If you want to, you may spend over thirty bucks per pound for dog food. It’s available. You can score an eight-pound bag of K9 Natural Lamb Feast Raw Grain-Free Freeze-Dried dog food for $245, not including tip. It’s not made from your soiled ordinary domestic woolheads, either. Straight New Zealand grass-fed lambs wearing daisy necklaces and humanely dispatched mid-frolic, all the way. There’s virtually no filler involved. It’s made with 90% meat plus 5% fruit and vegetables and 5% egg and green lipped mussels (also from New Zealand). You can also sprinkle on some Lamb Green Tripe Freeze-Dried Booster for a probiotic effect. The company claims the food is highly palatable.

That’s important for a species that hoovers up socks and cat turds.

We spend about two dollars per pound of cat food, ourselves. Tater cat never overeats and also never eats anything other than the grocery-store kibble, not even ice cream, and not because we never tried it. She has no interest. One bag lasts quite a long time and she doesn’t even eat half of it, because she will eat only the original-shaped kibble; once she crunches into one, the leftover shards are dead to her.

We’re very fond of this cat and would probably spend more on her nutrition, but if we spent $30 per pound and she snubbed it, we’d have to pin her down with a gavage tube, and it wouldn’t end well for anybody. So we’re limping along with the $2 stuff and the little extra bits get tossed out for the birds.

I hope that’s okay. One worries. She’s gone to the vet about four times in her adult life. The first two times it was because she was sneezing. Both times that cleared up immediately as soon as we forked over good money for the vet visit. It was almost as if inserting our bank card into the port was a miracle injection. Then last year we took her in because she’d lost a lot of weight and started throwing up every now and then (after fifteen years of no horking at all). That one ran us up to $500 for the lab tests confirming they had never seen a healthier cat and she had a lion’s heart and the kidneys of a prize kitten.

Then last week we took her in again.

This time I was nervous. I found a small damp poop with a little fresh blood in it. And no poops at all for the previous two days. This could not be good. We boxed her up and hove off for the vet. It was the usual thing. First the technician and the vet both went on and on and on about how beautiful she is. “Amazing,” they agreed. They’d never seen an eighteen-year-old cat look that good. “Eighteen and a half,” I pointed out, modestly. Her ears were great. Her teeth were great. The vet scooped her up and squished her all over like a stress ball. He had postulated that she was a little backed-up and straining had produced the dab of blood, but he proclaimed her blockage-free. We all watched as she jumped down from the table, did a little reconnaissance and ankle-rubbing, and jumped straight back up again in case they weren’t done admiring her. She refused the technician’s treats. We stuck our bank card into the port and brought her home and she promptly produced three perfect turds and had a bout of the zoomies.

The At-Home Care Instructions were brief. “Keep Tater clean and dry and warm.” Well. Tater keeps herself clean, thank you. She got the heebie jeebies from stepping on a damp spot once and hasn’t been anywhere near water since. And she always finds the hottest part of the house and bakes until she just springs back when lightly tapped at the center. I think we’re in good shape. And I don’t want to change up her food. If she felt any better we’d have to set up a steeplechase course in the living room.