Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [83]
Controversy rages over canned versus dry food, with a heavy weight of authority on the side of the dry, often with a noticeably puritanical ring to it. Those who favor strict rules and discipline for cats seem to insist on dry food as well, as if canned food were a wanton luxury, a dietary satin cushion guaranteed to produce whining, spoiled, demanding children. It isn’t. However, chewing dry food is a kind of feline toothbrush, and may help prevent some dental problems. Many have their saucers of dry food topped off with small amounts of our favorite canned stuffs for excitement; the topping is eaten at once and the crunchy part picked at later.
The “soft-moist” foods in their convenient packets are poorly regarded and often referred to as junk food. I looked up some of the ingredients once in a king-size dictionary and found that one of them is also used in embalming corpses; probably there’s nothing wrong with eating it, but it isn’t something you’d order from a menu if you had a choice.
My vet offers no people food to cats at all, but most of us don’t see the harm in sharing an occasional treat. Some cats get quite excited over it; Sidney, admirer of human customs, was delighted by scraps of this and that, but only at the table, where humans ate. Others will accept them only in their dishes, where cats eat. And still others glare, suspect poison, and scratch imaginary dirt over anything that isn’t cat food. Those of us lazily given to canned or frozen human dinners will get a dismaying look of reproach if we offer to share; perhaps we’d be better off sharing theirs.
I’ve always felt an egg yolk, fork-beaten with a dash of milk, was a wholesome small luxury, but we should throw away the white.
The puritanical experts are also severe about overweight, and to be sure it’s no better for him than for us to get fat, and a cat without enough to occupy his mind may get obsessed with meals and overeat just for something to do. But with a busy, healthy cat I don’t see any sense in fussing around weighing him, and measuring out his tablespoon of breakfast. The fattest cat I ever knew, a neighborhood gent named Junior Reynoldson, was reputed to weigh thirty pounds, and died under a lilac bush at the age of twenty-four, having enjoyed an excellent life. Perhaps if he’d been severely dieted he would have lived to be thirty, or perhaps he would have lost interest in life and died young. It was his vocation, his calling, to be an enormous cat.
A cat that goes off its feed may be sickening with something, or there may be another problem, requiring thought on our part. Corvo, for instance, refused his food for several days and sat in the kitchen doorway watching the others eat. Before I rushed him to the vet it occurred to me that he wanted to be fed in the kitchen doorway, as a mark of distinction from other cats, a sign that, while the others, of whatever breed, feeding in a row under the table, were only cats, he was Corvo. It’s a great nuisance stepping over his dish in the doorway now, but he eats well.
All books tell us to keep a bowl of clean, fresh water available and change it daily, and of course we should. I do, and sometimes, when there are no foul-smelling marigolds rotting in a handy vase, no muddy puddles, leaking faucets, damp bathtubs, or melting ice in a whiskey glass, and someone has put the toilet lid down, they are forced to drink some of it.
Cats eat grass. Nobody knows why. Some claim it’s because they need it in their diets, and instruct us to keep a pot of it growing in the house in winter and for indoor cats. They don’t explain what possible nutritive use it is if the cats are going to keep throwing it up on the rug the way they do, unchanged and only slightly marked by teeth, since cats are not cows. It’s also been put forth that they eat the grass because they need to throw up; but how is it, then, when you open the door on a sunny May morning, that every cat in the house suddenly needs to throw up and runs out to eat