Fanny Trouble by Gwen Cooper

Author:Gwen Cooper [Cooper Gwen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948836098
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.

Still, in all, Fanny’s dictatorship over us used to be an essentially benevolent one. She never exercised her authority in obtrusive or oppressive ways—except, possibly, upon poor Laurence, who had to (and still has to) spend half his night tending to Fanny’s scritching needs. For the most part, all Fanny ever seemed to want from any of us was on-demand affection and playtime when she was in the mood for it—and it probably goes without saying that we were always happy to comply without feeling the least bit put upon.

Then came the fateful day about six months ago when the helpful sales clerk at Fussy Friends, our local pet store, slipped a small sample bag of dry cat food in with my usual purchase of canned delicacies. And life as we knew it changed forever.

Dry food had been verboten in our home for quite some time. Scarlett was briefly diabetic during her last years, and it was only by cutting out dry food entirely that I’d been able to bring her condition under control and wean her off insulin shots. There was a minor flirtation with dry food once again during Homer’s own final battle, with liver disease, when we were trying hard to keep him eating and Kitten Chow reliably made him so, so happy. Of course we let Clayton and Fanny partake of the Kitten Chow as well. It would have been impossible to keep them away from any food we’d left out for Homer, and I reasoned that—at a year and a half old—they were still young enough to outgrow any of the damaging long-term effects that dry food might have on their weight or blood sugar.

Perhaps I was right about the long-term effects, but I’d severely underestimated the short-term ones. Only a few weeks after Homer was gone, Clayton developed a urinary tract blockage—a condition that, while easily treated if caught in time, is still life threatening. Had I waited only a few hours longer to rush him to the 24-hour emergency animal hospital, we might have lost Clayton as well. It was a condition that some male cats were prone to, the doctor on call told me, before sternly warning that a diet of dry food could bring on another bout—one that, a second time around, might not end as happily as the first. I didn’t need to be told twice. And, from that day in 2013, not so much as a single kibble had crossed our doorstep.

But then I unexpectedly found that small packet of (the packaging assured me) high-quality, grain-free dry food among my purchases, and I wavered. After all, I told myself, I typically gave Clayton and Fanny a handful of dry cat treats over the course of the day (they needed some crunch to clean their teeth with), and there hadn’t been any adverse effects in all these years. Would it truly be catastrophic if I were to give them the tiniest smidgen of a sampling, just this one time, from

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