All Kangaroo All the Time

Posted at 10:00 PM, Monday, March 31, 2008

Readers will remember the addition of a grey tabby cat to our household back at the beginning of December. Hobbes was then about 9 weeks old and weighed all of 3.5 pounds. He's been with us for four months now and has grown into a beautiful cat. Hobbes has become a beloved part of the family, and the boys absolutely adore him. Although he often minds his own business, he predictably turns up for the ritual singing of bedtime songs to the boys. This generally marks the start of the most high energy part of the day. He loves it when I chase him around the house and enjoys it even more when we fold paper airplanes and toss them for him to catch.



He has also grown into a discontented and rather large cat, weighing in at something in the neighborhood of 8 1/2 pounds. As responsible pet owners, we fed him a carefully calibrated diet of Hill's Science Diet kitten food, purchased from the local vet--$45 for a 5 kg. bag. The problem was, it never seemed to be enough for Hobbes. After our vet told us he gave his two cats only 1/4 for the whole day, we cut Hobbes' food rations down to 1/2 cup, split into two 1/4 servings during the day. We'd give him his 1/4 cup in the morning, which he would wolf down in five minutes. Then he would start haunting the breakfast table, sniffing in the garbage, and stealing crusts of bread off of the table. Eight hours later, he was more than ready for dinner and was furious when we refused to feed him before 6:00 p.m.

On Sunday, I talked to Jonathan Wysoke, a quietly brilliant veterinarian who is a member of the synagogue. As in the past, he had an immediate answer for my problem: The cat was hungry. Or, as he passionately phrased it, "The cat is starving." How was that possible? Because dry cat food is ten times as concentrated and so gives the cats all their necessary nutrients without leaving them feeling fed and satisfied. Furthermore, he pointed out, cats were not really meant to eat a heavy carbohydrate diet. Modern cats suffer from obesity and diabetes, conditions that have never before afflicted them. When I objected that I was feeding our cat the state-of-the-art pet food, he gently told me that I had been duped by the food industry. Alas for our nearly-full $45 bag of cat food!

Dr. Wysoke prescribed a strict diet of kangaroo meat. Kangaroo is increasingly acquiring a reputation as a delicacy for humans--slightly gamey, highly flavored, and very low in fat. It's also really REALLY not kosher, so it will not be finding a place onto our dinner table. Although kangaroo in restaurants is a fairly new phenomenon, kangaroo meat in pet food is a decades-old practice. It's marketed usually as "pet mince"--meat chopped very finely and apportioned out in pre-measured packages just right for kitty. This wasn't what Dr. Wysoke had in mind.

I made my way to a small pet store at the Central Market which sells meat for consumption by pets. For $4.50, I brought home a kilo a chunks of kangaroo meat scooped into a plastic bag and wrapped in newspaper. I gingerly slipped a few smaller pieces into Hobbes' food dish and waited. Hobbes of course made a mad dash for his food dish and prepared to dive in. He took one look at the radically-altered contents of his bowl and literally sprang backwards two feet. It took him about fifteen minutes to decide he was willing to try something new, and he did so in a fairly meticulous, almost scientific manner. He plucked each of the meat chunks out of his bowl, gave them little shoves across the floor, and then slowly starting figuring out how to eat them. These were not bite-sized pieces, so he had to use his teeth to tear off manageable bits to chew up. It took a solid thirty minutes for him to consume every bit of meat, and at the end he seemed to have achieved a state of inner bliss.

Americans are often amazed to hear that kangaroo meat is used to make Australian pet food. But the fact is that there are way more kangaroos living in Australia than is either good for the continent or good for the kangaroos. It's hard to get an exact figure, but one website estimated a total population of at least 50 million, well more than twice as many people and apparently more than at any other time in Australian history. Kangaroos are cute, cuddly, and generally friendly, so that periodic calls to engage in targeted population reduction are about as popular as efforts to trim deer population in America. Hobbes seems very happy to do his part, and we'll be quite delighted if at the end of the day he loses some weight, has more energy, and is less interested in raiding the dinner table.