How to Make Your Cat Flip Out

I’m re-posting a Blog story here, originally from my WordPress blog, “Fascinating Animals”, in memory of our beautiful cat Shandy. He passed away in 2016 and I still miss him!

In Shandy’s words, if he could speak!

Mum can be cuckoo sometimes. Now, here is something that will make you laugh or cry. One day mum decided to give me a paw operated pedal bowl.

She was very excited about it and told Dad that it was also called a Cat Flip or a Step and Dine and that it had won awards.

This will keep Shandy’s food fresh Mum said. You mean, it will keep the ants away I thought to myself.

Well, I hated that silly bowl with a passion. Mum grabbed my paw and put it down on the pedal and it gave me an enormous fright when the plastic lid sprang open.

Even though Mum shouted at me I would not press that pedal and I did not care for her pressing that pedal herself and making the lid raise.

I did not understand it at all, and it was alien and terrible, plus I knew that mum would feed me properly soon, which she did.

This page below will show an animated cat that when you move your mouse around will step onto the pedal and raise the lid. It is great what they can do with animation, isn’t it?

http://www.jimrokos.com/pedalbowl.html

When I told Mum I was going to write about this fiasco for my Column, “Cat-Man-Do”, she took me into her study and showed me a You Tube video that shows a poor starving cat forced into using the silly contraption.

Well, after watching it I said to mum but that thing is noisy and how would you like having a helmet on your head while you were trying to eat?

I won. While I don’t know what happened to the alien feeder, and don’t care two hoots, the best thing in the food appliances department that mum has ever done for me so far, is to buy me a Whiskas Care Bowl.

Over the Easter weekend, I saw mum dashing around trying to do a gadzillion things including reading a Woolworths Pet booklet.

Well, Mum’s eyes lit up when she turned one of those pages, and she shouted to me “look at this, whisker stress.”

I took no notice of her, thinking she was cuckoo, so I dashed off to run after a lizard (but I let it escape, although mum would say I was too lazy to make a proper attempt at catching it).

Later I heard Mum fervently explaining to Dad that a cat’s bowl should be low to the ground so the cat’s long whiskers would not touch the bowl’s sides.

It has only taken Mum about three years and one Woolworths magazine to figure out why I don’t like my pink double bowl she bought for me 3 years ago.

Sometimes I would see Mum looking puzzedly at the bowls which she obviously thinks are one of the amazing wonders of the world.

They are 2 stainless steel round bowls in a one piece oval shaped container which is coloured pink.

Now I cannot see colours but I can make out shades, and I hear mum talk about pink a lot so I know she loves pink.

I have always had trouble with those bowls, one for food and biscuits, and one for water, and yes, it was “whisker stress”. So now you know about whisker stress.

Both mum and dad would wonder why I would peck at my food and not stick my head in for a good feed. “He is fussy, he wants to be hand fed” one of them would say, to my embarrassment.

If Mum was cleverer, she would have worked that one out, because before the pink double bowl monstrosity, I had my favourite dish of all time.

My favourite dish was a one piece plastic green coloured double bowl, low to the ground, so my fine old whiskers would protrude grandly out over the bowl and not be squashed up against the sides of the small, deep metal bowls.

Sadly, one day, Dad threw away that green bowl, saying it was “knackered”, and with delight, silly old mum produced the metal bowls.

However, I am very happy now that I have the Whiskas Care Bowl.

I noted mum trying to register for Woolworths Online shopping to buy something on Easter Sunday so she could go in a promotion to buy the dish for $5.

She was muttering things like “can’t validate address”, and “wonder if I get an online receipt” and “do the promoters accept an online receipt”.

After a lot of muttering and then yelling “I’m not going to spend $30 on online shopping”, she then went to eBay and said happily “you can find anything you want on eBay.”

All in all, I think that this post is about me NOT being a technocat, thanks to Mum scaring me off. Here is a photo of me with my new bowl. You can see my whiskers stick out nicely above the bowl mouth.

Mum excitedly said to Dad, “we’ll see if he likes his biscuits separate”. This is because dad used to put biscuits on top of the food in one metal bowl, and water in the other metal bowl of my last dish.

Well, before the Care Bowl I sometimes only ate the biscuits to get to the food below. Lately, I have preferred my biscuits to be separate. Now that I am older, I find that my tastes have changed a little.

They still put water in the silver bowl and dad even said “we’ll keep these 2 round silver bowls, one for water and one for milk.” “

Don’t give him too much milk” Mum advised Dad, but I just looked at mum as though she was crazy, and dad took no notice at all.

Thanks for reading! If you would like to read Shandy’s column, “Cat-Man-Do”, head over to my blog “Fascinating Animals” at the link below. 😺