It’s official: Louis Catorze is no longer on the steroid pills. And thank goodness for that because, after I came home from hospital, he decided to be extra difficult about eating his Pill Pockets, meaning that every pill has had to be a Greco job. This was how I found his Pill Pocket yesterday, on the floor next to his empty bowl:
He has upped his Greco game, too, having learned (from where?) to do a fake-swallow, spitting out the pill when he’s released. Cat Daddy, incidentally, refuses to Greco, using this defence: “But he loves me! It should be you because he doesn’t like you as much.”
Luckily it’s all over and the little sod is on nothing but Orijen and beauty oil, which makes life much easier.
Orijen claims that their food “mimicks the diet your cat’s ancestors would have hunted and eaten in the wild”. Although there is no doubt that their ingredients read like the tasting menu of a Michelin-starred restaurant, I find it doubtful that most cats would have been able to source them of their own accord. Venison: nope. Wild boar: nope. Bison: HELL, nope.
Catorze is very much a fish gentleman and his food is called “Orijen Six Fish”. I imagine hell would freeze over long before he successfully caught even one fish, let alone six. I chatted a few months ago with one of Catorze’s lovely blog followers about the size of tuna, and the smallest species is twice his size at 7kg, with the largest weighing in at up to 250kg (!). So the more likely scenario would be him falling into the water and the fish grabbing him in its jaws, then promptly spitting him out again after realising that he wasn’t a worthwhile snack (being only just bigger than krill and nowhere near as nutritious).
A true ancestral diet would, surely, have been small birds and rodents, although the idea of buying them freeze-dried in foil somehow doesn’t appeal. I think what’s REALLY going on here is that the good folk at Orijen are just like us, i.e. complete suckers who want the little sods to have the best of everything. And they’ve made up all the stuff about ancestors to shut up those who accuse them of spoiling their pets. “But Alaskan cod, garnished with Saskatoon berries, is what cats have always eaten, ever since the dawn of time!”
Here is Catorze, with his eyes locked on the green parakeets. His chances of catching one are zéro, and the parakeets know this.
We bought our first 1.8kg bag of Orijen from the manufacturer’s website but, since they don’t do a subscription service, we recommend this site: https://www.petscorner.co.uk/cats/orijen-six-fish-cat
They have a huge range of unusual brands and are carbon-neutral, packaging their deliveries in cardboard boxes with paper tape.
The fad among vegans is to feed their cat a vegan diet too. Since cats are obligate carnivores this could really be detrimental to their health. And yet this super-premium cat food seems to contain a lot of veggies. Catorze may not have hunted buffalo in the wild, but we’ll bet he didn’t hunt a heck of a lot of beets or turnips either.
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I bet he didn’t! Ugh, a vegan diet for cats. Just nope.
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Ancestors… Well, how far back? If we are going to Finnegan’s Lion Cousins, we are looking at zebras, gazelles, and whatever else Lions eat. The first House Cats? You just KNOW they enjoyed a luxurious, decadent diet in ancient Egypt, none of which was sourced by them.
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Oh my, I bet ancient Egyptian cats were utterly spoilt, entitled little shites.
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The birds unreachable? The bison too big? But a cat’s reach should exceed his grasp; or what’s a kitty heaven for?
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Can you imagine 3kg Catorze chasing a bison? 🤣🤣🤣
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Our saskatoon is filled with berries. If you like, I can send some to you to prepare a parakeet confit for dear Louis.
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I had to Google saskatoon berries and they actually look rather nice!
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Saskatoon berries taste nice too and the wood pigeons share my point of view.
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“just bigger than krill and nowhere near as nutritious”🤣🤣🤣 Lucky for Sa Maj! Speaking of whale feeding, a lobster diver found himself in the mouth of a humpback whale recently 😱 Look up Michael Packard Cape Cod…True story!
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I just Googled it! Oh my! 🐳
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Love the photo! Hope springs eternal…there may be that one parakeet with a limp that gives Louis Catorze the long awaited snack he desires…
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Oh my, I really hope he doesn’t! Nobody really likes the parakeets because they’re so noisy, but even so I wouldn’t want him to catch one. 🦜
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There is a fir tree outside my backdoor that is a prime habitat for pine siskins, house sparrows, house finches, and Townsend’s solitaires. Every cat in the neighborhood and mine love, love, love that tree. the outdoor cats hunt there, and Andy dreams of that opportunity. Like you, I wouldn’t want Andy to kill any birds. He is an indoor cat, so he has to be satisfied with spiders, house flies, millers, and crickets that occasionally stop by.
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Yes, Sa Maj also kills bugs and I find this very useful. That tree sounds amazing! I am just picturing a circle of cats all gathered around it!
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It gives them pretty good camouflage with its boughs.
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What a great photograph of Louis. A photograph of a determined and driven cat!
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Determined and driven, yet unsuccessful in this case. He can’t jump up to the telegraph wires to catch the parakeets. And they’re certainly not stupid enough to fly down. 🤪
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My Hazel always got meds in pill pockets until that one day when she figured out how to eat the pocket without the pill. The was like the end of the world as she wasn’t easy to pill either.
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I fear we are going to be there one day. Le Roi previously only ate Pill Pockets because he liked them about as much as he liked his food. Now that he LOVES his food, the Pill Pockets aren’t quite so nice in comparison so why bother? 😩
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Saskatoon berries, which grow in nearby Saskatchewan and Alberta (very little grows in Alberta except potatoes and carrots, and saskatoon berries, so we LOVE them, and sadly their season is very short) look like blueberries but taste like pear, it’s very weird. Their trees look more like bushes so it would be easy for a cat to catch some, although I can’t imagine Sa Maj or Miss Penny interested in this kind of food! But they are delicious in pies (the berries, not the cats) 🙂
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Ooh, I want to try Saskatoon berries now!
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I got you some on my blog 🙂
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😀😀😀
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Glad to hear that the food is working. At least some of the cost can be offset by not needing the pills anymore.
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I really hope that’s the case! Little sod is looking fine and glossy which could be down to the food.
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