Cat food comes in various flavours: beef, duck, lamb, turkey, salmon, chicken, tuna.  None of this is part of a cat’s natural diet and the obvious question is why we don’t make cat foods in rat, squirrel, and starling flavour but that has been asked many times before.  What I am wondering is why I haven’t seen pork flavour cat food.  Or dog food.

Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention.  Has anybody ever seen a tin of pork-flavoured cat food?  If it doesn’t exist then why doesn’t it exist?  And if it does exist why is it so relatively rare?

I have a theory, but it isn’t nice.

I also found out that the cat who most terrorises our two is called Thomas.  I also found out that he is 18 years old, so he is not likely to be a long-term problem.

After we moved house we found that there are a couple of big aggressive cats in the road who pick fights with our two (not very streetwise) cats.  These cats got more and more aggressive to the point of following our cats through the cat flap into the house.  At the same sort of time Jayne’s sister decided that she couldn’t keep her cat, Boots,  who is a bit of a bruiser.

We decided to take him on a trial basis to see if he could get on with our cats.  The idea was that he would, if all went well, discourage the bully cats from coming into our garden and house by being scarier than them.  As soon as we got him home he managed to break out of the cat box and leg it out of the house and has not been seen since.

This week’s episode:

Yesterday evening I heard a noise at the cat flap and went to have a look, expecting to find one of the local cats trying to get in.  The cat that ran away when I opened the door looked a lot like Boots.  A couple of hours later there was the sound of a pitched battle outside.  I went downstairs in time to see one of our cats shoot into the house with fur flying and another cat escape over the back fence.  This time I got a good look and it was not any of the neighbours’ cats that I have seen before and looked a lot like Boots.

It looks like the cat we got to protect our other two from bullies, who then ran away, has come back to bully the cats we got him to protect in the first place.

What we really need to do now is catch him and take him back to Jayne’s sister.  I wonder if Pets at Home do a cat trap?

I’m lucky to have it actually – I had to come home at lunchtime to let an electrician in and found that Royal Mail had left it outside the house – £150 worth of toy just sitting there for anybody to snatch.  Without no trouble at all I took a quick test video of each cat, uploaded them both the Facebook, and uploaded one to Youtube.

I’ll be writing a full review soon, but for now here is a hastily-shot film of Diego.

In keeping with our habit of giving the cats Spanish names we are calling him Diego. (Think Velázquez not Maradona)

Chiquita is having a serious sulk in the kitchen, but I’m sure she will snap out of it before too long.  If she knows what is good for her she will stop hissing and start making friends because having seen Diego’s parents and half-brother we reckon he will be bigger than her in about five months.

How can you not adore him?

He looks fluffier without the flash

It was only a little bit worrying that we saw another cat there who was from the previous litter only five months ago and he was huge!

Although it is normal for kittens to not be taken from their mother until they are at least eight weeks, the lady who has these kittens is of the opinion that the sooner they go the better, and she tries to find good homes from them as soon as they can handle meat, which is at about five weeks.  She thinks it is best for them to still be very dependent so they bond better with the new family.

Professional opinion may differ, but as a farmer she has had plenty of kittens to rehouse over the years and reckons they have all thrived on this approach.  It is certainly good timing for us because it means we should be able to get a little playmate for Chiquita during the school holidays so there will be somebody home all day for a week or two to keep an eye on them.

So… brace yourself for a barrage of kitten photos in a couple of weeks.  Flickr?  You’d better buy yourself some more hard drives!

We were only really after a second cat to keep Chiquita company, and neither of us has had more than two cats before, let alone three kittens.  Part of me hopes the other one goes so we don’t have to make that decision – but part of me sort of hopes we get the pair.  It will be at least three weeks before we can have it/them anyway, but I think we will be popping down to the farm this week to say hello and will probably get hopelessly smitten with both.

If we do end up with three it does open up some possibilities…¹

1. only joking obviously.  I can’t juggle

Not a happy bunny!

Chiquita had her long-awaited visit to the vets to get spayed yesterday and returned with a huge shaved patch and a buster collar to stop her ripping the stitches out.

She is not impressed with the collar.

Advice from the vets included a remark that the cat could be drowsy for a few days as a result of the anaesthetic.  If only!  She has been going berserk from the moment we got her home.