Thursday 18 December 2008

Disappearing Chicken

Something VERY strange happened here a few weeks ago and I'm still kind of scratching my head about it.

Let me set the scene - I live in a 53 storey building that has an 8 floor carpark. That carpark is frequented by indian workers and homeless cats. Both stare balefully at us whenever we leave the building and it's more often the cats that call out to us for food.

The two cats that have adopted our building are rather manky looking. There is Tinkerbell and the unnamed female. I called the boy Tinkerbell before I noticed his MASSIVE cat balls. He's got patches of skin missing, chunks out of his ears and I think he was white once upon a time. The girl cat would be kind of cute if she didn't have a gammy leg, a lopsided swollen mouth and a terribly annoying yowl. She's also frequently pregnant or nursing babies (that I've never caught a glimpse of), courtesy of Tinkerbell.

Every now and then I'll buy them a sachet of cat food from the nearby grocery store and they inhale it like they've never been allowed food before.

Since joining the gym and being put on my "brown rice is good for you" diet, I've turned into Little Miss Domestic - always cooking and buying wayyyy too many groceries. A few weeks ago, I bought a massive pack of chicken breast, planning on a chicken palooza in the kitchen. I shoved it onto my crammed shelf in the fridge, piled more stuff on top of it and promptly forgot it was there until I re-discovered it about a week later after returning from a long trip. It was way past the very optimistic expiry date on the packet, which was about a week longer than I'd give chicken to live in my fridge. We waste so much food on board that unnecessarily wasting food at home really upsets me.

Ashelgith said unnamed female cat was meowing pitifully outside the building when she came in that morning, so I got the chicken out and cooked it up. It smelt absolutely rancid and I was really worried that she'd get sick if I gave it to her to eat but figured that beggars can't be choosy and that if she lives in the desert and eats out of bins, my slightly off cooked up chicken really wouldn't do too much damage to her stomach lining.

So, armed with three massive cooked chicken breasts that'd been cooked and diced up (and still smelt hideous), my packed gym bag and I headed downstairs. I'd folded up some foil to make a bowl for the chicken, and I put it near the entrance of the carpark elevators. There was an Indian man lurking there watching me, but he wasn't a worker. He was wearing the standard Indian man outfit/uniform: plaid shirt, trousers of indescript colour and sandals. Man sandals.

I put the chicken down and smiled at a businessman who came out of the building and looked oddly at me for feeding the cat. Some people just don't understand niceness. The cat however, was nowhere to be seen. I felt good about doing a good deed and skipped off to the gym, only to be tortured beyond belief by Jimmy.

When I came home I was hoping to see the foil bowl empty or at least almost empty. Instead, I was shocked to see it was gone. Not just empty and perhaps pushed about by the wind, but GONE. Finito. Removed. I was sure that even though the cat is starving, not even she could eat that much chicken in just over an hour. I scouted around the car park, behind the poles and under the surrounding cars as unobviously as I could but had no luck. Then I thought perhaps the foil was thrown into the bin by a passerby who saw it was empty.

Feeling rather homeless myself, I went over to the bin, opened the lid and looked inside. Still nothing. I then realised that someone had taken it. Now this may sound like a stretch but this IS Dubai. People do all sorts of weird stuff here and while a great many of them are crew, this reeked of homelessness. Not even the most conceited of cabin crew would throw out a cat's dinner and a unnamed female cat most certianly DID NOT get up on two legs (one of them very gammy), teeter over to the bin, open it and place the foil inside. There was also no spilt chicken on the floor around the bowl, telling me that unnamed female cat never even saw the meal.

I came upstairs and told Ash and while we had a giggle that someone had stolen the chicken, I then realised that that person would be in a world of pain after eating it. It was so off it didn't even smell edible once it was cooked. For someone to be so hungry and poor that they need to steal food that someone gave to a cat is just so sobering. I really help that's not the case.

Does anyone else have a plausible explanation for the disappearance of my thougthfully cooked chicken??

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I liked reading your post. I think it is really nice of you that you thought of feeding the poor cats.

Either the cats were so hungry they ate the whole thing and ran away with the foil to hide it somewhere in a secret place in the building...or someone saw you and: option A:was hungry and ate it B: gave it to someone to eat as a prank, perhaps to a roomate thats too messy.... C. was hungry, ate it and got sick.

Girl on Tour said...

oooh yuk. I just looked over at my cat bowl here inside thinking my cat had returned home for a meal after 3 days away, but it happened to be another cat that had worked out how to get in the cat door...these deserts breed crazy felines.

I cannot believe you cooked it as well, and endured the smell haha.I would have just given the cats it raw...cats and dogs love raw chicken!

Merry Christmas fellow Aussie away from home :D