Saga of Duck 🦆

A Battle of Wills with my cat

Mar 19, 2025

Those of you who have cats know and understand this: cats are adorable stubborn little assholes.

And Mr. Kitty and I have been going through some things.

Namely — the duck cat food I made the mistake of purchasing in December.

Let me tell you the tale.

Almost from the moment that little turd came into our lives — November 2021— he has only wanted his rabbit pate wet cat food.1

We tried other kinds at first to give him variety — chicken, turkey, salmon — and he turned up his nose at them all.

Especially salmon. That shithead hates seafood, even though the first food we gave him when he showed up at our door and waltzed in was canned tuna 🙄

He will tolerate poultry.

But that cat wants his bunny. So we stopped mixing it up and it’s been all rabbit all the time for the past three years.

We buy our cat food from PetSmart — it’s close to us and with our Treats Points we occasionally get a $20 off of a $100 purchase coupon.

You usually have about 30 days to use said coupon.

So I’ve gotten into a rhythm where I’ll buy a bag of kibble to get the coupon, then go back a week or two later and buy a ton of canned food and maybe some litter or flea and tick treatment for Little Miss Kitty2.

Sometimes — if the timing is right — I’ll get to use the coupon on both kibble and pate.

Rinse and repeat.

In early December, I had a coupon to use. We were out of the big cans of rabbit pate — and PetSmart was out of them too, for some reason.

I’d been going to PetSmart every weekend in November to buy enough wet food to get through the week, hoping for a case of rabbit on the shelves. First I bought mini cans of rabbit, then big cans of duck since he’ll deign to eat poultry and duck is game.

Finally, my coupon was about to expire and all they had was “Limited Ingredient Duck Pate.”

Well, he’d been eating it — and they had a case of it.

I put the cat food down at checkout unaware that I was sealing my fate: a three month battle of wills with one Mr. Kitty.

Weirdly, I got another $20 off a $100 purchase coupon at checkout — that almost never happens when I’m using one.

It expired on January 6. Maybe it was an omen.

As we moved through December, Mr. Kitty was becoming less and less enamored of his duck dinners.

He started eating maybe half of his duck and sating his appetite with kibble.

I was ok with it, because he could stand to lose a pound or two.

But once New Year arrived, I had a coupon to use and PetSmart had rabbit pate.

So even though he still had about half a case of duck, it was raining rabbit.

He was pretty excited when I put the rabbit down on the first day. I think he’d forgotten how much he liked it.

Typically, it takes us two days to go through one can of food, since he splits his food with Little Miss.

I decided to rotate a can of duck in every week so we could get rid of it.

The day the duck reappeared in his bowl, he ate a bite or two.

Then I got the kitty stink eye of utter betrayal.

On rabbit days, he cleaned his bowl.

On duck days, he would stick up his nose when I put his food down — literally he would sniff it, look at me, and walk away — and maybe eat a few bites later when he was hungry.

The Man suggested that I just feed the duck to Little Miss — but I drew the line at having two cans of food open at the same time because His Royal Highness is a picky dickhead.

So we continued this dance through February.

I started giving him duck on days I worked at the shop so I’d be gone while he spent his day being mad at me.

Finally, last Thursday, I emptied the final can of duck into his bowl.

Halle-freaking-lujah.

Unfortunately, on Friday I opened our last can of rabbit.

We went to PetSmart on Saturday — and natch — they were out of fucking rabbit pate.

We went to another PetSmart — same.

So I bought a few cans of super fancy rabbit — this stuff is nearly $4 a can and looks human grade — to get us through the week.

And I got the $20 off $100 coupon at checkout.3

Of course he is absolutely crazy about the new extra fancy rabbit.

Send me positive vibes that his normal rabbit will be there when we go this weekend4 — and that he doesn’t turn up his nose at normal rabbit after his taste of extra fancy.

Shithead.

“Mom how could you call me a shithead when I’m so adorably angelic?”