Jinx eats only dry food. Friskies, usually. I've read enough about the crap (by product cereal filler and sprayed on grease for taste, mostly) they put into commecial pet food to wish I could feed her real food, like they tell you how to make on those hippie organic they-are-our-companions pet sites. There are recipes to blend up raw meat and cereals and animal organs and all kinds of other stuff for optimum nutrition. You can make a ton and freeze the extra for later feedings, so it's not like you're spending more time (maybe $) on your ass-licking feline's meals than your own, but it's still a far greater effort than just opening a 50 pound bag of Friskies and pouring it into a self-refilling feeder. Maybe someday when I can afford it, etc.
She eats the dry food happily enough, and gets table scraps semi-frequently, though not as often as in her first couple of years, since I eat meat far less often than I/Malaya did when we lived together. She's gotten pickier, too. (Jinx, not Malaya. Well... her too, I guess. Hence me here, and she there.) Jinx used to eat bread crumbs, popcorn, soy milk, ramen noodles, and virtually any kind or quality of meat we'd give her. She still enjoys some of those, but these days she'll often beg for something she ignores once a morsel of it is provided. She also gets a can of tuna, or just the juice from it, once in a while, and enjoys that quite a bit. Oddly, she's not a big fan of actual wet cat food. She won't eat the usual foam-rubber looking canned type at all, and when I give her one of my dwindling supply of cat food in a pouch, she'll lick up the juice, but generally ignores the shaped meat-chunk pellet things. Not that I can much blame her on that one. They look awful.
One thing she does love, without reservation, are cat treats. She loves the
Temptations variety, in any flavor, but has never failed to prrffff and chirp about and leap for and run after any other brand I've picked up at the $.99 store. I usually feed her 10 or 12 at a time, every other or third day, and she loves it. I shake the jar I keep them in, and she perks up and runs over and rubs anything nearby. She'll bark of brrrowfff a bit if she's especially excited. When I feed her I do it one treat at a time, and always by throwing them. She loves to chase them down and chomp them as quickly as she can, and she'll run back to me after each throw if I make her wait. Her swatting instincts are displayed to good measure during this ritual, and quite often I'll toss one over her head, she'll leap and bat at it, and knock it across the room like a drunken volleyball player.
A typical session has her knocking away and losing 2 or 3 of the 10 or 12 I toss her, and I'm sure when I move out of this apartment and pack up all the furniture, I'll find a good handful of these things behind the bookcase and couch. Often I'll see Jinx digging under some piece of furniture, or pawing around a corner, then happily chomping the treat she's just located and dragged into biting range.
She eats Friskies too, and can easily be tricked into running after one if I throw it like a treat, but when she catches it she sniffs in surprise, then turns and withers me with a glare of disgust; fair payment for my treachery!
So, two questions. What's in the treats that makes them so much more delicious, and why don't they just make Friskies (or other bulk cat food) taste like treats?
Personally, I think it's a conspiracy. A kind of mutual non-aggression pact between the cat food companies. They all make some basic model of cat food, and they all sell treats, which are about 50x as expensive, by weight. Obviously the treats have a vastly higher profit margin, so it's in their interest to have treats taste much better than regular dry chow. After all, if Jinx didn't bark and run around and leap for them, I wouldn't keep buying them to feed her.
All the cat food companies know that cats like treats better. They clearly have the technology to make tiny dry pellets of food that cats like, and that cats love. Why doesn't one company just make their regular bulk food taste like the treats? Cats would love it, would refuse to eat other brands, the company would sell more, make more money, etc.
Two reasons: First, it would be a short-lived coup, since the other pet food companies would follow suit. Second, it would destroy the treats market, which is, as formerly noted, far more profitable than the dry chow. Therefore, it's in the best interest of Purina and Nine Lives and all the others to keep their dry chow just good enough that cats will eat it, but not so good that it approaches treats quality, since that would bring their whole house of cards crashing down.
On the other hand, it's possible that cats only like treats so much since they're scarcer. If I poured a whole bowl full of them Jinx would gorge, but after a day or two would she get sick of them? Maybe they're like chocolate or ice cream or dessert wine; incredibly tasty in limited quantities, but overpowering (for most people) in volume.
Alternatively, the treats might actually be better quality food. Maybe they've got more meat by products in them, maybe they're less chemicals and fat spray, and as a result cats like them better, and they cost most to manufacture. Surely not 50x more, but enough more that selling them in 25 pound bags would make them cost far more than current cat chow. Of course there are "gourmet" types of dry cat food that do cost much more than Friskies and other generic bulk bags, but I always figured that was just marketing. Same crap + boutique brand name + fancy label = perceived value. Like Grey Poupon; dijon mustard isn't much more expensive than regular yellow mustard, but by selling it in tiny bottles for $5, rather than big bottles for $2, people decide that it tastes better. Gladwell has a fascinating chapter on that in Blink (or maybe it was one of his speeches I read, and I'm conflating the two.)
And with that, I going to give Jinx some treats and go to bed.
Labels: cats, jinx
