Max is Not Smart

A rare photo of Max not eating.

One of the three remaining feral cats I feed in my backyard is Max. He's the one who's about the size of a Honda Accord. This is because he is perpetually hungry and I'm dumb enough to feed him about 5% of the time he demands to be fed. It still works out to four or five meals a day.

But I'd like to think I'm a bit brighter than him. In the evening, I usually give him an entire can of some variety of Friskies containing some variety of alleged fish. I used to just dump the contents of a can into a bowl but I've since learned. Now, I split it up and put the same amount of food into each of two dishes. He devours both. In fact, he sometimes can't decide which bowlful to devour first so he goes back and forth, eating a little out of one dish, then eating a little out of the other dish, then going back to the first dish for a while and so on until he's licking them both clean.

It's the same exact food in both dishes and the same quantity I used to put in one dish. But Max is happier this way because he thinks he's getting two dinners.