Chicken’s Corner: Tasty Snacks

I continue to dig through my camera roll, late at night, while pondering life, and stumbled across these lovely photos of my tiny entourage, sharing a snack, post-nap for everyone, and so I thought it time for another update on the cats.

We have these two shop cats: one veteran, Chicken, the ginger, who is a bit crusty but overall a very reliable shop cat, once upon a time quite calm and polite with customers, a good mouser, a bit of a scrapper outside; and one intern, Tuna, grey striped, who wandered in off the streets, willing and enthusiastic, if a little bit of a goose, pretty smart and pretty dumb at the same time. Some time ago, almost a year, Tuna was diagnosed with feline leukemia, and so we’ll have him for as long as he’ll have us.

Alas, there is not much to update. The cats continue on, both alive, both their own flavour of delight. Tuna salad, butter chicken, each smothered in their own life sauces.

Chicken continues his ambivalence towards the fishy smells in the house, despite the treats he gets as a result of the aura constantly present. We bought bulk packs of these squeezable cat go-gurts back when Tuna was not eating, and we were directed to incentivize him with whatever we could. Tuna is now on a “diet” which is to say he’s no longer getting as many treats as he’d like, and so part of my daily routine, a real highlight of my day, is to share a go-gurt between the cats, slowly working my way through the giant box of them.

They share okay. It’s a work in progress, as we all are on this journey we call life. I don’t know which cat shares better. In terms of eating, Chicken is 100% the more careful, less messy eater of these tubes. Tuna gobbles and chomps and blobs everywhere, getting it all over the tube, his face, the floor. A metaphor for their relationship: Tuna is too eager, maybe, which Chicken regards as being ill-mannered, ill-bred. Chicken is a bit catty about the concept of sharing with this homeless cat. It’s not that Chicken is snooty—he is a cat that gets into real scraps out in the world—but I think Tuna might go a long way if he just played a little harder to get.

The range of emotions across all three of these faces. Ah, what a journey.