I’m a muffin stealing whore…

I’m a muffin stealing whore
(photo author unknown –
but not by me)

Cats are finicky little gits. But that said, probably no more so than we humans. Boris is no exception to this – he has always been fussy about what he eats and when. As I said in an earlier blog post, I’m convinced that his meowing for food is usually nothing more than a power trip rather than a desperate plea for food from a starving feline. He knows he’s the boss here, but it doesn’t hurt, once in a while, to ensure that premise is clearly understood.

When he came to live with me in Padova, his vet told me that he had some stomach problems and that it was better if he only ate cat biscuits rather than the wet stuff as this would probably be bad for his stomach. He was also not to eat human food. So, I started him out on biscuits and tried a number of different varieties. It turns out he preferred just one. Not just one brand, but one flavour of one brand: Chicken and Rice. He can also tell the difference between the “normal” chicken and rice and the “urinary protection” chicken and rice varieties. He will not eat the urinary protection ones. He just scratches around the bowl – a sign that he just wants to cover the damned things up and have something else – or meows at me intensely until I relent.

Oz was still with us then, of course. Oz would eat most things – but not biscuits; he preferred the wet stuff. I alternated his brands and flavours a lot. Sometimes he would love to eat the kite-kat brand and then he’d get bored with that – all flavours – and I’d buy whiskers which he would then consume with gusto, but again there would come a point when he would decide “enough of the whiskers” and would just stop eating again. Sometimes these choices would last weeks, sometimes days. It was often a struggle to know what he would eat. Boris, on the other hand would like to “taste” Oz’s food once in a while, but wouldn’t try to eat it all. Never. Either he knew it was for Oz and therefore accepted it wasn’t for him, or he knows that it really doesn’t agree with him and avoids it.

During the summer Boris stopped eating much. I think it was the heat. I tried him again with other biscuits, but no thanks, and also with wet food – and absolutely no interest there. He also has a tendency to regurgitate (some cats do this a lot) and this was also worryingly frequent during the summer. But, once the heat subsided a bit he returned to normal. Recently though he stopped eating the Chicken and Rice biscuits. It was a sudden thing, but he seems to have decided – after 2 years of eating them, that they’re not for him. A change in recipe perhaps? Possibly. Perhaps I should write to the manufacturer and ask – who knows, they might even send me some free samples. Anyway, I discovered that there’s a Turkey and Rice flavour which is apparently also good for dealing with fur balls so we are trying that. He seems happy to eat it.

He sometimes also shows an interest in what I eat – often wanting to come up and sniff my mouth either while I’m eating or just after, but he has never tried to eat my food. I suspect that would be different if I was eating meat or fish, but since I don’t eat either, I guess vegetarian dishes don’t appeal to him. That said, I recently caught him drinking water from a glass on the table where I work. It’s not something I had ever seen him do before and didn’t know he did it. It’s not something I can stop when I’m not in the room – so although I am not encouraging him to do it, I’m not actively discouraging the behaviour either. Cats need to drink as much as they can and I’d prefer that he drank out of a glass on the table than from the toilet bowl. I’ve caught him a few times with his front paws on the rim looking down – but thankfully never caught him actually drinking. I try to remember to keep the toilet lid down to discourage him from this. It seems Boris is not the only one – Oz obviously liked to drink out of glasses too – something I wasn’t aware of until two friends shot this little film of him…

 

So there you have it. Boris is not a muffin stealing whore – just a finicky little git. This post will probably only appeal to cat lovers (if even to them) so should perhaps carry a public health warning, so here it is:

DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU ARE NOT INTERESTED IN READING ABOUT CAT EATING HABITS.

Oh damn, too late! Such is life…