I had just finished having lunch with my wife. She had had a salad with shrimps in it but had given at least half of the shrimps to the very insistent Geronimo, one of our cats, who likes shrimp better than anything else in this world. This led me to comment on how strange it is that cats should have such a strong preference for seafood given that they can't swim, hate water, and would presumably never eat seafood in the wild. It's not just fish but shrimp, squid, oysters -- almost any kind of seafood, really -- and even among fish they have a strong preference for large marine species such as tuna.
After lunch I opened up a book I had just started, Jonathan Cott's biography of Dorothy Eady, alias Omm Sety, a 20th-century Englishwoman most notable for her firm belief that she was the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian priestess. Wanting to have a mental picture of this character as I read, I flipped forward to the plates and found this.
The caption (also notable for its curiously "broken" English) mentions the clay figurines just barely visible in the background but has nothing to say about the feature that dominates the scene: an enormous poster of a cat reading "Every cat has a right to eat fish."
Why should such a poster exist? It seemed as if it could only be an advertisement for a particular brand of cat food, but no brand name was visible. Googling the slogan yielded, amazingly, only one hit (this post will bring the total up to two), but that did lead me to a vintage cat food advertisement (UK, 1979, just a year before the Eady photo was taken).
This is obviously an ad from the same series as the one that appears in the Eady photo, differing in that it features a different cat and, more importantly, that it has the expected brand name written at the bottom in huge letters.
One can only conclude that Eady, a fondness for cats perhaps being part of her "ancient Egyptian" shtick, got a Choosy cat food advertisement, cut off the part with the brand name, and put it up on her wall -- but left the slogan intact because there was no way to remove it without also cutting the cat's ears out of the picture. This strikes me as rather eccentric even by reincarnated-priestess-of-Isis standards. It's not as if pictures of cats -- even Egyptian-looking ones! -- are so hard to come by that anyone should have to resort to incompletely mutilated cat food ads.
Note also that one can buy an ad like this on eBay now because it's a vintage ad of the sort some people like to collect -- but it wasn't "vintage" in 1980 and would not have been for sale to the general public. It's the sort of poster that would have been displayed on the wall of a pet shop, veterinary clinic, or some place of that sort, and Eady must have specially requested it from the owner of some such establishment so that she could take it home, cut off the bit with the logo, and put it up on her wall!
