This story was originally published on my vet school blog, “Wet Cleanup on Aisle 5.”
Our clinic cat, Elliot, thinks he is starving all the time. I can’t say I really blame him, seeing as how one of the notes in his chart from his previous vet says something like, “Advised owner that if he would be gone for 18 months, eventually he would need to have a cat sitter come in…” !?!?!?!
So I think Elliot’s meals might have been a little sporadic before he came to live with us. (By the way, I don’t think Elliot really likes it when I tell that story–sorry, E–but I do think it explains his affinity for food pretty well.)
He, like many critters I’ve met, has an uncanny sense about feeding time. In his case, he begins meowing non-stop exactly one hour before his scheduled feeding. I’ve taken to saying, “No, Elliot. When the big hand gets to the Labrador Retriever, THEN you can eat.”
I am referring to the cutesy dog clock we have that barks on the hour. Well, it used to bark on the hour until we debarked it. It was either that or euthanize the clock with a hammer…
My own kitty shares this sense of timing. Like now, for instance. It’s time for her evening meal, and even though she got her midday meal much later than usual, some internal clock is telling her it’s time to eat again, never mind what her stomach must be telling her. It’s the same in the morning, too. When it’s time for breakfast, she lets me know it, and it doesn’t matter if I want to sleep in that day.
Daylight savings time changes are the worst. It takes her about a month to adjust to the new time, so I’m guaranteed two months a year of fitful sleep. Darn that Ben Franklin.
One of the things I fantasize about, when I am being deprived of my last few precious moments of sleep, is creating a Wallace and Gromit-style feeding machine — some gizmo which will allow me to press a button next to my bed and have a mechanical hand extract cat food from the fridge and serve it up while another mechanical hand scoops Cat Mandu into a dumbwaiter and transports her from my bed to the kitchen. On her noisier mornings, the dumbwaiter in the fantasy is replaced by a catapult.
On the flip side, she does make a pretty good alarm clock.1
- Cat Mandu was my first in a long string of cats. I have yet to live with one who does not know exactly when mealtime has arrived.
