4 posts tagged “cats”
I find myself rushing home.
Because I used to rush home to get Samantha fed, and i felt particularly guilty after going back to working in an office, because when working at home I could feed her whenever she showed an interest in food. (At her weight, getting her to eat was of paramount importance.)
So, I find myself rushing home.
And then about halfway there I realize I have no reason to rush. That no one is depending on me to get home and feed them.
And then I get home, and no one is greeting me with an insistent and outraged meow.
And then I feel like eating comfort foods.
Breakfast:
Green tea
Organic Applesauce
Lunch:
Avocado, Lettuce and Tomato on Sliced Sourdough with Mustard
Chips
Nutrisoda
Snack:
Almonds
Dinner:
Organic Golden potatoes, mashed with Soy margarine, Organic Avocado, Salt and Nutritional Yeast
Corn Salsa
Vegan Chocolate Cake
My vet called today in the afternoon, since I left a message there this morning that Samantha and I would not be making our 9Am appointment.
What a weird weird day.
For almost 20 years I have had my cat, Samantha. For almost 18 years I have continued to buy her carnivorous cat food, even as I was a veg*n. And for many years I have even brought her home leftover turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas from my family dinners.
But let's face it, there's a big difference and distance between buying canned cat food and buying human meat for your cat. At least from a mental rationalization perspective.
But for several months now my cat has been getting more and more finicky. She just doesn't want to eat her special, super-healthy (and I'm sure low-flavor) cat food anymore. A cat's digestive system is triggered by smell, not taste, so I also theorize that in her old age her sense of smell has diminished. So, we've been getting more and more creative and more and more indulgent about trying to get her to eat. We sprinkle treats, catnip, cheese and eventually sliced turkey onto her food to try to get her started eating, after which she often continues. We also finally and for the first time bought her dry cat food to see if she liked that better, and if she could keep it down (in years past dry food experiments resulted in even more copious vomiting than she has always engaged in!)
At the age of nearly 20 and the weight of only 6 lbs, the vet has said for some time that it's more important for her overall health to keep her weight on than to be rigid about feeding her the so-called "healthy" cat food.
Well, I'm sure you can guess that the more we try to entice her and spoil her, the more finicky and demanding she has become. And the more we are indulging her.
I've been traveling a lot too, which make me worry about her and the stress of my absence even more. While I was gone this last time the S.O. said she was barely eating. So I just decided: if it's human food she wants and will eat enthusiastically, then that's what we'll do. I even have a book from way back, the New Natural Cat that has recipes for cooking food for your cat. (Haven't tried it yet, but ready to give it a go.)
So, yesterday I went to Whole Foods and bought a whole roasted chicken...not for us, for Samantha. Sure, it's supposedly a "humanely raised" and "organic" chicken, but it's still totally NOT OK.
At least she is eating it quite avidly...although now she really likes to be fed by hand, I kid you not. If I leave the food sitting in her dish she eats a tiny bit and walks away, but if I sit there and feed her piece after piece, she eats for a much longer time. (And yes, I understand that by now she's getting all sorts of positive reinforcement to just keep doing that.) Serously I can't figure out if taking care of her is like having a baby or caring for an extremely elderly or infirm person, but it's a bit stressful.
I will say this: she looks really good. Smooth coat, not too skinny, and purring like sports car whenever I pet her. That's the reward.
What did I eat yesterday? Not as much as Samantha:
Breakfast:
Coffee
Organic Corn Flakes
Organic Rice Milk
Snack:
2 mini-Midnight Milky Ways (non-vegan, I know...it's a whole other story about showing up to go to lunch with a former boss and discovering he forgot to tell me he couldn't make it, and being a little frustrated and very hungry and snagging two of these bite-sized goodies from a dish on the receptionist desk. Frustration = bad eating for me, probably more than any other emotion.)
Lunch:
A big-ass Burrito from Whole Foods with: Spinach Tortilla, Black Beans, Brown Rice, guacamole, Corn Salsa, Tomatoes
Tofutti Cutie
Dinner:
Organic Golden Potatoes, mashed with Soy Margarine and Organic avocado
So, here's some irony. Right around hitting my 90 days as a vegan, I decided that I really needed to get my geriatric cat to eat more. So I had the S.O. buy her some turkey, and I'm mixing some into every meal. I have always fed my cat regular meat-based cat food. I know some folks say differently, but for the first decade and a half of being a vegetarian it was common knowledge that dogs could be vegetarians, but cats could not. Even now that some places tout vegetarian diets for cats I figure it's not the time to start experiment with my cat's nutrition. She's almost 20 years old. She has chronic kidney disease, for which I administer sub-cutaneous fluids every day. And she's down to about 6.5 lbs...which is about as low as my vet wants to see her get.
Don't get me wrong, she's still in good shape, and looks far younger than her 20 years...she runs about, she still jumps pretty easily, and she still wants attention and strokes all the time. But it's abot the most important thing for her to keep her weight on. My vet long ago approved feeding her eating healthier OTC cat food rather than the prescription diet for cats with kidney issues, because she wasn't touching the stuff and it was more important to keep her weight on than to get a little bit less protein or phosphorous in her food. That's worked pretty well for the 3.5 years dince her kidney diagnosis.
Anyway, lately she's gotten more finicky and erratic...sometimes she'll turn her nose up at her regular food choices. Sometimes she's obviously hungry enough that she wolfs it all down. I felt it was time to do more tempting and enticing. (I also felt that feeding her leftover turkey scraps from Thanksgiving for a week had spoiled her, and that I could track her current finicky behavior back to that date.)
So, here I am tearing apart turkey meat with my bare hands and feeding it to Samantha the amazing geriatric cat, all while hitting Day 90 of my new veganism.
Yin. Yang.
Breakfast:
Organic Corn Flakes
Organic Rice Milk
Organic Banana
Soy Latte
Lunch (a catered lunch at a meeting):
Rice
Salad (non-vegan alert...there was some cheese in this salad, but given that otherwise my entire meal would have been rice, and I was about to speak for over two hours, and I hadn't had the biggest breakfast in the world...I decided to try to pick out the most cheese-free looking portionsof the salad, but eat it even though there were still some cheese remnants there.)
Snack:
Leftover Verdure and Penne form Pasta Pomodoro
Dinner:
Vegan Macaroons from Whole Foods
Vegan Grilled Veggie Sandwich from Whole Foods
Organic Pineapple Juice
