Tuna cat food gets no pull tabs

Dear Matthew Alice: Why is it that every flavor of cat food comes in pull-tab cans except tuna? Tuna cat food always comes in a regular can that requires a can opener. — Dick Fitzwell, Lakeside

In spite of what you may have heard, M.A. is nobody’s fool. And nobody’s cat owner either. So I trotted right down to the local mart to check this one out. Sounded highly improbable to me. But the evidence was right there on the shelf. Stuff like kitty-style tenderloin tips in Madeira mushroom sauce and Peking duck or whatever the heck people feed their cats these days come in quick-open cans with pull-tab tops. Languishing next to all the gourmet fare are cans marked simply “tuna” or “tuna in sauce," none of which were the easy-open type. A call to the Alpo folks revealed that the company has several canneries, not all of which have the same type of canning machinery. Their tuna-canning facility only offers non-pull-tab tops. Gourmet kitty fare, they say, is cooked and canned in more modern facilities. The next cat food vendor I tried said they, too, just happened to have the old-style machinery in their tuna factory. Seemed like too much of an odd coincidence for me, so applying a little pressure, I got vendor number two to confess that tuna cat food is canned by tuna processors, the same folks who package tuna people food; the cat food vendor simply affixes its own label. Tuna people food is sold in the traditional-style cans, so tuna cat food is too.