Louis Catorze’s fancy new food has arrived, and I have successfully destroyed the receipt so that Cat Daddy will never know how much it cost. When I was ordering it I made the mistake of reading the description to Cat Daddy, and he was so aghast that he spat tea all over his laptop. “Imported from Canada?” he spluttered. “IMPORTED? FROM CANADA? He’s a cat!” Then I reminded him that he was the one who instructed the builders to put an extra pillar in the kitchen just so that Louis Catorze could have a feeding station, and he shut up.

There are many types of cat food on the market, and deciding which are good and which aren’t is down to personal choice, but there are 2 ingredients that I really feel cats could do without:

1. Grains. They don’t do anything for cats – nor for humans, come to think of it.
2. Sugar. Just NO. Quite frankly, I would rather give Louis Catorze heroin than sugar.

My boy has the added problem of needing to avoid rabbit, flax, fennel and egg, which appear in a surprising number of foods. So, whilst it may seem absurd that we’re on a constant mission to reduce the miles travelled by our own food when our cat’s food has been flown from across the world, trying to find one without the troublemaking ingredients really wasn’t that easy. Acana Pacifica was virtually the only one.

When getting your cat to eat a new food, apparently the trick is to mix it in gradually with the old one; not only is kitty less liable to get an upset stomach, but this also means that the little sod is less likely to refuse it after all the pains you have taken to find it. So I did exactly this with Louis Catorze – 10% new food to 90% old food to start with – and I was met with the “And what the hell is THIS shit?” look.

Oh dear. What are the chances of a cat who doesn’t like food, eventually getting hungry enough to eat food he has previously refused?