12 August 1984 was my 26th birthday. I was living at the House at Ricker Wood, a co-op of 4 roommates in the Newton Corner neighborhood of Newton, Massachusetts, a streetcar suburb of Boston. We cooked dinner for one another, split rent and utilities, shared a food budget, and rotated household chores, when we weren't procrastinating about doing them. We planted a vegetable garden in the back yard, at least until we found that the house sat on the site of a former garbage dump.
For much of the summer of 1984, only two out of four of us were in residence. One roommate, Michael, was out of state helping his girlfriend go through the stuff in her late parents' house, while another roommate, Ellie, had yet to move in. It was just me and Howard, who had just moved in a few months before.
For my birthday, Howard made me a chocolate birthday pie. Although our household at that time did not have a cat, somehow the subject came up of how cat food was made, and of what it was composed. Did cats actually like to eat mice, we pondered, or did they eat them only because they were easier to catch than, for example, a cow?
Being severely under the influence of chocolate, we came up with the idea that was to make our fortune: Mice(TM) Cat Food — Made with Real Mice!(TM) If, as we suspected, cats actually liked the taste of mouse, Mice(TM) Cat Food would be a hit.
We foresaw a few hurdles. The first, and perhaps most severe, was that cats didn't buy cat food: all-too-human cat owners did. No matter how strongly we could demonstrate that cats loved the taste of Mice(TM) Cat Food, and no matter how many veterinary nutritionists we could bribe to endorse the product, the fact remained that we had to get past the average pet owner's instinctive revulsion toward handling a can of mouse meat. Years of rival pet foods' ad campaigns had persuaded pet owners that cereal fillers and horse lips weren't good enough for Princess Fluffy; ground-up mice, regardless of how high in protein or rich in calcium, would face a similar stigma. Our marketing campaign would have to be a subtle one.
The second problem was, while catching mice in order to put them into cat food might be a public service, it was a terribly inefficient method of obtaining mouse meat in industrial quantities. Moreover, there was always the problem of whether the wild mice had been fed poisoned bait by neighbors not in on the scheme, rendering them of questionable use for feline consumption. Only the healthiest mice, raised under the most exacting conditions, would be fit for Mice(TM) Cat Food. We set about investigating our options for rodent husbandry.
Michael returned, and Ellie moved in. Both were enthusiastic enough about our proposed innovation, albeit not enough to invest. The House at Ricker Wood buzzed with talk of Mice(TM) Cat Food.
At the office where I was programming at the time, I had a co-worker who had previously worked in a lab where they had handled experimental mice — the proverbial white lab mice. I asked him what they fed the mice at the lab.
"Purina Mouse Chow," he said.
That, alas, settled our hash. It hardly seemed right to have to feed our mice with a competitor's product. And it hardly seemed worth our while to make our own.
We never made even a test sample of Mice(TM) Cat Food. Meanwhile, a succession of pet treats — chicken-flavored soda for cats, carob-coated organic gourmet dog biscuits, frozen ice-cream nuggets formulated for companion animals — have in the succeeding 20 years hit the market, and either found a minuscule niche and stayed there, or vanished without a trace.
Would Mice(TM) Cat Food have taken the pet-food world by storm? Or would it have gone the way of chicken soda? We may never know. However, it is worth noting that Marmalade (b. 1993) spent the first several years of her mousing career not bothering to eat — or even dismember — her kills. Tiny corpses littered the path to our front door, having apparently died of indignation rather than injury. Once the play value was gone — once they ceased to wiggle, squeak, or attempt to flee — mice were of no interest; yet still Marmalade would beg for seconds on breakfast.
In 2004, Her Redness finally learned — we suspect from watching a neighbor's cat — that mice do make lovely snacks. Crunchy, at that.
So if we ever do make Mice(TM) Cat Food, we now know we won't have to de-bone the little suckers.
© 2005 E. J. Barnes