When You're Old, Maybe You'll Eat Cat Litter Too

Sasha, my ancient feline (18 in April), Holstein-colored, muscle-wasting, tottering, senile dear has taken to eating clumping cat litter. I first witnessed this a few months ago, so who knows how long this has been going on since she has moved to the basement 23 hours a day.

Just yesterday, as I leaned over and scooped her litter, she came up to the edge of one her boxes and put her nose down inside it and began to nibble as if she were at a trough made for cats. I tried to gently dissuade her by tapping the box and talking to her, but my hands were full, and she didn't lift her head. After a few seconds she wandered off to the stairs and put her snoz in a bowl of expensive, stinky, fishy, dried cat food and ate it as if it were litter.

To be clear, we feed her whatever she wants, which is made for cats' consumption. Her pica shouldn't be due to a nutritional deficiency. She is, however, slowly losing her mind.

I like the new Sasha. For 17 years she was mostly unapproachable, untouchable, except for the rare occasions where she'd jump on the bed, and if you didn't move, she might knead and suck on the fabric in the crook of your arm. Now, things are very different. I can pick her up, hold her, for god's sake. I walk her up the stairs in my arms and pet her on the couch for hours. She purrs and purrs. She even saunters up to the bird when he's stupidly on the floor. I am not sure if it's in malice; more likely, she's wondering what the hell the little blurry thing on the linoleum is.

We first noticed The Great Mindshift during a party in May. She came up the basement stairs, sat in the kitchen filled with people, and proceeded to stare at the guests. Huh.

She had vacant but sweet expression on her face. A few friends picked her up; the dwindling cat mewled. Jonesy, protective like a mama bear to her cubs, burst forward with a "I don't care if you are vets. Put my cat down!"

Down the cat came.

It's painful to watch her walk, wrists askew in arthritis. Her hips jut out, her once fatter belly sags and swings like an empty udder. When she sees me at the top of the stairs I wince, knowing she's headed up to see me. I put her on pain meds, but I am not sure it helps much.

Further proof her mind has wandered to the place of permanent absenteeism--we feed her little bowls of wet food when she comes upstairs. If you move when she eats, or if another pet walks by, distracting her (you need to sit by her and fluff her food with a fork), she turns around, looks up as if to say, What was I doing here? You get her attention back to the bowls (multiple flavors to encourage her to nosh), and she dives in as if she's never seen them before. She may eat for a minute or a few seconds, and the whole cycle of attention starts again.

The newest dilemma is she appears to be voraciously eating but when she totters off, the food merely looks moved around, some now on the floor for the dog-vultures to swoop in. We add water to the wet food to create more of a stew--she tends to lap up the liquid and then stumble away, as if drunk. Then a minute passes and she looks at you as if she hasn't eaten yet.

Occasionally the bird walks over--he prefers to be center stage with all activities. I shoe him away; the dogs are circling, knowing there will be great payoffs if I step away from guarding the bowls. A little bird in the way of that could lead to a pile of feathers and a small avian leaving this mortal plain.

Every day I look down the basement stairwell to do what we call the Dead Check. This was first instituted when my lovely O, my aging lab cross, started to not come down from the upstairs bedroom (do we detect a pattern here, retreat to floors above or below the mainstay commotion?) when we got home. He had gone a wee deaf and was not easily wakened, even by the piercing barks of the terrier-mutt Lulu. Each day, you never knew if today was the day.

So now we wonder, Is today Sasha's day? So far so good.

She seems transilluminated with happiness, suffused with even more present-tense-ism than even before. I love watching her look around the room, then amble over to rub on Jonesy's legs. She's unsteady but she doesn't care. She just wants a little pet, preferrably on her tummy, and then feed her already--It's been days, she says, since she last ate.