Feeding the Borg

I am not a Trekkie, or Trekker, or whatever fans of the different Star Trek series call themselves. I did watch the original television series, as well as most episodes of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, however, and, thanks to my memory’s phenomenal capacity for recollecting anything that has little value to my life, I can remember the majority of what happened in each.

In one episode, the crew of the Enterprise fought the Borg (the imaginatively named race of cyborgs intent on conquering the universe, as cyborgs usually are.) The crew found to their dismay that the Borg had developed individual force-fields (if that isn’t an illogical item for a race of collective beings to possess) which protected each Borg from the fire of hand-phasers. Picard et al. were forced to adjust their phasers to shoot each time at a different frequency, thus being able to penetrate the force-fields that one time. The Borg would modulate their force-fields, only to be confronted by a phaser-beam with a different frequency the next shot.

I realised that this is how I feed my cats soft-food.

As every cat-fancier knows, a cat’s inclination to eat a specific flavour or brand is in inverse proportion to how much of it the fancier buys. What feline tastes enjoy today, they will not like the next day when presented with the first of two dozen tins of what had been, until then, their favourite. Furthermore, a cat will often change preferences during a day, disdaining in the evening what she thought the greatest thing since sliced cat-nip in the morning. Not satisfied with that, a cat will sometimes decide it wants nothing to do with even a second helping of what it consumed with such gusto a minute previously, though it will find plenty of room for another flavour thrust upon him a moment later.

So it is that I find myself repeatedly alternating foods during any one meal-time. It is as if I were under attack by a race of small, furry Borg, and my only defence is continually to switch the frequency of brands, varieties, flavours and mixtures to keep them provided with something they don’t expect.

My tactics don’t always work. Now and then, a cat will like nothing given to him. For the most part, however, I am able to feed, one way or another, all six of the beasts, not only keeping them alive, but keeping them interested, to an extent, in their nutrition. I save the galaxy one meal at a time.