Fud!

In my house, food is dispensed freely. My little piglets eat three times a day and are very clock-oriented. Food begging begins approximately 1 hour and 56 minutes before the designated food times. If I am to get up to do anything in my house, my furry magnets are racing behind me, meowing happily. This dramatic display of starvation is only outdone by the tragic expressions on their faces when they realize that I have deemed it Not Time To Eat.

This food requires a bit of work because we do not feed dry cat food. My cats work very hard to make sure that I spend the majority of my life thinking about cat food. One favorite tactic my cats employ is This Food That I Used To Love Now Sucks. Of course I have fostered this behavior by immediately running to the nearest pet store to get them something they might like better.

To date, I have a very lengthy and comprehensive list of things my cats don't like, which has caused quite a problem now that we have Leo in the house. As a rule, my cats don't like healthy food. The fewer additives, the less they like it. This makes my life fairly easy between mind-changes about what food they like, because all premium brands have been ruled out by The Picky Ones. That means anything else that costs more than $0.50 a can is off the shopping list. If it has gravy in it, they love it even more.

Enter Leo. Leo likes everything. He will eat any food they hate, he will eat things that are not food, and he will eat their food. Leo's primary diet consists of Wellness grain-free ($2) and Evo ($2). These two brands are at the top of the Hate That Food List, but Niko and Roxanne are now concerned. Leo gets to eat more than they do, and he does so with gusto. He is an eating machine. Even though Rox and Niko still have food on their plates, it does not seem fair to them that Leo gets More Food Than They Do.

It started with Niko.. he would wait until Leo was almost done with his food and then go over and sniff the remnants. Then he'd daintily lick it, before shaking his head and walking away. "Disgusting!", he'd pronounce to Roxanne. Roxanne did not view this attempt to fall on the sword of disgusting food as anything heroic and would go over to investigate herself. She'd settle in, wrap her tail around her legs and commence licking all the little flecks of food off Leo's plate. Periodically she'd shake her head, letting Niko know he was right, it was disgusting. In due time, Rox and Niko started trying to convince me that they too loved Wellness and Evo. Their beloved Friskies Turkey and Cheese with Gravy sat untouched as they stared Leo down until they could get his Wellness crumbs.

Leo eats around 2.5 large cans a day because he is literally starving. With this diet and quantity of food comes an equal quantity of the previously-discussed poops. These poops are pretty uncomfortable for him, he grunts and groans in the litterbox and he's going 3 times a day. This is a vast number of visits to the litterbox for a cat on wet food. I decided it was time to switch Leo to an even higher-protein food that might possibly lessen the strain of his overworked digestive tract. Raw food is that food. To Niko and Roxanne, raw food is the work of the devil himself. They were mortally offended the day I tried to feed it to them and no amount of speeches about how they would eat it in the wild would sway them. I thought maybe this was the food that would convince them to stop staring down Leo.

Wrong again. Fortunately Leo has no idea he's being stared-down because he never lifts his head to even breathe while he's eating. As soon as I post this, I'll be off to the pet store to spend another $50 buying food my 3 cats may or may not like, and stocking up on raw food, just in case Rox and Niko decide they like that better than Turkey and Cheese with Delicious Gravy.