Several years ago, to keep our cat from having hairball problems, we started giving her lubricant-bassed stuff. There’s a compound called “Petro-Malt”, for instance, that is largely petrolatum (Vaseline) and malt. Most cats apparently don’t go for this stuff, and the dodge is to put it in their fur, where the compulsively clean creatures will be forced to lick it off.
Not our cat. Midnight loved it.
We also gave her butter. But she never seemed obsessed by this stuff before.
Lately, though, we’ve been putting Vaseline on our daughter MilliCal, and Midnight has begun hanging around the medicine cabinet whever we’re there. She doesn’t want Petro_malt. She wants straight Vaseline, and she’ll hang around the sink until you give it to her. She goes nuts when you open the jar, and she reaches out with her paw to pull it closer.
We’ve given her some, but this weekend she threw it up twice, and she still wants it. I’ve tried substituting Petro-Malt, but she only accepts it in a reluctant, half-hearted way. It’s Kitty Methadone for Vaseline junkies, I guess.
What’s going on? I never heard about anything like this before. What do I have to do to keep from coming home and finding Midnight on the street corner, selling butter to support her habit?
Mine loves the stuff too and will beg for it relentlessly. So your cat is not weird, or at least isn’t raising the bar on the already high weirdness quotient of cats in general.
Does vaseline have any fat in it? The reason I ask is because I had a cat once that would just love to lick plastic bags and I found out later, either here or from the vet that cats will lick the bags because of the fat in them. Maybe it’s the same idea.
My kitty Manfred is an earwax junkie. So much so that any time I touch my face he thinks I’m scratching my ear and he gets all frantic trying to get to my finger so he can bite and chew and lick it. It’s awful funny.
We had a hairball-infested cat and a neurotic, insanely jealous dog. It required 3 people to subdue the cat and literally force Vaseline down his throat. Quite a production.
The dog watched on, inferred that the cat was being fed some heavenly special treat, and demanded her share of Vaseline too. She’d lick it off your fingers. If the cat got some, she had to have some too.