Tuesday, December 05, 2017

Miss Willow goes on a hunger strike

She is not going to take it any more.
My cat Miss Willow has always been a pretty picky eater but it's gotten really bad lately. And in the past few years she's gotten thinner, which worries me. Meanwhile my other cat Mr. Fuzz is packing on the pounds. I can't win with these cats - I can't feed Mr. Fuzz less because then what will Miss Willow have to eat?

And so, alarmed that she didn't seem to be eating much of her food this week, I decided to tempt her with rotisserie chicken. Well she certainly did like it! She ate all the dark meat from the entire roast chicken I bought at the supermarket.

After the chicken was consumed (I got the light meat) I switched back to canned wet cat food - some of which is quite expensive. I always have five or six different varieties at any given time because Miss Willow will get tired of one kind of food after a few days and so I have to switch it up. Right now I have chicken pate, chicken and liver feast, salmon and shrimp grill, salmon and spinach, chicken and sweet potato - she usually loves that - and chicken with garden greens.

Well she didn't want any of them on Sunday and I really started to get worried. She's too thin to go even a day without eating, she doesn't exactly have a  layer of fat to live off of. I was worried that maybe she was sick. But she was interested in food - every time I put a new variety of cat food down she would smell it and then do that thing cats do where they pretend to bury something. By the end of the day I had six plates of different cat food on the floor, untouched by Miss Willow, but eaten by Mr. Fuzz, who likes to decorate his food with "real fur" mousies as I documented here.

So it occurred to me that she might be on a hunger strike. Rather than risk her health in a strike-breaking attempt I ran out for another rotisserie chicken.

And sure enough, she gobbled it up. She had just decided she wasn't going to take this cat food crap anymore and it was time to do whatever it took to get the good stuff.

Oy.