Fun with Food and Pets

We have two cats right now. We used to have dogs as well, but we travel so much it is just easier to care for cats. The difference in our two cats is phenomenal since they eat side by side and one is a truly skinny, and we refer to him as our “black and white ‘unit’” (after a colloquialism for a police squad car) named Albie, and the other cat is a  twenty-three pounder (which is a huge size for a cat) grey-striped fatty named Moses.

Whatever Moses eats, Moses retains, thus his hefty profile. Moses still runs very quickly, but only when it is meal time and then he is like greased lighting, racing to the food bowl. Albie likes to eat, but he is, for lack of a better word, bulimic. When Albie eats, he eats so quickly that eight out of ten times, as soon as he is finished he will “throw up” this meal in a neat long tube which we are forever cleaning up. Albie is, therefore, a sleek, lean “little guy”.

Albie is currently being treated for a digestive irritation with steroids, with wonderful results. What got me thinking about this article is that the steroids are delivered to Albie mixed with a tasty, chicken flavored cat food. Albie has always loved chicken, therefore he is very compliant with this therapy.

This brings me around to our two collies, Cubby and Trixie. Trixie LOVED a “Milk Bone-like” doggy treat called “Bonz”. She would do anything for a “Bonz”. If you said, “Trixie, would you like a ‘Bonz’?”, she would race into the kitchen and sit like a stone statue until you took one out of the box. Even though she was already sitting you could say, “Sit”, “Now, Sit” and “Sit, girl”, and each time she would scoot her hind quarters as if trying to obey you by sitting deeper into the floor. She would obey any demand (“Speak”, “Lye down”, “Roll over”, etc.) for a ‘Bonz’. Trixie even got so desirous for this treat that we could not even spell “B-O-N-Z” without her knowing what was coming.

Cubby was the “catch it in the air King”. Whereas Trixie was somewhat near-sighted and couldn’t catch anything tossed to her (it would bounce off her nose while she has trying to grab something tossed to her in the air), Cubby could catch ANYTHING tossed to him, pieces of doggy treats, meat, bread, anything that was within a foot of his head, Cubby could catch it in his mouth.

The family still chuckles about Cubby and the piece of fish. As I said, Cubby could catch anything out of the air, and the end result was one “chomp” and he had eaten the morsel tossed to him. One time I was cooking fish, and as usual the dogs were around the kitchen. When dinner was over there was a small piece of fish on the serving platter. I said, “Cubby, come here boy!”, and tossed the piece of fish in the air. Cubby caught it, as his usual, and once he closed his mouth he tipped his head downward towards the floor, opened his mouth and dropped the piece of fish on the floor, and stared at it. And then he stared some more. Once it registered in his doggy brain that, “This ‘stuff’ is not part of my dog world, EVER!”, he looked up at me with a superior look as if to say, “You have GOT to be kidding!”

He glanced once more at the fish with doggy disgust, and once more at me as if to say, “Would you like to try again?” “Some steak, perhaps, this time?” Our children started making up Cubby statements after that (as if Cubby could speak them in; a deep low voice) like, “I don’t eat fish”, or “I don’t eat anything that lives in the water”, “I don’t like things that have fins.”

Pets are wonderful, and everyone who keeps one knows the joys (and trials, too) that pets bring to the life of a family. I can’t ever imagine being without at least one pet. They can bring humor as well as joy into your life.