Though Jeffrey Steingarten can get away with cooking snacks for his dog (Sky, was it?) and writing about it, I fear that there are certain stigmas (crazy cat lady crazy cat lady) attached to cooking for one's cat. Which isn't actually the reason I've never done it; the cat is rarely interested in what we eat and always made happy by the opening of the Beatrix Potter tin in which his dry food rattles.
But I was roused unusually early from bed by Glyn to watch the cat tossing the body of a rather large rodent around the garden in a disturbingly vicious and playful display. By the time I got slippers on to get a closer look, the cat had begun a reckless, bloody vivisection around the belly, and the beady little eyes had turned into a pair of cartoon x's.
Ew.
After my initial blood/rodent disgust, I felt a strange sense of the natural order of things, the wildness that resides in the domesticated, and the cat's innate desire for protein rich snacks that scamper and hide. That struggle. Not that I've ever pounced to kill, or sunk my teeth into a squirming victim, but I can imagine that both reward with a certain kind of satisfaction that a half cup of Iams Original for Adults 1+ does not.
A bowl of brown sugar lives on the coffee table and though he's sniffed it once or twice, his apparent lack of sweet receptor nerves means the sugar bowl might as well be a pile of shredded paper, push pins, pennies. Ah, but when Glyn pulls a lamb shoulder or half a dripping duck from the barbecue and the garden smells of smoke and meat, it's another story. When we return from the Japanese grocery store with bags of dried kelp and bonito shavings, the cat is dizzy with interest. And when a fly enters the house by means of the sliding glass door, the cat does not rest until it is silenced and squashed. He has acquired a taste, one might say, but it is not a matter of taste.
The cat was not built for barbecuing and grocery shopping, for taking scraps or begging. He is capable of silent pouncing, lethal neck bites, canines severing a small spinal cord, asphyxiation. My grandparents kept a vegetarian dog whose treat was a raw banana, boomeranged into the air--but cats cannot synthesise certain nutrients in a strictly vegetarian diet, they are serious carnivores. One cannot argue with the digestive tract--well, obviously--claws that sharp, and ears that hear several octaves above Mariah Carey's highest squeal. He can see in the dark! No doubt, the cat is a hunter.
And it would be a shame to let thousands of years worth of evolution go to waste, to enforce severe domestication in a creature with such wild design. "Good cat," we told him, as he looked up with a bloody nose, frighteningly excited eyes, and I wondered how it would be in a few hours after he'd cleaned himself up a bit, when he jumped on my lap for a nap while I worked, "em, good cat."
Anyway, I certainly won't be cooking anything, anytime soon for the cat. I think it sort of defeats the purpose--when he wants variety, protein, and the thrill of the hunt, he can seek it out himself.
We have a cat named Harley. I awoke Friday morning to Harley sitting in our back hallway polishing off a mouse foot. I ran for the bathroom to get a wad of tolit paper and managed to save the little mouse butt and tail before he ate it. He thinks he is a mountain lion. Alas, every time he eats a woodland creature, he horks it back up shortly afterward. Stephen even cleaned up one of Harley's horks, that was the day I knew I loved him! When Martha is home and is cooking Harley goes into hunt mode. He once pounced and grabbed a whole chicken breat in his mouth and took off running down the hall with Martha and I chasing behind trying to salvage the piece of meat from his jaws.
Oh wow, I giggled my way through that comment.
Yes, I've heard about this runaway chicken breast before! Luckily, Milton does not dare to jump around in the kitchen--except for on the floor where he destroys pizza boxes...
My family's cat is a little terror hunter, too. She has killed dozens of mice, moles, voles, snakes, lizards, and once, as a greeting present for my return from college, a squirrel! She never eats, though. She just kills.
When it comes to her protein desires, she begs for raw chicken, flips out at bonito flakes, and tries to gnaw through the plastic covering the thanksgiving turkey. We spoil her rotten, of course, and give her bits of every meat we cook.
Have you tried giving Milton an eggshell yet? Many kitties love to lick the egg remnants from the shell, and then they're left with a free toy to bat around the kitchen floor!
Whitney, hi! There's something a little dark and creepy about making a kill for killing's sake and not eating...and what on earth is a vole?
Raw poulty is safe I assume as Martha's mom's cat and yours both seem to enjoy it. I'll be giving him an eggshell (an eggshell, really?) tomorrow, for sure.
A vole!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vole
Not all kitties like eggshells, but many do. Josie has lost interest in egg in her dignified cat adulthood, but if you can get a kitty who tries to lick all the eggy bits out of the shell and then bat the shell like crazy all around the kitchen, you got you a good kitty.
I thought I'd end up using eggs this afternoon when I started cooking, but I didn't. So I suppose Milton will have to wait. But I'll be sure to take pictures and let you know because...I'm a crazy cat lady!!!
I had to post one more Harley story and then I promise I'll stop. I call it My GodFather Experience. I awoke to my alarm clock one morning. As I streched to try to shake off the sleep my right hand touched something on the right side of my mattress. I picked it up and it took a couple of seconds for my eyes to focus. It was a mouse head! It had this look of total terror on its face and the body was gone. I screamed bloody murder and flung it across the room. Martha, Abram, and Nathan came running in as they thought I had seen a monster. There was a big blood spot on my sheet right next to my head. He had eaten it while I slept. Martha, like me, was grossed out. The boy's thought it was funny. Once I took the sheets off the bed I had to get on my hands and knees and crawl around on the floor until I found where I had flung the little head.
Ew, gross. Seriously, that's really, really gross. Perfectly titled though!
If a cat kills but doesn't eat the animal, it means that it sees you as the alpha of the group and expects you to eat it. It's a sign of submisiveness.
Hi kitchenbeard. Fantastic! But unfortunatley, my cat never kills and leaves the body as offering for me. Since writing about this, he's taken to bringing them home alive for his own amusement, terrorising the hell out of them, and then letting them go when he's finished playing. Not sure what that's a sign of...evil?
And how soon is your website coming?