Rescue Cat Refuses To Eat Food Unless It Comes With A Side Salad

A rescue cat refuses to eat his food, unless his owner serves it with a side salad.

Said Dina Moeller, from Boston, Massachusetts Newsweek that, from the moment she adopted Shaggy as a tiny kitten from the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem in May 2021, she could tell he had a unique relationship with food.

“I noticed right away that he really liked whatever I was eating,” Moeller said Newsweek. “I ate a chicken parmigiana sandwich while he was sleeping. When he woke up, he smelled it and yelled at me for 20 minutes!”

Moeller lost her beloved 21-year-old cat last month but, with the pandemic still in full swing, is eager to adopt another feline companion. She originally set her heart on a gorgeous tortoiseshell cat she saw on the shelter’s website.

“I thought this kitten was going to be snapped up right away because he was so cute,” Moeller said. “I did notice, in the background of the pic, there was a black kitten, and I wondered about him too.” That black cat became Shaggy.

“It was meant to be,” Moeller said. When Shaggy was first adopted, she noticed he was labeled as shy and fearful. However, that didn’t stop him, and rightly so.

“When he got home and got out of his carrier, he immediately climbed a large Mass Cane tree that I have in my dining room and swung from the branches,” Moeller said. “He hasn’t shown any signs of being shy or scared since.”

Shaggy has certainly never been afraid about letting him know what he wants for dinner, something Moeller suspects was born from a number of contributing factors.

For example, early on, he discovered that Shaggy had worms and needed a six-week course of medication to eradicate them. “During that time, I had to feed him plain chicken and rice, and he really developed his needs for human food,” Moeller said.

Even after that, Moeller had a hard time finding cat food that didn’t wreak havoc on Shaggy’s digestive system. “It was around that time that he started stealing my salad ingredients while I was preparing dinner,” she said. “I always ask Siri on Google if a cat can eat things like lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, kale, avocado, etc. and start putting some of them in her dish.”

Shaggy’s stomach issues soon cleared up as a result of his salad consumption, too.

In a piece for the VCA, the animal hospital group, veterinarians Krista Williams and Robin Downing emphasized the importance of resisting “the temptation to start feeding human food casually from table.”

They wrote: “When human food is provided like this, it becomes more difficult to transition back to a balanced cat diet. It is actually quite difficult to balance a cat’s long-term nutrition when feeding them home-cooked food.”

However, Moeller said Shaggy’s eating issues started before she came into his care. “His papers said he came from a shelter in Mississippi. I suspect he came from a feral colony and possibly lost his mother,” he added. “Maybe that’s why he’s drawn to atypical foods; maybe it’s all he needs to eat.”

In any case, Moeller is always careful to make sure that everything he eats is suitable for cats. “Usually, red butter lettuce or kale is in it,” he says. “But if I’m making a salad or get one from a salad bar, I’ll give him other things like tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, red cabbage and, on rare occasions, avocado. He also loves watermelon and cantaloupe in the summer and pumpkin seeds in the fall.”

Moeller also likes to emphasize that Shaggy isn’t completely against eating straight cat food. We go through stages,” he said. “If he’s bored with a certain flavor of wet food, the salad gets him to eat it. If it’s a flavor of food that he’s totally into, he’ll be totally fine without lettuce on the side. If it’s not his favorite and there’s no lettuce on the side, he’ll have less of a food strike.”

The only problem is that Shaggy’s interest in food doesn’t end with salad. Moeller said: “He tried to steal, or successfully stole, bagels, hamburgers, edamame, meatballs, cheese, baked goods like muffins, potato chips and more. He was like a dog.”

Ultimately, though, after consulting an expert, Moeller isn’t going to change anytime soon and probably couldn’t even if he wanted to. “I’ve discussed this with my vet, and he also has a pet that also has feral origins, and he does the same thing,” Moeller said. “I guess if it’s programmed into you at an early age that you might not be able to eat again, old habits die hard. As long as I make sure he doesn’t eat anything like chocolate, raisins, grapes or anything from the allium family, it’s OK in moderation. He’s happy and healthy, so I just went along. It’s very hard to change cats.”

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