Here is your latest Pussycat Report, live from my back yard…
We presently have four cats who are more or less constant dinner guests. They work in shifts: At any given time, two of them are here for breakfast, lunch, brunch, mid-day snacks, late-night dining and any other meal they can squeeze into their day and out of me…
We have Lydia. Lydia is the small, multi-hued creature that, you may remember, I trapped and took in for a feral abortion.
We have the Stranger Cat. The Stranger Cat is a lovely animal who is friendly and undemanding. He just sits on the porch, waiting patiently for someone to come out and feed him. Lydia and the Stranger Cat often arrive at the same time, apparently from different starting points.
We have the Stranger Stranger Cat. The Stranger Stranger Cat is obviously a relative of the Stranger Cat…perhaps a daughter or younger sister. The Stranger Stranger Cat is the shyest of the four. One night, she was in an odd frame of mind and she came up to me and rubbed up against my shins and demanded to be petted. But except for that one inexplicable moodswing, she stays far from any human.
And then there's Max the Bulimic Cat. That's Max in the photo above. Max is a large feline who is always either eating or about to eat or throwing up what he just ate so he can eat some more. That's how he spends his days: Binging and purging, binging and purging. You'd think he'd be built like a supermodel but no. The purging can't quite keep up with the binging, which is why Max weighs about as much as a Buick LaCrosse. And for what it's costing me to feed him, I could buy a couple.
Max will eat anything but he especially likes to eat what Lydia is eating. So what will happen is that I'll put one dish of vittles out for Max and one out for Lydia — the same food in each dish — and each feline will begin nibbling. Then Max will notice Lydia munching away and he'll decide he wants to eat her food…so he'll go over and chase her away and begin partaking of her Friskies. Lydia will circle around and start eating out of the bowl Max abandoned and all will be well…
…for about 90 seconds. That's how long it will take Max to notice Lydia has supper. You can almost hear him think, "Hey, I want to eat her food," forgetting that less than two minutes ago, it was his food. He'll go over and spook Lydia and cause her to flee from that bowl, and he'll resume chowing down from it. Lydia will sneak back to her original bowl and…well, I think you can see the pattern beginning to emerge.
Max is not that way with the Stranger Stranger Cat. He takes pretty good care of her. He'll come up on the back steps and howl for grub while she lurks in the shadows or behind a bush. I'll put food out and then, once I'm back inside and the patio door is closed, the Stranger Stranger Cat will cautiously approach and Max will share the food with her…and only her. (One of the reasons he gets so much food out of me is that I always think he's asking for the two of them…and it sometimes turns out that he's alone.)
Max is also deferential to the Stranger Cat, perhaps because the Stranger Cat is older or maybe it's because he's a he. Max won't share his food with the Stranger Cat but does permit the Stranger Cat to dine, uninterrupted. And if there's a moment when there's only one bowl of food out (because I'm preparing the second), Max will let the Stranger Cat have it. So he can be gracious when he wants to be.
I give them wet food and I give them dry food. Max prefers the wet food and will demand it, even though there's a whole dish of the dry stuff out there. Eventually, if I don't respond with canned something, he'll grudgingly go over and have a little of what's there. I'm thinking I'm going to steer him to more of the dry food as he seems to eat less of that, and he could stand to lose a few pounds. If he keeps eating the way he's been eating, we're going to have to have his fur let out.
And that's your Pussycat Report for today.