... I did it.

I have this little black kitty, PassePartout, and he has a very picky appetite. The good part is that he's lean. Not like my orange cat, who coming up on his 8th birthday, has become decidedly fat. (But he's also plushy to cuddle.)

So I finally bought PassePartout Fancy Feast. (Need I say that morally this is the pits for me. The tiny metal tin. The cost. Never mind the rest.)

He seemed to like it, and ate an ounce or so.

It was then my curiosity got the better of me. I had already read that actually the pet food industry is better regulated than the human food industry.

(This is not a failure in the human food inspection system, but a recognition that humans will knowingly use products that are not good for us. So if the inspection service banned all products for human consumption that were, say, high in salt, then there would be an uproar from the potato chip addicts.)

But there is no such lobby in the pet food industry. So pets are forced to endure foods that are not positively harmful to them.

So, back to my gross act. I was curious. Why did PassePartout like the Fancy Feast? I did find that its odor was less repellant than that of most cat foods.

So (ulp!) I tasted some. It was bland but not repulsive. Also it had an 'animal' taste -- not the corn meal taste that is probably the basis of most pet food.

(Hey! corn meal is cheap!)

I hope that you will respect me in the morning.

Interesting to know.

You get what you pay for with cat food. I bought Fancy Feast for my little cat because she didn't wat very much and I wanted her to be happy and as well-fed as I could get her. I never tasted it, but she loved it. I suspect it has higher quality ingredients than many other pet food and cats, being the gourmands that they are, know good when they taste it.

My mother once witnessed a very famous dog breeder and trainer, Barbara Woodhouse, carefully tasting all the dog foods for sale at Bournemouth Dog Show, in Hampshire. Mrs Woodhouse was a great character, who insisted that no dog of hers was to have any food that she , personally, hadn't approved.

I've often eaten dog biscuits.Thay are astonishingly bland to a human palate but the dogs here are sufficiently equipped with taste and smell organs that they can distinguish between biscuits of slightly different colours and mix from the same box, and get quite picky about them. At least one of our petfood makers here does employ a man to taste the dogfoods.