Pussy Whipped

There are six open cans of cat food in my refrigerator.

Now, there are several cats here. Four, to be exact. Two inside that were conscious acquisitions, and two that appeared in the yard hungry, and one of them bleeding. So, it was out of my hands. More alarming to me than the fact that I have four cats, is the fact that four no longer seems like that many. Each day, I love them more.

Two are male, two female, two under five and two over ten, two indoor, two that split their time inside and out, one long-haired, three short-haired, one insulin-dependent diabetic, one with kidney disease, one lap cat, one marmalade with seven freckles on his nose, one that is super-easygoing, one that likes things THE WAY SHE LIKES THEM, and two that are mistaken for black although one is chocolate brown and the other has gorgeous red highlights. I could go on, but I think you probably get the idea. They keep me busy, and on my toes. I've written Haiku poems for each of them.

Now if anyone actually read this blog, there would be a percentage of you that automatically went "I hate cats" before you even read past the first line. May I take this opportunity to say, I hate people who say that. I find it a strange phenomenon - when I say, "oh, I need to pick up cat food," or something equally innocuous, someone nearby will say "I HATE CATS." There are almost no other times in polite discourse that someone would tromp all over good manners and make vehement personal opinions known to the person who so obviously doesn't agree. (Barring election years....) I mean, if that same person were talking about, say, a mushroom pie they made and how delicious it was, I would, even if a MUSHROOM KILLED MY MOM, find something to say about it that did not insult the mushroom lover. It's just the right thing to do. "My sister would love that recipe," or even, "I was never a fan of mushrooms, but that sounds good even to me! Ha ha."

If I were a different sort of person, I would, rather than secretly hate the cat haters, see their "I HATE CATS" and raise them something along the lines of "Really? Well that tells me that you are a lazy, complacent a-hole, who wants everything handed to you." I mean, if you can't even take the 30 seconds it takes out of your precious selfish day to befriend a kitteh, why are we even still talking? And, if you don't have the basic manners to keep your damn mouth shut in the face of my obvious cat-ownership, then really, again, why are we wasting our time? This is never going to work out.

Anyhoodle. Back to the cat food. Louise, the diabetic, ought to be eating meat. They all should, with very little to no grains and vegetables. Almost all cat food has grains and vegetables, as filler, and to sell to humans, who perforce must think that grains and vegetables equal good health. Advertising makes the world go round, but in this case it also causes diabetes in cats. They are carb overloaded without a system to deal with it, and so poor Louise gets two insulin shots a day. She is also a grazer, which doesn't help matters, but long story short, I'm trying to get her to like a meaty wet food. All goes well for a few days, but then she eschews the food, arranges her pretty paws, and stares at me. So I open another can of different food. And so on. The other cats seem fine about getting the leftovers, but I think you can see that getting all four cats on the same food would be a boon for this caregiver. But Louise, the eldest, and first-adopted, is Not Happy. Oh, she purrs, and is Doing Well overall, but we haven't found the Perfect Food. Mind you, I've tried 100% Venison, Pheasant and Buffalo. I'm running out of options. But then, no one said they were easy, and I don't want them to be. I want them to be their little individual selves. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Unabashed,
Jenny