The Lemon Fool

Two-parter...

What's your pet's favourite food? I don't mean pet food, I mean human food.
Our late cat was mad for cheese & onion crisps, and the ice cream portion of choc ices.
And ear wax. He just lurved ear wax.

Part 2... have you ever tried pet food? Any recipes?

V8

88V8 wrote:What's your pet's favourite food? I don't mean pet food, I mean human food.
Our late cat was mad for cheese & onion crisps, and the ice cream portion of choc ices.
And ear wax. He just lurved ear wax.

V8

The mind boggles! Whose ear? Do you have a good dig around in your ear to feed the cat

Oddly enough, a couple of our foxes this year have taken to some serious ear licking on our lawn. 10-20 minutes at a time. Never seen that before.

--kiloran

88V8 wrote:What's your pet's favourite food? I don't mean pet food, I mean human food.

My old dog's favourite human food was frozen peas, second favourite frozen sausages. It had to be frozen - so he learned how to open the upright freezer and raid it.

88V8 wrote:Two-parter...

What's your pet's favourite food? I don't mean pet food, I mean human food.
Our late cat was mad for cheese & onion crisps, and the ice cream portion of choc ices.
And ear wax. He just lurved ear wax.

Part 2... have you ever tried pet food? Any recipes?

V8

We had a cat who passed away about ten years ago. He would go mad to get at chilli con carne off my plate. He wasn't bothered when I said no. Eventually we always used to give him a little dish of his own.

AiY

We used to buy steak pies in foil trays from the local proper butcher (lovely) and the tray would go on the floor for our border collie to lick.
He'd spend ages pushing it around until every last molecule of food had been removed, and it was shining and could go straight in the recycling.
He also liked pork pies, and biting the tops off some of my dad's plants.
I still miss him, the soft old thing

One of our cats would go crazy for sweetcorn, a food that I imagine she was ill-equipped to digest?

Her twin sister would look on in amazement. And then wander off in search of a few spiders to snack on.

BJ

Favourite pet food?

My elder daughter aged about 8, if hungry at cat feeding time, would enjoy sharing the can of 'Whiskas" with our cats.

Mike4 wrote:My elder daughter aged about 8, if hungry at cat feeding time, would enjoy sharing the can of 'Whiskas" with our cats.

I think all canned pet foods have to be tested for safety, as in when they're being used by humans. They tell me that dog food sales are particularly high in deprived areas, and I don't suppose it's the dogs that are getting all of it.

Curry, anyone?

BJ

bungeejumper wrote:One of our cats would go crazy for sweetcorn, a food that I imagine she was ill-equipped to digest?

Her twin sister would look on in amazement. And then wander off in search of a few spiders to snack on.

BJ

Can anyone(anything) thoroughly digest sweetcorn? It's normally sweetcorn in-sweetcorn out (minus the middle bit)

AleisterCrowley wrote:

bungeejumper wrote:One of our cats would go crazy for sweetcorn, a food that I imagine she was ill-equipped to digest?

Her twin sister would look on in amazement. And then wander off in search of a few spiders to snack on.

Can anyone(anything) thoroughly digest sweetcorn? It's normally sweetcorn in-sweetcorn out (minus the middle bit)

You're probably not really in search of a serious answer, but... I'd be pretty certain that various ruminants can - their digestive systems use bacterial fermentation to cope with cellulose-rich foods, and indeed some beef is described as "corn-fed" - which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed confirms can mean that the cattle have been fed on maize (among other possibilities). It seems highly unlikely that beef cattle would be fed on a diet they cannot digest efficiently, and although I'd guess that the type of maize they're fed on probably isn't sweetcorn (which has a short shelf life and is wanted to feed humans), it seems pretty unlikely that they'd be able to digest other varieties of maize but not sweetcorn.

Gengulphus

Gengulphus wrote:You're probably not really in search of a serious answer, but... I'd be pretty certain that various ruminants can - their digestive systems use bacterial fermentation to cope with cellulose-rich foods, and indeed some beef is described as "corn-fed" - which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed confirms can mean that the cattle have been fed on maize (among other possibilities). It seems highly unlikely that beef cattle would be fed on a diet they cannot digest efficiently, and although I'd guess that the type of maize they're fed on probably isn't sweetcorn (which has a short shelf life and is wanted to feed humans), it seems pretty unlikely that they'd be able to digest other varieties of maize but not sweetcorn.

We got a tour round a dairy farm in Brittany. Some of their dairy cows are kept indoors 100% of the time and fed more or less exclusively on maize. Both the cobs/ears themselves, and the stems and leaves chopped up into a kind of silage. That's why they grow so much maize there.

I thought it a fairly cruel process, I'm not sure we do it in this country.

Scott.

Gengulphus wrote:
You're probably not really in search of a serious answer, but... I'd be pretty certain that various ruminants can - their digestive systems use bacterial fermentation to cope with cellulose-rich foods, and indeed some beef is described as "corn-fed" - which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed confirms can mean that the cattle have been fed on maize (among other possibilities). It seems highly unlikely that beef cattle would be fed on a diet they cannot digest efficiently, and although I'd guess that the type of maize they're fed on probably isn't sweetcorn (which has a short shelf life and is wanted to feed humans), it seems pretty unlikely that they'd be able to digest other varieties of maize but not sweetcorn.

Gengulphus

Yes, ruminants can digest cellulose-rich foods including maize. However, if you fed unbroken maize to a cow and then looked closely at the 'output' then you would likely see quite a bit of undigested residue. For that reason it is usually cracked or rolled to break it down which increases the digestibility.

Sweetcorn:

is a variety of maize with a high sugar content. Sweet corn is the result of a naturally occurring recessive mutation in the genes which control conversion of sugar to starch inside the endosperm of the corn kernel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_corn

Maize is a major food source for humans as well as livestock and feeds more people than either rice or wheat. When I lived in East Africa I frequently enjoyed it when bought from a roadside vendor having been cooked on a charcoal stove. It is tough stuff though and good teeth are needed

In many places in Africa it is milled and turned into a meal which is boiled with water to produce something resembling coarse mashed potato or the kernels are boiled with beans. One advantage to this combination is that the both crops individually lack certain amino-acids required for humans to create protein but when combined the lack in one crop is made up by the presence in the other. Allow at least 90 minutes of simmering to soften maize sufficiently to be become palatable. The long cooking time of this staple is likely a cause of deforestation due to the extensive charcoal cooking required.

RC

swill453 wrote:

Gengulphus wrote:You're probably not really in search of a serious answer, but... I'd be pretty certain that various ruminants can - their digestive systems use bacterial fermentation to cope with cellulose-rich foods, and indeed some beef is described as "corn-fed" - which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_feeding#Corn-fed confirms can mean that the cattle have been fed on maize (among other possibilities). It seems highly unlikely that beef cattle would be fed on a diet they cannot digest efficiently, and although I'd guess that the type of maize they're fed on probably isn't sweetcorn (which has a short shelf life and is wanted to feed humans), it seems pretty unlikely that they'd be able to digest other varieties of maize but not sweetcorn.

We got a tour round a dairy farm in Brittany. Some of their dairy cows are kept indoors 100% of the time and fed more or less exclusively on maize. Both the cobs/ears themselves, and the stems and leaves chopped up into a kind of silage. That's why they grow so much maize there.

I thought it a fairly cruel process, I'm not sure we do it in this country.

Scott.

Yes, we do it in this country too. It was not possible to grow maize commercially in the UK until a few decades ago because maize requires a lot of sunshine but plant breeders have developed varieties than can make do in the UK. The attraction to farmers is that it produces more dry-matter per Ha than any other crop. However it is not high in protein, the stems and leaves do not provide much and so some other form of protein supplementation is needed to compensate for this.

RC

ReformedCharacter wrote:

swill453 wrote:We got a tour round a dairy farm in Brittany. Some of their dairy cows are kept indoors 100% of the time and fed more or less exclusively on maize. Both the cobs/ears themselves, and the stems and leaves chopped up into a kind of silage. That's why they grow so much maize there.

I thought it a fairly cruel process, I'm not sure we do it in this country.

Yes, we do it in this country too.

Sorry my "not in this country" was directed at the practice of keeping cows indoors 100% of the time. I may be wrong though.

Scott.

swill453 wrote:

ReformedCharacter wrote:

swill453 wrote:We got a tour round a dairy farm in Brittany. Some of their dairy cows are kept indoors 100% of the time and fed more or less exclusively on maize. Both the cobs/ears themselves, and the stems and leaves chopped up into a kind of silage. That's why they grow so much maize there.

I thought it a fairly cruel process, I'm not sure we do it in this country.

Yes, we do it in this country too.

Sorry my "not in this country" was directed at the practice of keeping cows indoors 100% of the time. I may be wrong though.

Scott.

Some of the large dairy farms in the UK do that too, not sure about beef. It's called 'zero-grazing' and has been a part of farming in the UK for many decades.

RC

ReformedCharacter wrote:Some of the large dairy farms in the UK do that too, not sure about beef. It's called 'zero-grazing' and has been a part of farming in the UK for many decades.

Fair enough. Thanks.

Scott.

Guinea Pig risotto or Hamster fricassee.

And hamster jam is always wonderful in the spring, don't you think?

BJ

Our cats go to war over an empty tuna tin. OH loves tuna sandwiches and if any of them sees him take a tin of tuna out of the cupboard they go as quiet as a mouse and just wait patiently until the empty tin goes on the floor, trouble is you can't lick a tuna tin out quietly, not when it's on a tiled floor that's when the trouble starts. Griselda our beautiful grey fluffy cat, sadly now departed, was particularly partial to scrambled eggs. Our dog loves ice cream but only Magnums, she gets to lick a very small portion left on the stick and closes her eyes in ecstasy. We've tried her with other ice cream but she just turns her nose up.

R6

bungeejumper wrote:And hamster jam is always wonderful in the spring, don't you think?

BJ

Ah the tulips.