No, as far as I know that is not a euphemism.

I am spoiling our cat. She is elderly, mostly deaf and going blind. She’s got a constant runny nose that was finally diagnosed as asthma a few years ago. We recently had a bad scare  and thought she was dying as we helplessly watched.

Long story short — an emergency vet visit brought up the probability of cancer and an emergency animal hospital visit said no cancer, but she has pancreatitis.

Apparently a cat with pancreatitis will eat, but the food he or she eats is not absorbed well. It can be a spell of pancreatitis or chronic. It can lead to diabetes. The vet said to feed her whatever she wanted to eat. Hence the spoiling.

She began turning her nose up to the Science Diet canned food for mature cats, so I bought Royal Canin because she liked the sample the vet gave us. I also gave her some low-sodium tuna in water — the kind people eat — and she liked that. We also give her the skin off the salmon we cook because we don’t like the skin and she loves it. It seems to make her chipper.

The other day she began turning her nose up to the Royal Canin food and I suggested to Dean that I buy fish for her and cook it and freeze it. He shook his head and said that at some point she would only eat caviar from the rarest of sturgeons in a country that does not trade with the U.S.

Okay, he really didn’t say that but I bet he wishes he had.

I did buy some inexpensive frozen fish and will cook it for her — but she seems okay with the Royal Canin again. Dean says she’s got me trained. I think he’s right.