Sassy cats — Food edition

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Gracie, Morgan and Mollie all eating at the same spot. This never happens! This didn’t happen this week.

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it’s because they’re cats. No one here was in an eating mood this week. They weren’t interested in anything I fed them. However, they were interested in what I fed someone else even if it was from the same can. SAME CAN!

Life is easy when you can buy ONE cat food and feed everyone. That hasn’t happened in my house for a long while. Maybe decades!

Hazel: Don’t give me that healthy crap. I want the gravy stuff. With French fries. I don’t care if it gives me gas.

Some have ailments or conditions that are controlled by diet. If Hazel eats the wrong thing it sets off her toxic nuclear butt. If Mollie eats the wrong thing, she had hairballs bigger than she is. Gracie turns her nose up at almost everything. Even Morgan, the perfect cat, wanted something different from what was in her dish.

I have seven different “active” wet cat food varieties and a few that were universally thumbs down waiting for a trip to the shelter. There are also three different varieties of kibble. We don’t have that much variety in people food!

I cut back on how much I fed them because I was throwing it out. No one likes wet cat food when the edges dry out. That happens in ten minutes.  *bangs head on table* There was talk about unionizing but so far nothing has come of it. There were some hang-up calls to Cat Protection Services. No visits so far but I’m sure the worker would want to move in here.

Mollie is scratching. The vet thinks she has food allergies so I’m trying a new wet cat food just for her. She likes it and it’s grain-free. Morgan likes it too so she waits patiently until Mollie needs a drink of water and then she sneaks in to finish off the plate. If I fed it to Morgan she wouldn’t eat it.

Morgan: I’ve picked out my appetizer!

Hazel, the Hoover cat who eats anything, didn’t this week. She no longer liked the limited ingredient diet that she needs for her intestinal problems. She likes what Gracie is getting instead. Morgan will graze on Hazel’s food which is expensive. It has poop meds in it. *still banging head on table*

To complicate my life more, the ants installed an escalator and now go to the food dish on the second floor. Who has ants like that? As soon as I find that escalator I will rip it out!

We will be gone for a few days in a couple of weeks and I’m trying to settle everyone on a simple routine that the cat sitter can follow without a complicated spreadsheet. I’m already worried she will charge combat pay if Hazel does one of her toxic poops.

Maybe it’s the heat and maybe it’s because they are cats. (I hear dogs are so much easier to feed!) I saw a copy of Bon Appetit next to the litter box with some tuna recipes cat-eared. Perhaps I should be screening their mail! I am screening their calls!

Morgan eating on the porch. She loves al fresco dining.

91 thoughts on “Sassy cats — Food edition”

    • Mollie is the barfer. The other three don’t unless there is a hairball going on. I can also change their food pretty fast without slowly introducing it. Sometimes they don’t like something but that’s only with “healthy” food.

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  4. I am not letting Teddy or Jack read this post! They eat what I put in the bowls. The only thing that is special is the dry food. Jack throws up all dry food except Purina Gentle. If they don’t eat what’s in the bowls in the morning it sits there until I put out fresh food at supper time. They might go hungry for a couple of days but the never starve. I guess I am a mean Mama.😼

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  5. OMG – I know your pain! We have three – so fussy about what goes in their bowl, but so willing to steal whatever is in someone else’s bowl!
    Stick with it -they will act like angels for the sitter, you know 😉

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  6. 10 minutes? Your cat union allows 10 minutes before refusal? Must renegotiate here. (It’s all about the gravy….)
    It’s too hot to eat – even for humans. (cool you have a knowledgable pet sitter. On the rare occasions we leave, it looks like RC Cat is totally cooperative and eats politely and entirely even if dumped once a day….she just making a statement about how Staff better be careful as we can be happily replaced…”Why I keep them, We do not know. Simply charitable, We guess.” she’s been heard to say upon our return….

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  7. Toxic nuclear butt! Oh my goodness! I am très fortunate in that Louis Catorze has never farted – as in, not a single time, EVER – but he certainly makes up for this by offending in every other possible way.

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  8. At least in my experience dogs are indeed easier. I’ve never had a finicky dog, any way. The heat, however, has affected Zena’s appetite. She isn’t eating as much as usual, and yet neither am I. I think we just don’t have the same appetite in triple digit heat! I love your comment that your cats are interested in what each other is eating even if the food came from the same can. They are indeed entertaining! 🙂

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  9. My daughter should stop complaining. Her feeding problems are simple in comparison. Her male cat is too thin. He loves to run around the neighborhood and run off calories, but he’s not very interested in food. The female cat is too fat. So–naturally–when the male won’t eat his food, she’s happy to oblige.

    The thing that’s fun about hearing about cat-eating problems is that anyone who’s had a cat has seen the same behavior over and over.

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  10. I am with Morgan, dining al fresco is the way to go! Everything tastes better on the porch. You are so lucky to have a vet tech for a sitter. I could be away for a few days and hardly worry… just a little worry maybe. Hope Hazel’s tummy behaves while the pet sitter is there. Picture of Morgan with Chippie cracks me up!

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  11. The cats at your house are lucky to have such good staff. I think the cats that live here are less enthused by their staff. Adequate is what I am.

    They want to be fed 3x a day. And one of those times is 3-4 am. And the embarrassing fact is that I have to be woken up to do it. I don’t just get up and do it. Every time Bijou wakes me up, the look of “you have failed me” is what I open my eyes to. And then I fail again by going back to sleep when obviously it is time to play. But I draw the line there and threaten to call the union if they don’t calm down and let me sleep.

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    • 🙂 You are a good pet mom. When Jake was alive, I fed him at 3 a.m. in the hopes that he wouldn’t howl. Never worked. He howled anyway. Now I ignore all attempts to get me to get out of bed to feed them. I get up early so they have to wait. There is some free standing kibble they could snack on. It is the first thing I do though. Feed the cats!

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  12. I understand. I have 13 cats and several are on special diets for health reasons. We have to police them at meals to be sure they don’t trade lunches 🙂

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  14. This was a hysterical post, even though it is not funny to you. I think I mentioned my friend Carol to you when you had another cat post – she has three cats, all with various issues and dietary requirements. She has to have a cat sitter as well to ensure the cats eat in different rooms, so they don’t eat other’s food til the plate is done.

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    • She does loves cats. Gluten-free isn’t big in cat food. The trend is grain-free. Cats are obligate carnivores meaning that they don’t do carbs — grains, fruits and veggies well. However starch is such a universal binder that even when it’s grain-free, it usually has sweet potato or pea starch. Maybe I should let them catch their own food.

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  21. Unless the dog has a health issue, yes, they’re certainly easier to feed than the cat issues you have. But their food can’t be left out. They could eat an entire 16 pound bag of food in one sitting and then promptly puke it up. My cat (Sneakers in Florida who lived to be 16 1/2) used to need a special diet for her kidney issue, but she ate it without a problem. I could keep her food out and she’d eat whenever she got hungry. We could go away for a couple of days and she’d be fine. However, when we got a dog, I could no longer leave her food down when I left the house. He knew not to when I was home, but as soon as I was out that door, the cat bowl would be licked clean.

    I can’t imagine the spreadsheet you need for a cat sitter. I used to print out a full page of instructions for just one dog when we had a sitter. Good luck. Hope their diets straighten out before you leave. Have a nice weekend. 🙂

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    • Hazel would eat everyone’s food if it was on the floor. I have to feed the cats up where Hazel can’t jump. She’s a chubster so it’s not too hard although she’s occasionally made it up to the counter.

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  23. Wow Kate! I love my 2 cats as much as you do yours. And I know I would probably do somersaults (OMG, I’d love to see THAT!) if they were not eating. But, “they” do say that when they are hungry they will eat. They won’t starve themselves. Harry went on a hunger strike when we got Daisy. You’ve seen his size, that did not last long!

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    • I think it was the heat and they didn’t feel like eating much but I wish they would have told me before I tossed out good food! Then again Gracie is always picky. She is happy to eat kibble if the wet stuff isn’t to her liking. Yes, I’d love to see you do a somersault!

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  24. I love the photo of Morgan watching the chipmunk…too cute! My appetite has been diminished this week, I think due to stress. Do cats get stressed? If you can find any ant trails around your foundation, I have a great recommendation. For years, we battled ants coming in the house for water. No bug company could ever get rid of them. Two summers ago, I purchased Terro stakes that go into the ground around your foundation, wherever you might see a trail. That product worked miracles and wiped out ever colony we had. If you kill the queen…no more ants. This summer, I haven’t seen one ant inside the house.

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    • Our problem is that we can’t see the trail. They seem to be coming from the wall that connects to the attic over the garage. We have shrubbery all around and there are no ants in the garage. We keep looking though. I had sprayed inside with some stuff that’s supposed to last a long time and we haven’t had ants since on the first floor. I may try those stakes at the places I know they come in for the first floor. I swear they have installed an escalator behind the drywall.

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      • If you have exterior brick, ants march in the weep holes and use those like tunnels to invade…they are great at hiding and looking inconspicuous when you are trying to locate them….(they learned this from cats, I think)
        Wiping large areas around food bowl with soap and a little bleach sometimes confuses them…but if your cats are anything like our animals, you have to wipe down the entire house to get all the crumbs and smudges…Molly and her visitor Ella like to do the dog style drive thu style: grab mouthful then go munch it elsewhere…I blame then watching humans watching TV….

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        • I cleaned up the ants with a wet rag. When it dried my cat Mollie started to roll in the area I had cleaned as if it were catnip. Not sure what that was all about but she loved that area for a day or two. I had moved the food dish to a more interior location but she would go back and roll in the old location. Maybe squashed ant smell is good.

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  25. Same issues except now I just have Tyler. They seem to know when you buy more than one can of anything. They love it. I buy a case to get the discount. They don’t like it anymore. I recently started a slow switch on the dry I feed for other reasons. Most of the time the answer in our house was adding a little freeze-dried whole life chicken on top of what they didn’t want to eat and wa-la it was good again.

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  26. Love your humour Kate, and the photo captions. Cats, like dogs, nearly always want whatever the other is having, and you’ve got it four fold!!!
    I’m glad I didn’t have an issue with the two dogs………….. once I’d disposed of the smelly open can of dog food in my fridge (I was a bit miffed about that actually) and got both dogs eating Maggie’s dried stuff. Bud liked it, cleared his bowl every time, and we could leave Maggie’s down if she didn’t finish as for once he didn’t pinch it. You could say he was being polite, or that he didn’t like it, or my favourite, he’d had enough and wasn’t hungry. Whether MOH will change him onto it is another matter, but the 9 days he was here, 8 of which were on Maggie’s food, Bud didn’t stink the place out with butt bombs, his motions on our walks were more solid on day 3 and thereafter, and he seemed to be moving better by the end of the week.

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  27. A laugh out loud post 😆😆😆

    I have a feeling it’s the heat, because Theo is also extra challenging right now. For a while it seemed like he was living on air, until I discovered that if I put his food dish outside, he would eat it. It seems like he couldn’t be bothered to be in the house long enough to actually eat.

    I love the picture of Hazel. That is clearly a disgruntled look 😆
    … and the picture of Morgan with the chipmunk … does she ‘bark’ at them like Theo does?

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    • Morgan twitters at any wildlife. She will stop eating to have a chat with them. I imagine there are comments like “you’d taste good with ketchup!” Hazel is the most challenging right now because I need to get the meds in her.

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        • We do. She was a feral kitten and never completely socialized. She wants to be petted and sit next to me but she gets very antsy so it lasts less than a minute. Morgan has caught mice and didn’t eat them. My old cat Jake would have eaten them. He was a mancat in the truest sense.

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  28. My dogs get fed on the patio. They generally hoover their food.

    After one dog got a suicidal early morning possum, though, he stopped eating breakfast. I can’t figure out if he was using his food to lure in another possum or he preferred his breakfast sprinkled with possum blood.

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  29. dogs are sadly not easier …. they eat or whatever they call it… but there is more food on the floor than in their tummies… maybe I should buy some farm equipment… a trough and a pitchfork would be not bad ;O)))

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    • I thought all dogs were “hoover” pets and vacuumed up all food! My old cat Jake used to sit next to my husband when he ate dinner so he could clean up any bits that fall to the floor. (I miss him for that! Now I have to clean.)

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  30. Oh my goodness, what a convoluted feeding regimen they put you through. But then, look at that photo of Morgan on the porch . . . it’s all worth it! You might want to quit banging your head on the table. It’ll give you a concussion. Then who will feed the cats?

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