Are men with cats odd?

That's not "disappointment", it's normal hunting behaviour. Cats will sit watching "nothing" for hours, if they think there might be some food hiding somewhere.

I don't think having a pet that doesn't eat treats is a big deal. At least it won't get fat on too many treats. But not eating your idea of "proper" cat food is more of an issue. Have you tried mixing some "real" meat or fish with the stuff she does eat? You could always ring the shelter for some advice.

But then, I know a "vegetarian" dog - if it gets a plate of scraps from the dinner table, it will ferret out all the vegetables and ignore the meat. Its favorite "treat" food is a banana. You have to peel it first and hold it so it can nibble at the end. Eating a whole banana can take half an hour, and woe betide you if you get bored with holding the banana before the dog gets bored with eating it. Go figure.

Still, if Pixel trusts you, she may be willing to eat what she sees you eating. You can try.

I'll bet that if you made Pixel some of the liver and bacon cookies and kept them "bite sized" for her, she'd pile right in.

Hmm, get rid of the liver, and you've got a cookie we can both get behind!

Thin-sliced beef heart sauteed in butter with onions... I'd have thirds!!

I don't get it... do you gain their courage or something?

Thin-sliced heart (beef or venison) sauteed in butter with a little onion is food for the gods!!

One time, a couple of decades back, I dragged a deer home (about 1/2 mile uphill) and my wife asked "where is the liver?" I had to trudge all the way back down there and recover it to keep her happy.

Surely you jest; it's also appropriate food for serial murderers and futuristic genocidal mechanical abominations.



Now I'm sure you're joking.

You'll drag home, across broken glass and dirty syringes, a deceased animal you just find lying around and then, when, unbeknownst to you, its disparate organs tumble from its bloated, disease-ridden corpse, faithfully trot back to the pile of dead plague rats in which you found the carcass to retrieve them?!

You goon!

My wife was the the child of Depression-era parents, as I was. You don't ever, ever discard any usable portion of an animal. You would not have wanted to join me and my family on the farm when it was time to slaughter hogs!! Tiny little kids could be trusted to haul buckets of intestines to the kitchen for cleaning and sausage-making. Only "big boys" could be trusted to lug wash-basins of blood to the kitchen. That was a rite of passage!

Spill that blood in the gravel drive, and you'd better figure out how to hitch-hike home and hide for a few days. After your mother got through thrashing you, your aunts, great-aunts, etc, would be waiting for their turn to get at you. Blood sausage was huge here.

I don't know, man. Blood sausage? What are you, a Klingon?!

Yikes. Everything I've read about cats says they get all of their nutrition from meat

OMG, I did that to Pixel, but I made it disappear into her cat cave. That was a mistake. She was mucking about in there (removed all of her other toys) for a good five minutes before setting up shop just outside and staring into it.

I didn't really want to encourage that type of disappointment, so we played a bit more and I just ran up her up and down the steps in the same pattern until she got bored. Then it was okay to stop and she went back to normal cat activities.

Incidentally, I have a weird problem...

Pixel plays very well. I wasn't sure I wanted her to get used to playing with a person's hand, but she does a good job: she will open her mouth but won't bite (like a dog), and she'll bat at your hands with her claws tucked safely away. If she starts to get overly frisky, I just say (in a stern voice) "hey, be nice" and apply firm pressure to her belly; she calms right down. So far we have had zero biting or clawing incidents while playing.

However, I think she will ONLY bite when she's eating hard food which brings me to my problem: she won't eat treats. I think she loves the smell and taste, but she just gnaws on them a bit, and them spits them out. There aren't even tooth marks on them! She'll pounce them, bat them around, put them in her mouth and (basically) suck on them and spit them back out. This is true of both the salmon ones and the lamb/chicken ones.

The fact that a cat doesn't eat treats shouldn't worry you unless its a problem with teeth. With a ktten, it probably isn't. But, for the future, remember that it's hard to detect discomfort in cats. They can be in pain in not show it. They can have very bad dental problems and not show it. (Just as in humans, bad breath is a symptom.)

My current guest cat had to have all but 6 of her teeth removed because her gums got such deep pockets in them that the nerves were exposed. Until the vet discovered this, nobody who was around the cat noticed that she had any problems.

Thin-sliced heart (beef or venison) sauteed in butter with a little onion is food for the gods!! If you have never had it properly prepared, you just don't know.

My neighbor likes shooting deer and he is REAL squeamish, so I have to go gut out his deer for him whenever he kills one. In return, I get to take home the heart and the liver, and he brings me some steaks after the meat-cutter packs them, and some ground venison from time to time.

When I bring home a heart and a liver like that, my wife and I plan our next few days' meals around those organ meats. One time, a couple of decades back, I dragged a deer home (about 1/2 mile uphill) and my wife asked "where is the liver?" I had to trudge all the way back down there and recover it to keep her happy.

I'm beginning to wonder if you ever ate anything that didn't come from a supermarket.

Warning: this is a VERY acquired taste - if you think using that much parsley and rosemary in a recipe is insane, then it's not for you!

OMG you got one! She is adorable!

Actually, not quite true. Cats get grains and greens from the stomach contents of the rodents they eat, and generally do quite well with some vegetable and grain.

Also, someone suggested catnip. I don't know the *why* behind it, but I have always heard (even from the vet) that you should not give a cat under a year old catnip.

And if you choose to go the natural food way, they don't need sugar and salt. People food has too much.

One question - the video was dark, was she actually RETRIEVING?

She is an adorable cat[...]

Call it an improvised sleeping perch, comfy as heck, on top of a knee wall shelf.

I wasn't going to include the close up, but I took about six pictures and caught her eyes just right.

The fact that a cat doesn't eat treats shouldn't worry you unless its a problem with teeth. With a ktten, it probably isn't.

It is one of the only animals to domesticate itself.

and

Turkey may be the place where cats were first domesticated.

I know, right?

Don't make it sound like I'm going granola, here. All things being equal, I'd rather have her just eat a turkey rather than processed turkey by-products.