Intoxication
I always think of Buddy when I peel carrots. Maybe there are other creatures with a similar fondness for the vegetable, but Buddifer was unique in so many ways that I tend to think not.
The first time I saw him rubbing his face on a couple of peels that missed the garbage pail, I knew I’d be saving them for him from then on. If he found one or two strips of carrot skin intoxicating, imagine how he reacted to a paper plate full of them. The sheer joy of so much carrotness was almost too much to bear. He wore himself out rolling and wriggling on top of it.
It was so funny to see Buddy react as he did to carrots, of all things, that I began to wonder if there were other lesser known feline intoxicants. The old standard, catnip, had never elicited more than a mild response from him, but I read that black olives make some cats playful and cinnamon is the drug of choice for others. I tried both of those with Buddy. He stuck his nose up at olives, but he did enjoy rubbing his face on the cinnamon broom his “grandmother” gave him. Cinnamon didn’t captivate him as much as carrot peels, though.
I kept expecting his fascination with carrots to diminish, but every plateful was as exciting as the first. If catnip is the marijuana of the feline set then, at least for Buddy, carrot peels were the hard stuff.