About a year ago, my cat went on a hunger strike. She had always eaten wet food because she refused to drink water: tap water, filtered water, it didn’t matter. She had been eating a well-known vet brand for eight years, but all of a sudden she refused to touch it, or any other food, from supermarket own brand to specialty store gourmet. At the time, I noticed that it was just about impossible to buy any cat food that was not manufactured in Thailand, but shrugged it off as another weird consequence of globalisation.
Luckily, after a year of digestive upsets, horrendous vet bills and indeterminate diagnoses, she began drinking water (but only out of coffee mugs!) and eating a locally manufactured dry food containing no fish meal. I put it down to allergies until I read this horrific
set of articles in the Guardian about slave labour being used to produce fish meal feed for prawns (shrimp), something that is also a main ingredient in pet food. Now I’m considering that the cat has more ethical sense than I do. I still have a half bag of frozen Thai shrimp in the freezer, but it will be my last.