Famished!

Billie--our tiny, smart, and feisty tuxedo cat--had to be rushed to the vet this week. Over the past few months, we noticed a change in her behavior. Her once precious trait of mewing at us when she had something to say had since escalated into a shrill and constant yowl that we just couldn't bear any longer. So slowly that we almost hadn't noticed, she had morphed into some little Hitler or diminutive Darth Vader, parading and barking orders around our nice, quiet home.

To make matters worse, she had become totally fixated on food to the point that much of my life at home (where, by the way, most of my life takes place) had become an ongoing battle against food scraps. If I failed to remove a single crumb, Billie would discover what was in her mind a feast and redouble her efforts at prowling through the kitchen. We even once caught her licking the droplets of oil off the dials on the stove.

So we finally wised up and carried her off to the vet, where we discovered that Billie had dropped three pounds. She went from being a tiny eight pound cat to an even tinier five pound one. We had no idea. After a day's worth of tests looking for things like a tapeworm and hyperthyroid disorder, we learned the true cause of the problem. Jen and I were basically terrible owners who were slowly starving our cat. Okay, so we're not that despicable, but it turns out that, a few years back, when the vet switched Billie to a hypo-allergenic brand of kibble, she forgot to tell us that it contained fewer calories.

This whole time, I had been attempting to deter her by shaking cans of pennies, cleaning non-stop, and carefully sealing anything with a smell. I even almost succumbed to purchasing a motion-sensor spray-can online, and I won't deny that I took a cruel pleasure at the thought of Billie flipping out when this thing activated without a soul around. When instead, what I should have done was just opened the fridge and said 'here you want some ham, how about a turkey.'

Anyway, she's better now. We're feeding her a half can of the heaviest, fattiest, stinkiest cat food I've ever had to dish out. It didn't take but a day for her behavior to revert back to normal. She's like, "aah, that's better, now I can go back to my life of sleeping and opening all the closet doors." The answer was that simple: she's hungry, feed her. Sometimes, I wish Billie could speak, I think I could learn a lot from her.

Before
















After