Veggie Serves Meat Eaters

I'm a vegetarian for around 17 years now. Sometimes I miss fish badly but usually I'm not having any problems with this diet.

I've always had cats, too.

Although all of them every now and than had a strange fondness for tomatoes, strawberries, olives, bread, ground coffee and diary products anyway, their main diet was and is meat. Feeding my cats the scraps from my cooking would have resulted in starving them to death ;-), so from the beginning on I've been feeding them with canned cat food to ensure them getting all the nutrients they need. With the ongoing affairs about unpalatable meat however, I'm sure the quality of the early cat food was much better than it is today.

So I'm not too much surprised that Mini may have developed an intolerance to the canned food she regularly gets. Since a few months now around once a week she has horrible diarrhoea and regurgitation. My vet and his lab have carried out lots of tests during that time yet we cannot find the cause. According to all these checks Mini should be absolutely healthy.

One day, when again she was so sick, it came to my mind that there may be something wrong with the food she had eaten. I couldn't figure out which of the brands it may have been. Being a very picky cat I feed her several brands throughout the day.

I finally decided to cook something for her from scratch. In a very light organic vegetable broth I cooked some chicken with rice. I was not sure whether she would eat this. The beef I'm feeding to Leo, the least weasel, she doesn't even try nor did she touch the chicken hearts Leo got in the beginning. But she loves butter and so I added a little bit of that to the chicken-rice-mash.

A raving success! At least with regard to her appetite. She loves it and eats so much of it that simply the amount could be somehow counterproductive. But no, no more diarrhoea and regurgitation since then, although it's still too early to state a final result. In addition I have to get some supplemental nutrients for her. We will see.

So, today I have to buy chicken for the cat and beef for the least weasel. I must admit, this is difficult for me. I've always forgone the meat counters but since Leo is with me I even have to inspect meat in order to get the right thing for him. And now chicken, too. It's frustrating.

Mini sleeping on the windowsill while I'm writing this post, having no mercy on me ;-)