In Service to Our Pets
by Tina Blue
Nvember 26, 2003
In "Wow! I Could've Had a V-8!" I tell how my Tonkinese kitty Sammy developed a taste for tomato juice.
But that wasn't the only weird food fixation Sammy had. From anywhere in the house he could hear (or smell) whenever I tried to eat an apple. However it was he knew about that apple, he would always come running to get his share.
But unlike my husband, who could just pour some tomato juice onto Sammy's saucer and let him help himself, I had to "prepare" and serve Sammy's apple just the way he wanted it.
What he wanted me to do was bite off a piece without any skin, and then lightly chew it, so that it was a slightly chunky mush. Nor did he want it on a saucer. Not this delicacy. It had to be hand-served. Literally. He would sit in my lap and daintily nibble his chunky apple mush from my hand. It usually took several such hand-helpings to satisfy his craving.
The only thing weirder than the fact that he wanted hand-served, half-chewed apple was that I actually served it to him like this, simply because that was the way he preferred it.
That reminds me of a Chihuahua my family had when I was a girl. Tiny loved spaghetti with tomato sauce, but she was very picky about how it was served. You couldn't just put a small helping of spaghetti in a saucer and expect her to eat it herself. Oh, no. You had to hang it over her head, one strand at a time, and let her slurp it down from below. I wonder if she really even liked spaghetti all that much. I suspect she just got a kick out of eating it in such a fun way.
Considering Sammy's pronounced taste for tomato juice, Bob and I decided to try him on spaghetti with tomato sauce.
Yep, he liked it. But like Tiny, he liked it only that way.
So whenever we ate spaghetti, Sammy would sit on the floor beside the table and wait for us to offer him some, hung over his head one string at a time so he could slurp it down the way he liked it.
Don't even get me started about my mother's cat who would only drink water out of a two-ounce (never larger) Dixie cup, held beneath her mouth, at a perfectly convenient tilt. Unless the angle of tilt was just right, Mari Gaila would simply sit and look at you, waiting for you to wise up and do it right.
Poor pets. They find it so hard to get good help these days.
