There’s no getting around it, this period of inflation we’re going through affects all of us. I’m certainly being more careful as to where I spend my money these days, and I’m looking for places to save. As odd as this may sound, I thought cat food was a good place to start because we spend way, way too much on cat food ... out of necessity.
Back in September I wrote in this space about how I had to purchase ‘special’ cat food because one of ours had a digestive tract issue. Back then, Hypoallergenic Hydrolyzed Protein cat food cost $84 per bag, including tax. I initially wrote that column to lament the cost, yet, here we are eight months later. It’s gradually crept up and the bag I bought last week was $94 including tax. We have two cats, one could surely eat Friskies Chef’s Blend which clocks in at $21 for the same size bag. But have you ever tried to feed cats separately? It’s a game to them. They taunt you by purposely eating out of the other bowl. So, we feed them both the specialized food in one big bowl. Spoiler alert. That’s the problem.
Earlier this week, I pondered finding some sort of substitute for the $94 bag. Both cats are 16 years old. I went to PetSmart to see my choices and there were lots. I was pretty sure I had a good candidate picked out. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. What if I made a change, and that led to the demise of one of the cats? I beat a hasty retreat to the door.
You can only get the specialized food the cats need from the vet. After I decided the expensive bag was the only way to keep going, I went to the vet to purchase another one, still trying to figure out how to spend less than $1,100 per year on cat food. Turns out the answer was there all the time, I just didn’t see it.
For the longest time we had three cats, and the easiest way to feed them was to get one of those large containers that ‘self dispense’ the food as the cats eat it. The end result of this is that their bowl is literally never empty. They’re eating on their timetable, not yours. I never thought anything of it when the food was $25 a bag. For some reason, as I was checking out, probably desperation, portion size jumped into my mind. I asked the lady behind the counter how much food the cats should be eating daily. This is clearly marked on the bag, but who was looking at the bag when you were just dumping half of it into the self-dispensing unit? Not me.
I reported the weight of the cats, and after checking, she grabbed an eight-ounce cup and said about half of this, per cat, per day. If you were putting fluid in that cup, it would only take about four ounces to get to the line of how much cat food each cat should be getting daily. So, all these years, the cats had been feasting on a never-ending all-you-can-eat buffet. It was like going to a restaurant and asking the cats what they wanted to order and they said everything. I went home and filled the cup to the designated line with cat food and almost fell over. The ‘bowl’ part of the self-dispensing unit holds the equivalent of three cups of cat food, and the two of them should be eating one cup, per day, combined. I ‘think’ I knew they should be getting about a cup a day, but my notion of what a cup of cat food is, and what it really is, was miles apart. But now, their party is over.
We’re dispensing with the dispenser. It’s one total cup a day. How will the cats know when they’ve eaten their half? Well, it appears we are going to find that out.
Bye bye all-you-can-eat buffet | The Eastern Graphic - peicanada.com
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