I pay a premium to feed my herd of cats good canned food. It actually comes in varieties with names such as “Primavera” and “Tuscany” and “Florentine.” They seem to appreciate it for a while, but then they’ll expect a change and stare at the fancy stuff until I relent and buy something cheap with lots of gravy. No matter what the price of the cat food, they love that gravy. No telling what it is. I once Googled whether cat food is safe for human consumption. (Hey! What is the internet for?) Guess what? It isn’t recommended, for a variety of reasons. One is, it contains “non-harvested” animals. This means if your dairy cow drops dead in the barn for unknown reasons, you can unload it on the pet-food manufacturers. Everybody’s happy!
Fancy-Schmancy Feast
By Jimmy Johnson
Recent Posts
Ghost of Christmas Past
This holiday Arlo & Janis comic strip from 2022 is similar in concept to the new strip that ran yesterday. I thought the latter ...
Spearhead
I have produced a number of comic strips related to Veteran’s Day. Especially in latter years, I have tried to emphasize the universal experience ...
Dark Passage
Remember: it’s that weekend. The return to standard time can be a bit of a shock in the late afternoon, but I rather enjoy ...
What’s old is old, again
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to build a web site, but there are similarities. Everything needs to be just right, or ...
Back to the ol’ drawing board
I don’t have a lot of time this morning. I wasn’t going to post anything, but I’m tired of looking at that old photograph ...
Thursday’s Child
On Sunday, I teased you with the suggestion there are more changes coming here. There are. They will appear soon, and I think you’ll ...
55 responses to “Fancy-Schmancy Feast”
But, GRAVY!
Leo, my cat, doesn’t care too much which type or brand I give him, as long as there’s gravy. He just loves licking it up, and usually doesn’t start eating until he’s drank whatever liquid’s on top. He’ll eat the pate or shreds, if he has to, but not with the enthusiasm he shows for the gravy. And yet, he’ll happily eat the dog’s food, even though hers doesn’t have gravy. Weird.
My son, on a dare, ate a spoon full of canned cat food. He was no worse for wear. Sometimes the tuna in cat food looks better than the cans that we were eating. My wife asked me to splurge and spend more on tuna. It does make a difference. Or is that tunafish, Jimmy?
If we have any veterinarians in the group, they can tell us whether the hype about pet nutrition is accurate or just a lot of advertising gimmicks?
When I was a Scoutmaster, one of the boys’ dad was a pet supply wholesaler. When he met my new pup, he asked what I was feeding her. I told him I had always used Purina, so she was getting Puppy Chow; I’d switch her to Dog Chow at the appropriate time.
He informed me that that was “poison”, went to his car, and brought me back a stack of coupons for 20# bags of Iams (I fed her for free for the first 4 years of her life with those coupons). I stuck with it for another 10 years.
She – a Golden, and thus expected to live about 12 years – lasted for 14, and was healthier than any other pet I have ever had,
Now, those ads from my youth touting that their brand (I disremember what it was) was the best thing for your dog to eat because of how much cheese it had in it? I’m thinking I gotta call balderdash on that one…………….
I have wondered that also, TR. Anybody in the Village have an answer?
My daddy was a rancher. If we had an animal die we called a guy that advertised as “Your Local Used Cow Dealer.” I worked for him one summer and the stink was not good. I would not label any of it as safe for human consumption as we sometimes had no idea what killed the animal. I sure would not eat it unless I was really starving. The ones that froze to death I wouldn’t worry so much about, but the ones that you fond in the pasture in August would worry me.
“…whether cat food is safe for human consumption.”
If this “virus economy” doesn’t turn around soon, we may have lots of empirical evidence. Possibly some of it from me. 🙂
My girls don’t like the gravy – just the Pate’ – and one likes one kind and the
others like something else. One likes human food (cheese, SPAM, Scoops) the others
have no interest.
If it were marketed to the cats it would be Mouse, Bird Brains, Gopher neck,
Rabbit parts. 🙂
My cats will not eat wet food. Even as kittens they wouldn’t eat it. Makes it real hard to give them a pill as they want dry kibble.
We’ve had two indoor cats, one died at age 16, the next, still kicking at 3. Neither would/will eat anything other than Purina Indoor Cat Chow. We’ve tried moving up market but they won’t have it. They also liked/like Friskies fishy smelling treats.
The live one will turn away from a tuna can, chicken, beef or anything else humans might eat. She does seem to enjoy the occasional lizard head. I think it is the thrill of the hunt.
Going back a day or two, to where Janis is holding a hand mirror up and peering one way and that into her hair. Bonnie in Gloucester gets the prize for figuring out why Janis is doing this! She is examining her roots, which presumably are looking grey because she can’t go to the hairdresser. I didn’t get this, as I have never colored my hair, but I thought it was awfully far-fetched to think Janis was thinking of mirrors on the ceiling in Las Vegas. Why every single person who commented thought that, I cannot understand. You folks are usually perceptive — has this quarantine affected your minds?
Arlo was thinking of mirrors on the ceiling, while Janis was not. That’s why her question was “What brought that up?”
This cam, obviously Explore’s first peregrine cam, neither rotates nor zooms. Once the young can get over the E wall of the “nest” site, they do, and have the full width of the skyscraper out of sight. But all three were just back, & they’ve grown, mostly on a diet of squab & starling. Lots of adult feathers coming in, bits of down shedding.
https://explore.org/livecams/birds/peregrine-falcon-chesapeake-conservancy
Geese have left the MT “osprey” site; 6 or 7 yg foraging on the grass below, guarded by the parents 2-3 days ago, presumably have walked w/ the folks SE? twd the water. Newly built[?] MTDNR nest structure has 2 ospreys, but can see no details from webcam nr original structure. Nap.
Peace,
I once arrived home and found a poor old gentleman being arrested on my front porch. He was happily chatting with the officers while munching on PK’s (porch kitty) dry food. So I guess its edible too.
Regarding cast iron cookware. Has anyone else discovered the miracle of induction stoves?
They only work with ferrous metal. My favorite is the enameled cast iron.
I Bought a little single burner cooktop for about 40 bucks at Aldi and was amazed at how quickly it boiled water and how efficient it is.
Back on the show Greatest American Hero, Ralph’s government handler (Bob Culp) got hungry enough once to try a dog biscuit, and liked them. From then on, that was his regular snack food. And when you consider that they’re basically nothing but ground meat, corn meal and flour, you can see why.
Waiting in the (drive-thru) line at the bank to make a store deposit this morning, I found myself behind a car, out of which an older lady hopped from the passenger side, and walked over to the window. She apparently was making four loan payments, as she was standing there counting out that many wads of cash to shove into the teller’s drawer, one wad at a time. What caught my attention, though, was that she was, about every third bill of each wad she was counting, wetting her fingers with her tongue.
I know there are some, even perhaps many, that believe the need for added cautions during the COVID-19 pandemic are overblown, or even unnecessary. But my Lord, licking currency that has been through who knows whose hands! One should never do that, Rona virus or not. She might as well have been walking down the street licking the hands of every stranger she encountered. I wish her luck.
This morning, Dickens made a trip to his vet’s groomer for his once-every-three-weeks appointment to get “washed, dried, fluffed, but not folded”. (Which may sound spendthrift-ish , but remember, we do have to live with him.) He is now better groomed than I am.
Although Oklahoma hair salons and barber shops have reopened, their employees are swamped with their grooming-deprived clients and likely will be for a while. On top of that, during the hiatus my Very Cute & Shapely Oklahoma Hair Stylist decided to make a career change into the medical field, apparently deciding (correctly, I feel) that if one is going to work in a setting that exposes one to diseases, it should be one that offers medical coverage. So now I have to locate and break-in a new VC&SOHS. Come to think of it, that describes Dickens’s groomer. I wonder if she would consider a two-legged client. Though I would have to remember to tell her not to tie the little bandanna around my neck when she finishes.
Perhaps like this guy did?
Â
https://www.gocomics.com/pickles/2020/05/19?ct=v&cti=1930202
I have shared this here before, but my cat is addicted to this stuff. We have since moved so he doesn’t have to do his flip on a step.
https://youtu.be/c7qmJUUY3u0
Opossum / Panama feeder again.
https://explore.org/livecams/birds/panama-fruit-feeder
Peace,
I’m conflicted on A&J getting old, along with me……………. 🙂
I believe it was here where I read that A&J were aging at 1/4 the speed of reality. That means many of us have passed them on the highway of Life and not noticed. Hurray for them!
Ghost
Maybe it is the coke that supposedly infests 99% of $100 bills
that the poor lady was addicted to.
And yes it was never a good idea to lick fingers while counting money.
You never know who’s pocket was in – maybe some of the lower sorts (like us :-D).
Once I was in court and the court reporter had a bad cough. I pulled a cough drop out of my pants pocket and handed it to her. She laid it on her desk. I never knew if she used it My cats change their taste, which I understand. We have tried low calorie diet food and they will eat it, but they all throw up after they eat it. We gave it to a neighbor and her cat did the same thing.. Cilla forgets her weight and moves like lightning if I throw a kitty treat on the floor. Speaking of treats, did anyone receive their bribery check from the rump yet? We never did.
I got mine long ago by direct deposit, and about a week later my sister got a real check to be deposited.
It took me two weeks of trying to get information on that IRS site before it told me to enter my direct deposit information. From that point it was about two weeks till it arrived in my account. What aggravated me was that the initial reports all said if you had provided your direct deposit information in the last two years, it would be sent direct to your account. After they started sending it out, the story changed to, “if you didn’t get a refund via direct deposit in the last two years, you will need to provide it via the IRS website.”
I haven’t even filed for almost ten years and I didn’t have to provide any direct deposit information. Of course, I get my Social Security by direct deposit, and my VA compensation for my Service Connected disabilities, so they already had all of the information they needed.
Hey Arlo. What about the gray fishy stuff?
Sharing an anecdote about cat food – my sister in Florida had a Siamese cat who refused to eat canned cat food, and insisted on being fed canned tuna (of the people variety – I do not know what brand). After many years of eating this almost exclusively, he developed a neurological problem. The vet said it was mercury poisoning. My sister stopped feeding him canned tuna and he lived for a couple more years, but eventually died from the condition. I suggest that a diet of only canned tuna is not healthy in the long run, for people or animals.
The canned tuna alone does not give the cat everything he needs to stay healthy. That’s why commercial cat foods have all the added vitamins and minerals.
My grandmother worked for a man that manufactured canned dog food (many decades ago)
He would eat his product for lunch.
Was told we qualified for the check (we will all eventually pay it back with interest- maybe our great grandkids)
have not seen hide nor hair.
MIL had cat that ate nothing but raw calve’s liver – we raised our own beef at the time.
The cat lived to 12 or 14.
Does anyone else remember the episode of The Honeymooners when Ralph and Norton found some cat food in the fridge and loved it with crackers? It would be funny today if they edit out the “to the moon Alice” stuff.
Today I ran across an on-line advert for a company that sells shotgun shells. I noticed that in addition to bird shot, “drone shot” is now available. It’s what it sounds like…the ad featured the blurb “Protection Against Invasion of Privacy”. There was no mention of a daily bag limit.
Perhaps fortunately for Arlo and Janis, there was also no mention of “frisbee shot”.
Throwing things through the air reminds me of…
“What do you call a boomerang that won’t come back?”
“A stick.”