Feeding & Nutrition

The cat had gone off her food the way cats do, which is to say with an offence that suggested I'd personally wronged her, turning from a bowl she'd eaten for three years to a creature of principles overnight. I tried the usual tricks, warming it, adding a crumb of cheese, moving the dish, and she met each with the same flat refusal that made me wonder if the problem was the food or the fact that I'd chosen it.

A friend who raw-feeds swore by variety and lent me the name of a supplier who did frozen rabbit, the whole animal minced, the sort of thing that arrives in a white block and looks like a thawing snowball with ambitions. I bought one pack on a dare more than a plan, imagining the cat would sniff it once and confirm my madness, and braced for the waste.

She didn't refuse it. She approached the bowl the way she approaches a windowsill bird, with a stillness first, then a single long suspicious sniff that I've learned to read as the cat equivalent of maybe, then a lick, then a pause, then the sudden head-down commitment of an animal who'd decided the snowball was in fact dinner. I stood there longer than was reasonable, pleased in a way that made the freezer block feel like a small victory over a creature who'd been ruling the kitchen by appetite.

The rabbit cost more than the usual tins and smelled of nothing much once thawed, which the partner appreciated, having endured the prawn-stock phase without complaint and earned the right to an opinion. The cat's coat, within a fortnight, took on a gloss that the tins had never quite managed, and she started meeting the bowl with the curiosity she'd shown as a kitten, as if dinner had become an event instead of a fixed fact she'd learned to tolerate.

I read up, because you do, and found the raw crowd split between zealots and the cautious, the latter pointing at bones and bacteria and the fridges that should stay cold. I kept the pack frozen, thawed it in the fridge not the sink, and skipped the bits the books warned about, and the cat, who'd never read a forum, simply ate and shone and stopped treating me like the enemy of dinner. The science mattered less to her than the smell, which is the correct order of things.

What surprised me was how the change reset her. A cat bored of her bowl is a cat rehearsing a small contempt for the whole arrangement, and the rabbit broke it, not because rabbit is magic but because different is interesting to a creature built to hunt a new thing each night. The freezer block became a weekly ritual, the thaw a small appointment, and the sceptical first sniff became the part I waited for, the moment she decided I'd done right by her after all.

She's back on tins sometimes, when the supplier's out and the block's not thawed in time, and she eats them now without the old offence, as if the rabbit raised the bar and the tins dropped back to acceptable. The sceptical first sniff was the gate she made me pass, and passing it taught me that a cat's refusal is rarely about the food being bad and often about the food being the same, which is a small truth that reaches past the bowl and into most things she decides to ignore.

The pack in the freezer is a quiet promise now, the one the cat trusts me to keep, and the white block that looked like a dare has become the thing that ended the great hunger strike of the boring bowl, and gave her coat back its shine into the bargain. I buy two at a time now, so the strike can never restart for want of a thaw, and the cat, who never asked for much, asked for this, and got it, on the strength of one sceptical sniff I was clever enough to wait out.