Feeding & Nutrition

My grandfather kept a cat well into his eighties, a thin grey thing called Nance who had stopped eating the week he fell ill. The vet said she was just old, fourteen, and winding down. Granddad would not have it. He boiled a fish head in a pot of water, no salt, no nothing, until the kitchen smelled of the river, and set the cooled broth and soft flesh in front of her.

Nance lifted her head for the first time in days. She ate, slowly, and then she did something I have never seen a cat do since. When the plate was empty she climbed onto the counter, which she was forbidden from, and licked the cooking pan clean. Granddad laughed and let her. He said a cat that licks the pan is a cat that has decided to stay.

He was right, in his way. Nance lived another two years, and the fish head became a weekly ritual, a small boiled treat that woke her appetite when nothing from a packet could. I think now it was the smell, the strong natural odor that cuts through the dulled senses of an old animal, plus the moisture, which senior cats often stop taking in enough of.

I am not telling anyone to boil fish heads. There are safer, cleaner ways to get an old cat to eat, and bones in cooked fish are a real hazard I would never hand over. But the principle stuck with me: when a senior cat fades from her food, the answer is often smell and moisture, not another dry biscuit. Warm it, wet it, make it worth her nose.

Years later my own old cat went off her dinners, and I reached for the lesson. A little warm broth over her food, a stronger smelling topper, and she came back to the bowl the way Nance came back to the pan. The vet confirmed cats lose smell as they age and food has to work harder to reach them. Granddad knew it without the degree.

There is a thread here about respect for old animals. We expect them to keep eating the same dull pellet forever, and when they stop we call it decline. Sometimes they are just bored, or their senses have dimmed, or the water content left them dry. A small change, a warm addition, can rewrite the ending.

I keep a jar of plain unsalted bone broth in the fridge now, for the cat and the dog both, for the days appetite dips. It is the modern, safe version of Granddad's fish head, and it carries the same idea. Make the food matter. Earn the lick.

Nance is long gone, and so is Granddad, but the image of that grey cat on the counter, tongue working the pan, stays with me. It was the moment I learned that feeding is not only about nutrition. It is about wanting to eat, and sometimes an old animal just needs you to cook something that smells like love.

I tried to tell the story to a younger friend who had just adopted a senior cat, and she rolled her eyes at the fish head part. I do not blame her. It sounds like folklore, the kind of thing old men say about old cats. But the principle underneath is not folklore, it is physiology, and the vet confirmed it without a smile. Warm, smelly, moist food reaches a faded appetite when a dry pellet cannot.

Granddad would have hated the packaged version, I think. He cooked from the river, from what was cheap and near, and he trusted his nose over any label. The cat trusted his nose too. There is a line of handed-down knowledge in that, the kind that does not make it into the leaflet but lands in the kitchen anyway, passed from one caretaker to the next through the simple act of feeding a creature who will not eat.

I keep a photograph of Nance on that counter, though it is only in my head. The pan, the grey back, the single focused ear. It reminds me, on the hard nights with my own old cat, that the answer is rarely another product. It is attention, warmth, and a smell worth waking for. Granddad knew it. Nance proved it.

My own cat, the one who licks the broth bowl now, has no idea she is following a recipe from a dead man and a gone cat. She only knows the warm smell means someone cared to cook. That is the inheritance, really, not the fish head but the caring, passed down through kitchens and animals and the small acts that say you are worth the effort. Granddad left me a lot of things. This is the one the cat remembers.

I am only the one writing it down.