Terry Flanagan: Guinness and Harp Say, 'Vegetables! Blech!'

For a number of years now Dorothy and I have been poring over food product labels like a couple of students pulling an all-nighter for finals. Calories, calories from fat, trans fats, sugars, sodium, gluten, high fructose corn syrup, free range, cage free, organic, hormones, animal by-products. These are just some of the things we check in addition to price.

It’s gotten to the point that there is no such thing as a quick trip to the grocery store. A trip to the DMV to renew my license probably takes less time. I sometimes find myself longing for the good old days when we bought and ate whatever was on sale and paid no attention to the skull and cross bone warnings on the labels.

It’s bad enough that we have to agonize over each grocery item we purchase for our own meals. But we also have just as many decisions to make when buying food for our cats, Guinness and Harp. There used to be just a few brands of pet food and it was all pretty much the same blend of crude animal by-products. So you bought whatever was available and/or on sale and supplemented your pet’s diet with the toxic table scraps left over from family meals prepared with lethal ingredients from your grocer’s shelves. We lived in  blissful ignorance in those days.

There are now dozens of pet food manufacturers and hundreds of varieties of pet foods. Since I try to be a responsible pet owner, I have spent hours reading pet food labels to make sure what I’m feeding our cats is good for them. It has to meet AAFCO guidelines. It has to be nutritionally adequate. It should only contain liver in minor amounts, if at all, to please our cats. Natural ingredients are a must and animal by-products should be avoided. Harp is allergic to fish (don’t ask), so it can’t contain any fish.

There has to be variety too. While dogs seem to be content to eat the same thing day after day, much like my brother-in-law with burgers and beer, cats will turn up their noses at a dish they normally like just to perplex you. No matter how much you try to coax them to eat, even by pretending to eat the same food yourself, nothing you do will persuade a finicky cat to eat something they've decided not to eat. They merely snicker to themselves, smug and certain in their superior feline abilities to confound you.

Fortunately, there’s enough variety in cat food today that you can usually find something your cat will like, at least for a while. I still can’t get our cats to eat anything with vegetables though. Regardless of how healthy and good I think the food sounds, they would often rather go outside and eat grass and bugs than vegetables It does no good to try and explain to them how healthy and good vegetables are and how Captain Kody and Andrea Cladis say you should eat your vegetables. They just appear bored and walk away, which is pretty much the same response they have to everything. So if anyone has any advice on getting cats to eat their vegetables, I’m all ears, in more ways than one if you caught my last blog entry.