A Lucky Mistake

Sometimes, a mistake turns out better than what one planned.

I had to buy some more Fancy Feast for the beasts. While not everyone eats the brand (Neville is very particular when it comes to turning his nose up at something), it is often a good resort when their usual doesn’t appeal to them. Unfortunately, while I have been able in the past to leave my purchases until there is a sale, sale prices these days appear not to dip very low. In fact, sale prices everywhere aren’t falling as low as the everyday price at Canadian Tire (for the benefit of readers of foreign origin, that is a national hardware-store chain in my country. It sells items other than hardware the way drug-stores these days sell socks and computers. I hate the twenty-first century. Anyway…)

It was to Canadian Tire that I went to buy some Fancy Feast. The variety most liked by most cats here, if you understand, is ‘ocean whitefish and tuna’, with a blue label. I bought a dozen tins. When I opened one that evening, it was not the sickly grey, fairly solid paté that my animals usually eat. It was pinkish and more liquidy. I was perturbed.

I opened a second tin and found it similarly mutated. I checked the expiry dates, and saw that they were still a year in the future (though tinned food will last long beyond that unless contaminated.) It was contamination which I next considered. Then a thought occurred to me, as they do from time to time, though not enough to prevent me from acquiring six cats. I checked the label.

Though blue, and a shade very close to ‘ocean whitefish and tuna’ paté, some of my purchases were ‘flaked tuna’. Well. Evidently having fooled the clerks at the store when they were stocking the shelves, they fooled me, as well. I could take the unopened tins back for a refund, but the store would probably be reluctant to accept the opened ones. I decided to try them on my cats.

Like Mikey in the Life cereal commercial, several of the beasts unexpectedly liked the unexpected variety. Josie, while currently favouring Merrick’s ‘chicken divan’ variety, also liked the ‘flaked tuna’. Raleigh was coaxed to eat the remnants of his regular repasts by adding a garnish of the new flavour, and Tucker, hard to please, also consumed it. (It is under the maximum percentage of carbohydrates a diabetic cat should have, too, like most Fancy Feast varieties.) And Renn, hardest to please of all, finished off nearly a tin on his own. And unlike the chunks in gravy, the cats lapped up not just the fluid portions but ate the solid bits, for the most part.

While I do not expect the cats to continue to like this new variety (I have, after all, purchased a dozen more tins of it; that should end their tangent right there), two or three tins of it already went into cats who usually eat very little soft-food, or whose consumption of it is a battle of human/feline wills. If having cats has taught me one thing, it is that while struggling for greater success, I should not disdain the smaller. The journey of a thousand miles begins, I’ve discovered, not with a single step, but with managing to tie one’s shoelaces in inadequate lighting.