to veggie slices and nine-bean-vegetarian-symphony.”

He is ready to drive to the store to get them the full-fat version (with a stop on the way at Harvey’s, I’m sure.)

What I say to hubby is, “Remember where they came from…” All of these cats came from the area pound, the Rainbow Shelter. They survived on Country Cat – “corn, poultry meals, corn gluten meal, wheat middlings, poultry fat, liver digest, phosphoric acid, salt, all the essential vitamins and minerals.”
And frankly, I've got no problems with that. If it were cheaper, I’d have our cats on vegan cat food – “corn gluten, corn oil, rice protein, peas, pea fibre, brewer's yeast, linseed, potato protein extract, vitamins and minerals, taurine, L-Carnitine, Vitamin E, linoleic acid.” (Here hubby turns paler than tofu).

Truly, I feel badly about feeding one equally intelligent creature (chicken) to another (cat). Vermin – those critters who even still can destroy the crops necessary to human life in the two-thirds world – not so much. But there is no cat food made from ground-up mice and rats.

The cats don’t share my pain and, being true carnivores, see pain as a necessary ingredient in any self-respecting feline’s diet. Except when it involves them.

OK, maybe I have gone a little crazy, because it seems our largest cat, Skooby, is humming a feline version of Audrey’s “Feed me Seymour” song from “Little Shop of Horrors.” As you may recall, Audrey is a human-eating plant – and Seymour is her loving guardian.

If you want a rationale
It isn't very hard to see
Stop and think it over, pal
The gaijin [non-feline foreigner] sure looks like plant cat food to me.

Given that they outnumber us “X” to two and that I don’t want to have to sleep with one eye open, I expect that tomorrow a quick trip to the local store for a transition food might be in order.