Teleidoscope

Thu, Nov 30, 2006

Bacon Cat

Posted at 8:50 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I know that combinations of cats and bacon have a certain notoriety on the net. I am one of those who who found John Scalzi's excellent and consistently interesting blog due to the notoriousbacon-cat incident. Today I had a different kind of bacon-cat incident.

Dave Barry once wrote that he thought little boys must have pointed their fingers at each other and said "bang" for generations before guns were invented and made sense of the gesture. I wonder if there is something similar involving cats and cans.

My cat, Dinah, has strange ideas of what constitutes proper food. Dinah comes running when she hears me open any can except a soda can. It doesn't matter whether I use a rotary canopener or the can has a builtin opener. However, Dinah does not like to eat anything that comes in cans. Jars do not attract her attention.

She is quite a good mouser and often eats the mice she catches. Or parts of the mice, anyway. It would be less annoying if she would finish them off. She has one particular meow --generally slightly muffled -- that means "I have caught a mouse", and I have leaned to be careful walking after I have heard that meow. She very often leaves one particular organ (which may be the stomach or the gall-bladder) and quite often leaves larger parts of the mouse uneaten. I sometimes wonder why on some mice the front end gets eaten and on others the back end.

Other than the occasional mouse, she eats Iams dry catfood. And that is pretty much all she will eat.

When my old cat Little Kitty was very old and I was trying to encourage her to eat, I served her canned cat food and never needed to worry about Dinah taking it. I don't think it was just because Little Kitty was the alpha: I've tried using fancy canned foods as Christmas presents and special treats after Little Kitty was no longer around to own it, and Dinah wouldn't eat it.

When I open cans of tuna or salmon or chicken Dinah appears promptly and begs shamelessly, but she doesn't want the meat, and won't eat it if I give her some. She just wants the juice or broth from the cans.

Similarly, she begs for turkey at the holidays, but if I give her some, she just licks the juice off.

This evening I dropped half a strip of cooked bacon, and Dinah surprised me by eating the whole thing. After 7 months without real mice, she may be missing some variety in her diet, but bacon seems like an odd choice for an addition to her diet.

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