Felines and Meat Free Mondays

Watching the cats turn their noses up at their breakfast this morning started an esoteric train of thought.

First reaction, of course, was the usual hurt a mother feels when her family rejects her love offering of food.  For goodness sake, it's a perfectly acceptable high end range of dry cat food and they are both very healthy as a result.  Yes, I've realised that they don't like the Gourmet Feast flavour and aren't mad about Ocean Fish either, leaving them with Chicken, Hearty Beef and Deep Sea Delights, carefully rotated so that they don't eat the same flavour day in and day out.

But Egg's pointedly averted face, as she sat upright and indignant 3 metres away from the bowl, refusing to tuck in, was an insult and she got a dressing down for it as well.  "You may well be tired of Chicken, but they don't do a Sparrow flavour yet!" I cried in exasperation.  

Hold on, now there's a thought.  Neither of the cats will touch any fresh fish, chicken or meat tidbits occasionally shared with them, although the water poured off a tin of tuna goes down well.  So why assume that they like chicken, beef or fish flavoured biscuits?  It's perfectly obvious that Egg, the hunter, would like a wildbird flavour - Bronze Mannikin, Crested Barbet, Laughing Dove, Bulbul...as for Speckle, if she were human she'd be a hippy, wearing flowers in her hair, long floaty skirts and sandals, skipping through the meadows stopping to greet the sun and stroke a rabbit or two.  Vegetarian, that's her.

The marketing guru's at Hill's and Purina need to get on this right away. Vegetarian cat food, Catnip flavour.  If her reaction to that is anything like the insane way she attacks the infused scratching post, she'd adore Meat Free Mondays, a la catnip.  My father, very definitely a non-cat person, watching her frenzied antics one day expressed his disapproval of the feeding of what he termed 'drugs' to her.

It may be in bad taste to have a colourful photo of a beautiful Golden Tailed Woodpecker on a pack of cat food (and who would eat one to define the taste?) but since the customer is always right, and the cat is after all the end user, why not offer them a taste they'd prefer?  Perhaps bunny huggers would be less sensitive about Rat or Hadeda flavours?  (Still got that taste testing issue though)

Why stop at cats?  Dogs deserve a preferred seasoning as well.  And they stoop to the lowest possible level, sniffing and gulping down truly disgusting items (I won't send you off to the bathroom retching and heaving with a description, but you've all seen the sort of things that dogs stick their snout into and slurp up with relish).  Now that taste development job comes with an enormous pay package and benefits!