How Bad Is Cat Food When Ants Won't Even Eat It?

How bad is cat food when ants won't even eat it?

This thought crossed my mind the other morning as I was clearing the two paper plates on our front porch that I'd put out the night before with cat food on them for Smokey, our nephew's cat.

A little background is in order.

We have a cat -- Patches -- that we feed half a can of "wet food" every evening. While we have experimented with various kinds of wet food, she seems to like Fancy Feast the best. Now that doesn't mean she eats the entire half-can we put out for her. She essentially laps up all the gravy, nibbles on the rest and leaves most of the food on her plate for us to dispose of.

Disposing meant throwing it away, but then about 2 years ago, my wife decided that we were wasting perfectly good cat food and gave the leftovers to Smokey who tends to loiter in our front yard and for good reason. Her owner -- our nephew -- lives next door.

This communal cat feeding has evolved into an evening ritual where we give a quarter of a can of wet food to our own cat and the rest to Smokey on a paper plate that I pitch the next morning.

While our brand of canned cat food rarely varies -- Why fix something if it is not broken? -- I did recently experiment with some new offerings from Fancy Feast. They were introducing flavors just for "Gravy Lovers." That describes our cat to a T, so I picked up one of each of the available flavors to test.

Sure enough they appeared to have more gravy, but Patches hasn't been terribly excited over any of them. She eats her usual amount of gravy, and then wanders out to our sunroom to study the bird feeder from her carpeted perch.

Smokey was another matter. She has not touched any of her portion of the three "Gravy Lovers" that I have put out for her. She sniffs the contents and looks up at me as if to say "This is what I've been waiting for ALL DAY?"

So when this situation occurred last Friday, I succumbed to that woeful look and put a second plate of food out for Smokey, sitting it on the porch stairs just above the offensive entrée. Smokey had no issues with that plateful -- Grilled Chicken in Gravy -- and devoured all of it, leaving just a few specks of meat.

However, rather than pitch the plate of "Gravy Lovers" food, I decided to leave it out overnight in case one of the other neighborhood cats wandered by looking for a bite to eat.

That apparently didn't happen, or if they did, they were in agreement with Smokey on the quality of the food.

The next morning the "Gravy Lovers" plate was still sitting where I put it the evening before, completely undisturbed. But I couldn't help noticing a line of ants that was ferrying the crumbs from the other plate back to their nest out in a nearby flowerbed.

The line went right by the first plate, but the ants ignored it as if there was nothing there worth eating.

That observation made me wonder:

How bad is cat food when ants won't even eat it?