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My mom's cat is a common domestic shorthair we found on the side of the road as a kitten

Regular cat, not a maine coon or one of those massive breeds. His mom was smaller than a loaf of bread

But in a sort of a Clifford The Big Red Dog situation, he grew super fast, and really really big, and took a super long time to stop growing

Worried that she was overfeeding him, she eased back his portions, but he stayed a massive round baby

When he started having kidney problems, she took him to the vet.

The vet took a look at him and said, "holy fuck, what are you feeding him", checked the nutritional listings on his chow, and told her "Yeah, maybe he's reacting badly to the amount of grain in this, try a meatier diet"

So my mom wound up special-ordering this specific high-protein prescription cat food made of like. Kangaroo meat or some shit that cost like sixty bucks a bag

And, as typical act two in an episode of House, he somehow got worse on the fancy specialized stuff that was supposed to be Primo Athlete Olympic Feline Blend

Like. WAY worse. His guts were inflamed and his kidneys were shutting down and he was all sore and HE WAS STILL HUGE, just miserable and sad

So shetook him back to the vet, where they had to help him pee (he was apparently close to bursting and had some kind of blockage too) and went "Yeah no this is NOT normal and we don't know what's going on, we're gonna do some tests but in the meantime you should go back to what he was eating before, at least that wasn't actively killing him" so she did

And he still wasn't great, but he also improved

And so they take his blood and do an ultrasound and a couple g's later she gets a call back like "this is gonna sound crazy, but we want you to put him on a low-meat diet. Just the least amount of protein and iron and shit. We need you to find the grainiest, filler-iest dollar tree kibble available and give him some of that bad bad shit"

And my mother is a woman of science. So she did

And he GOT BETTER

His energy picked back up, inflammation went down, he started drinking normally again, got back to pissing like a fuckin champion

And so it turns out that out of all the random ass freeway bonus cats we possibly could have scooped out of a ditch, WE got the one-in-a-million freak of nature with a SPECIFIC genetic defect that means a paleo protein free range diet is essentially poison and he THRIVES on cheap ass garbage

Like. He medically NEEDS junk food

I dont really understand how that works, but i cant argue with results.

If we had four of him, they'd outweigh my mom. And he's FINE

Also blind, but that's unrelated

There’s no stated reason. They just pretend to not be alive. We usually can suspend our suspension of disbelief here because when it’s something like a video game or an emoji because any odd occurrences is perceived as a glitch or something similar but the actual reason why they aren’t too hung up on this kinda shitty lot in life isn’t said

They get something out of their current relationship with humans (like in toy story)

They have some specific reason to hide that they’re alive, like they die if they’re seen (like in the christmas toy)

They perceive themselves as sentient, talking creatures, but humans can’t understand them. They just see a squeaking mouse or an inanimate hot dog or whatever. 

and the last one is what most animal movies do, and it’s like, not devoid of weird implications but you can see where it mostly works.

but barnyard is the outlier here: it goes with tier one: the animals can talk and walk on two legs but just pretend that they can’t for unstated reasons. 

in the history of the barnyard world non human animals, at some point, decided to just pretend to be unable to speak. a “cow” or a “coyote” or a “hen” do not exist as we know it in the barnyard universe. the baa of the sheep is false; the ewe doesn’t understand it either. they only made up that noise to hide the fact that they speak human languages. a dog barking and running on all fours is a facade. animals naturally walk on their hind legs and made up whole postures just to appear non sentient.

and for what? what do they gain from this? they have no rights and no voice by their own choice. at one point a donkey claims the farmer is a good person because he’s vegan and a pig mentions bacon - this is not a fantasy universe devoid of death and misery and meat. do animals, in hushed whispers, remind their children not to sob in their real voice as they’re taken away? do the dogs not beg for kindness when they’re tied up and hit? do cows and chickens not cry for their life in the slaughterhouses? does a rat not scream a human scream when the trap misses their neck and only breaks their spine? Why? what is the point? They loose so much and have everything to gain.

anyways does everyone remember this really awful cat. it only appears in one scene but i can just sense the porn of it that would pop up if i googled it’s name

Have you guys seen that clip

Texts From Superheroes