The shared table

We've had five new baby lambs safely delivered on our farm - with no help from us whatsoever.  Phew!  Dodged a bullet there.  Bettie heroically delivered three.  She was pretty big, and very uncomfortable. We've got perhaps one more to come and have pretty well given up on names.  We started with chalky but then a few more chalkboards arrived and now we are struggling to tell them apart.  Did you know you are not allowed to call a blackboard a blackboard any more?  Head farmer and husband found this out in the local hardware store recently searching for blackboard paint to put up on a wall in our preserving room.  He was momentarily denied service by a surly store woman as she corrected him over and over again, saying 'No we don't have blackboard paint.  We have chalkboard paint'. So that's how the little guy on the left got his name.  There's a theory on farms that once you have a name you don't end up on a plate.  That will certainly be the case on our farm.  These little guys will grow up on this five star animal resort being none the wiser.  And costing us a small fortune as ute load after ute load produces more bags of animal feed with not much grass around, for the privileged mouths and beaks on this property.  Unfortunately they all support the shared table philosophy, that what's in your bowl is also mine when you're done with it. The chooks are eating the leftover lamb feed pellets and the thought of this now entering into our food chain via eggs scares me - just a little.   About 11pm every night Bennie our best in class cocker spaniel sneaks down the stairs to polish off the cat's food provided we haven't given Max's food to Minnie as she sits at the kitchen window looking in like something out of the movie Oliver, just not quite so undernourished.   Max won't eat anything that isn't out of a can or pouch and Bennie's gastronomical experiment with eating blood and bone out of the garden beds ended badly all over my new lounge room rug.  So food is a shared experience in my home.  Sometimes I wish it wasn't though.

But my cat hasn't been to Tuscany

We've been living on this property for a few years now and Max the Magnificent (self named) has not stepped foot outside.  In our previous house we had a little courtyard the size of a...tiny courtyard and it had fences all the way around.  Max and Bennie were given their dinner on the deck at the back door.  Bennie ate his in a few seconds and pushed the bowl around to get food out of every corner of a round bowl.  Max had to fight for his.  Unfortunately the local gang of pigeons would descend on hearing the dinner bowls rattle and intimidate Max enough to leave them food.  And they often succeeded.  Unfortunately, Max already being of elevated anxiety levels stills suffers from the pigeon effect at meal times.  Even now he doesn't like to eat his food unless I stand behind him.  I've tried to explain that there are no pigeons here and if there were, they wouldn't have a chance against the Butcher birds, the Noisy Miner Birds, the Kookaburras, the Black Cockatoos, the Chooks, Guinea Fowls etc., but this doesn't help.  He is still suffering from the effects of PPSD.  Post Pigeon Stress Disorder.  Most cats would wolf down their food but Max is quite thin and struggles to put on weight.  He was an ill kitten when we got him from the pet shop (yeah I know...) and has been really fussy with food all his life.  Most cats are fussy and pet food companies spend a fortune on the research into this but Max is truly hard work.  The other night I was cutting up a chicken breast and placed a tiny morsel in front of him on the floor.  He sniffed it and looked up at me with disgust as if to say I'm not eating that crap.  He won't eat the tiniest piece of fish being filleted straight from the ocean and never, ever finishes an entire tin or pouch of cat food.  Every night I reach to the pet food cupboard and pull out a serving saying 'Oh, this is your favourite' but it's always the same.  He'll eat just over half and walk away refusing to return to anything that's over 5 minutes old.  I've tried other brands, Fancy this and Fussy that but they are all the same to Max.  I've tried reading him the labels to get his appetite interested but even I must admit they're a bit vague.  It never actually says what it is.  It's (insert brand name) WITH  beef/chicken/fish etc.  Or it's the brand name with Tuscan style something.  What cat has been to Tuscany?  Other than the ones that live there.  So now I describe Max's food as a tin of With.  I guess even I couldn't get excited about a serving of meat derivatives and cereal.  It had better be with a big serving of something.

A serving of with or just go without

Deciding what to cook for dinner has been a problem ever since we came out of the cave and discovered there was choice.  Many choices in fact.  Not just the supermarket version of choice between premium expensive brand and theirs.  The biggest question is what will Max have for dinner.  To describe him as a fussy cat really doesn't give it justice.  He's gone off most of the standard cat food varieties and he won't even look at anything raw.  Fresh chicken slices was met with a look of disgust and the offer of a morsel of freshly caught flathead provided a response that could only be interpreted as offense.  I can't think what goes through his mind.  That we would somehow insult him by offering something that didn't even come out of a tin or a pouch.  Long ago I discovered that the cat foot labelling was somewhat vague.  The majority of brands describe their offering as with Lamb, Beef, Salmon etc.  But they don't actually tell us what 'with' is.  So in our house Max has a can or pouch of With and we hope for the best.  We've tried with all the varieties but lately he's bored with them all.  Frankly we've run out of tinned species.  All that's left are endangered and rare breeds.  And I can't see Whiskas running with a range of With bottle nose dolphin in seafood sauce anytime soon.