I used to dislike cats growing up, since I had a big dog. Our Rottweiler was always up for games, and it just seemed like cats were always annoyed, coy and snobby (or lazy). But I met a cat in 2000 that changed my mind about cats forever, and now I like them (mostly. There are still lame cats, though.). So you know what that means: I get to cat sit for my sister’s three (count ‘em: 3!) cats whenever they go away anywhere! Yay!
Actually, I really like their cats, and they have DirecTV HD, while I just have a lame cable system that I won’t mention because it has so many problems (but it starts with a “C”, and it ends with a “harter”). So anyway, I really like these cats, but they are funny creatures. One is very social, and the others are scaredy-cats. (Now I understand how the expression “scaredy-cat” came to be.) So you know that means just one thing especially: one is always first to the food when I do the feeding, while the others hide until I leave. Now, this can be nice, but it can also lead to much frustration and bemusement.
Now, since I like these cats, I want them to be happy, even if 66.6% of them are always running away from me. So I happened to notice that they snub most cat food flavors, but they seem to love any fish-related cat food (well, Friskies, anyway). So I told my sister, who answered the call by getting hundreds of cans of all that rotten-smelling fish-offal stuff. So then they’d be happy, right? Well, no, as it turns out, they like most of the awful rotting fish stuff, except for one kind: something called “Mariner’s Catch”. And there’s a lot of that right now.
“Mariner’s Catch” sounds like fish, doesn’t it? I would have thought it was fish, but it’s pink in color, and the cats don’t like it. The one extra-social cat sits around waiting for the food once she hears their food bowls clink in the sink. (She/they all hear it even if it makes no sound at all and they’re upstairs with the TV blaring. Maybe they’re psychic! In which case the military must learn how to use them as a weapon!) In any case, when I leave out the “Mariner’s Catch”, this main cat walks over, sniffs it, makes a “yucky” grimace, and then she turns around and looks at me with the kind of expression you’d expect to see on a CNN reporter who just caught Michele Bachmann in a bad mistake about the US Constitution, like that we all have the right to graft a bear’s arms onto us or something. But you know, just because it’s called “Mariner’s Catch”, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s got fish in it, right? I mean, it sounds like a guy out in a boat on the ocean catching fish, but what if what really happened is that he caught a bunch of corpses in his net from a sunk cruise liner or something? I’ll bet he’d make more money on cat food than he would by telling the Coast Guard. So maybe that’s why it’s pink. After all, Soylent Green is not naturally green; they dye it so environmentalists will approve of it.
