I’ve found another opportunity to use Fisher’s Exact Test!

One of the cats (Gwen) is anorexic. She’s 14 years old and weighs roughly 8 pounds. She’s supposed to eat a half cup of cat food a day. Most days she eats between a quarter and a third of a cup. She has never been a food-motivated cat. We have never been able to convince her to eat wet cat food, sushi-grade raw tuna, people-tuna from a can, or anything else that our bulimic cat would devour.

The vet was not enthusiastic about switching to a more calorically dense cat food. There should be some sort of internal force in the cat convincing her to eat enough food so that she doesn’t lose weight. Older cats are supposed to get fat, not skinny.

The vet ran an extensive panel of tests. The results came back great—much better than you would expect from a 14-year-old cat. Perhaps she has been browsing Reddit on my iPad when I am at work and reading about longevity through calorie restriction? (I should check my browser history.) Is there some sort of cat god she is trying to please though Anorexia mirabilis? No idea.

We have bought a different flavor of the same cat food that she has been eating. (The vet really doesn’t want us to change the food entirely.) The food dish has two compartments: the left and the right. The cat seems to eat preferentially from the right compartment of the food dish.

So now my plan is to put the chicken flavor in one side of the dish and the duck flavor in the other side and track how much is eaten. I would rotate the dish 180 degrees each day in order to eliminate the cat’s natural dish-side bias. I can figure out which flavor of food she likes better! I will report back if I can determine which flavor of cat food she prefers.