Whether you’re a pet sitter or an owner, tell us about the funniest or most unexpected meal you’ve ever had to prepare for a furry, scaly, or feathered friend. Maybe it was a gourmet spread for a fussy cat, a home-cooked roast for a spoiled dog, or something so unusual you had to check the instructions twice.
Pets often surprise us when it comes to food, and some of their humans take “special diet” to a whole new level. What’s the oddest or most memorable pet meal you’ve ever served? What was on the menu, and how did it go down?
I had to prepare special food for a sick chicken. 4 or 5 different items from the garden (oregano, salad, etc) and then about 4 more items from the pantry, and then I had to mix it all in a blender. Then the chicken had to be hand fed with either this food or cheese, 4 times a day. It couldn’t digest normal food, which made this necessary.
I filmed the pet owner while she made this food, or I would never have remembered what to do.
Funny enough, the most delightfully peculiar meal I’ve had to prepare while pet sitting was during my very first sit. The host was a vegetarian but kept frozen fish for the cat. Overnight, I had to leave some fish in the fridge, and first thing in the morning, I had to cook the fish for the cat, making sure it wasn’t too hot or too cold when serving it to him. Sometimes there were leftovers, so I’d sneakily try to reheat them… do you think they’d notice? The cat’s name was Lucky
I once sat for a tank of tadpoles (as well as the dog). I had to take little parcels of frozen lettuce out of the freezer and drop them in the tank.
I also had to syphon off the poop from the bottom of the tank with a turkey baster contraption. All seemed quite normal at the time but it still makes me smile when I think about it.
Just glad they didn’t mature on my watch or I could have come downstairs to a kitchen full of frogs
Our recent sit - biscuit o’clock! One digestive biscuit was shared between 3 dogs at 5pm They were patiently waiting for it but giving us “the look” from 4.30pm already…
Last year we did a sit with about 15 cats, all living outside in a huge garden. All beautiful, well behaved cats, fed with a raw, organic, diced chicken breast. Once a week we did a little trip to the butchers in the nearest city to get this fresh chicken, a lot of it! And then, every day, breakfast and dinner, 15 plates, 15 happy cats!
We once did a sit with two beautiful Norwegian Forest cats. They’d had a difficult start in life and the HOs had rescued them. For a long time they struggled to find anything the cats would eat. Then one day they were preparing organic rump steak for themselves and one of the cats jumped up and started eating some..!
So…fast forward.. the cats diet for the last 2 years has been organic rump steak served twice a day! Raw & chopped into little bits and hand fed- the only way they will eat it! The owners said the cats diet cost more than their own!
Its not exactly a ‘meal’ but i turned around for 2 seconds while the fridge was open he other day, and my cat jumped in and pulled out about half a roast chicken.
Now, everytime i walk past the fridge she is sat there expectantly. She even sometimes tries to open it with her paws, and howls when it doesnt work.
Not a THS sit: I’m headed to Italy soon and will bring cases of a specific canned wet food for a friend’s finicky cat, who moved with her human from the U.S.
On a previous THS sit, another cat was fussy and his humans worried that he wouldn’t eat enough, following a near-death illness a year earlier. I had to weigh each of his meals, fed to him in small batches, and monitor how much his lordship ate.
I also had to keep re-piling his kibble into the center of plates at two stations, because he’d not eat more if it was scattered. And even then, he picked away.
Plus, I had to get him to eat more by tossing pieces of dried food at him, like he was a soccer goalie. He liked to field and eat them. Or sometimes I’d lay out a handful in a row on a window sill he favored.
He was sweet and tried to feed me, too. Gifted me a mouse, with just its innards neatly eaten.
My cat Walter is very food secure, and has never really pestered me when I’m eating, except when I have an occasional rice pudding! As it’s full of dairy and sugar, he can’t have any, but he’s very persistent. Out of all the things I eat, including steak and chicken, it tickles me that rice pudding is his weakness.
I tried a cat friendly version of rice pudding with cooked plain white rice and pet milk, with some shredded chicken, but he wasn’t impressed!
Hahahaha, never heard anything like that! What I do see quite often, though, is that many hosts use all kinds of random brands for their own food, but when it comes to their pets, only the top-quality stuff will do.
I did a sit recently where the dog had a tablet to take daily. A couple of days she managed to push it away at both meals and it was left looking forlorn. I picked it up and offered it to her as a treat. She gobbled it up both times!
Not a pet sitting story, but when I was growing up our cat got to the fish destined for my father’s dinner. My mother rescued it from the cat and carried on with the original plan of feeding the fish to Dad. Probably quite normal behaviour for ‘waste not, want not’ Yorkshire.
I thought my experience with feeding cats organic chicken was fancy enough but organic rump steak…wow!
My own cat (years ago) was very picky and she wouldn’t touch even very fancy pates and food in jelly, she would only eat gourmet gravy or broth based cat food, with addition of prawns, pumpkin, seaweed, cheese…you name it. We got her fixed shortly after adoption and of course we didn’t feed her the night before the treatment. We had a few cans of unwanted pate left and she was so hungry after surgery, she just devoured it in a seconds. But the next day she just refused and here it go, back to the duck, wild rice and asparagus dinners…
We adopted a two year old lab/chow/IDK mix from the pound once. We were all in the yard bbq’ing some salmon. When we went to get the marinated salmon from the picnic table…you guessed it…gone! The dog threw it up a few minutes later still whole (a huge fillet). We thought about still bbq’ing it, but naw, couldn’t. Same dog went w us to family Easter dinner where my father in law, a retired vet, surreptitiously fed him turkey till the dog threw up on the new carpet. Guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks…either the lab or my father in law.
As my friend glanced out of the window she saw her cat coming across the lawn towards home . She noticed that with great effort it was dragging along something very large in its mouth . Almost too large for her cat, but the cat was determined and wouldn’t let go . As she got nearer she saw it was a whole roast chicken . Evidently , it had only recently come out of the oven since it was still hot !
She was too embarrassed to ask her neighbours which one of them was missing their lunch …
The owners said the cats diet cost more than their own!