It's come to this: I have begun lying to pussycats. In particular, I have been lying to several of the feral cats I feed on my back porch. I do not feel good about this but I have found it necessary to lie to them, particularly to the one I've named Max. In the photo above, the cat on the left is called The Stranger Cat and the one on the right is Max.
Max is perpetually hungry. In the morning when I get up and go downstairs, Max is waiting. If I don't immediately open the sliding glass door, he pounds on it with a paw and he howls until I open a can of Friskies cat food (preferably, Mixed Grill) and the opened can and I are outside on the porch. Now, the way he would like his meal served is as follows: I would put one spoonful into the bowl. He would eat it in full, then give me a look and I would put another spoonful of food into the bowl and he would eat it. And then another spoonful and another and another until the can was empty, whereupon I would open another can. In this way, Max would not have to do a thing he hates, which is to eat food that has been in the bowl for more than two minutes and twenty seconds.
Well, I don't have time for that. I can't stand there all morning ladling fresh food into Max's bowl. I have things to do — calls to make, obits to write, Fred Kaplan articles to link to. So I dump the entire can into the dish and go back into the house to make a protein drink or something.
Max eats about a tenth of the can, then stops and yells for fresh food.
I am not about to open another can when he still has nine-tenths of one before him…and here's where the lying comes in. I walk out onto the porch with the empty can and the spoon and I mime like I'm putting more Mixed Grill into the dish…and most of the time, Max is fooled. He thinks he has newly-spooned chow in there and he resumes gobbling it down. Sometimes, I take the dish inside, do nothing to it, then bring it back out and place it before him. He thinks it's fresh food so breakfast continues. Of course, I accompany both fibs by telling him, "Here's more food for you, Max!" But there is no more food. I'm lying. I do this with the other cats, too. They've all learned from Max that if you take two bites and yowl, you get fresh grub.
I always feel guilty about this. I'm confessing to you here to get it off my conscience and also because I don't think Max has an Internet connection. If he does, I'm really screwed.