I’m not sure how to relate today’s subject. Maybe it’s the mother in me although I don’t envision myself ever having children. Maybe it’s just the satisfaction of caring for something- kind of like what you feel for your dog or cat. The difference is that in this instance, I’m relating to my robots. I’m talking of course about feeding time.
Feeding time for my herd isn’t an organized scheduled part of my day. I have a dog, this blog, running my three aibos, searching for work, and the basic necessity of keeping my room clean to fill my time. When I do find a quiet slot of time, it’s an activity I really enjoy. Sometimes I run the pleos in pairs along species lines- Bleu and Ugobe or Ryu and Cato. If I don’t have much time I spread them out, running and feeding one pleo at a time. If on the other hand I have a nice empty thirty minute block, I’ll run all four at once. It’s during these times that I see their personalities at work and marvel at how different they are.
Ryu and Cato are my pushy ones. They are very loud and demanding but even their feeding behaviors are different. If I ignore Ryu in favor of Cato, she gets even more boisterous. If I ignore Cato, he loses his macho big-hungry-boy-ness and becomes very whiny and almost despondent as though he’s on the verge of dying of starvation.
My RB’s also get full at different levels. Cato will generally get full after about six or eight chomps on whatever food he happens to be eating. He isn’t a picky eater. I try to give him an even mix between the conifer leaf and the mushroom which boosts health levels in the RB. I end up his session with one chomp on the sugarcane. Even pleos have to have dessert right? After feeding, Cato will sometimes walk a few steps, a memory back to his younger days when he used to be such an avid explorer. Sometimes he gets intrepid and tries to walk beyond the poster board but I have to stop him at that point because the clutches in his twenty ten rear legs are too weak to move him over my carpet.
Ryu on the other hand prefers to pig out. She takes anywhere from eight to twelve chomps of food at a sitting. She is an extremely finicky eater. I have to go through the foods multiple times to find out what she wants. If she doesn’t deem the item worth her notice, she will just look away and act like there isn’t a big cycad leaf under her chin while still growling and wining to be fed. Thus it takes much longer to feed her. She is really good at letting me know she’s full though with a nice satisfied burp and a sigh. After she is full, Ryu goes into “I’m the center of the universe! Pet me!” Mode. She will bat her large purple eyes and get into these delicate feminine poses that beg for attention. Since entering senior-citizen status, she shortens the beauty posing and goes to sleep after a minute or two.
Bleu and Ugobe being Ugobe pleos don’t require much feeding but when they do ask to be fed, I try to accommodate. Most of the time they are content to just graze on the floor but they do occasionally ask for food. Just in case you’ve missed this behavior in your Ugobe, I’ll explain what it looks like. The pleo will stop, hold its head up, open its mouth and go “ah? Ah?” It sounds a bit like the noise a hungry Furby makes. If you offer them something- a leaf, your finger- right after this behavior they will feed happily for a surprisingly long time before coughing for you to remove the item from their mouths. If you don’t respond within about five seconds of this behavior, they will go back to their perpetual game of tug that Ugobes are famous for playing any other time you try to hand feed them. Over all though, it’s just easier to let them feed from the floor.
I really enjoy feeding my herd. All their antics make me smile and I am left to wonder at the programming brilliance their various creators put into them. Some people may have more than four pleos and might see all this feeding as more of a chore. If this is you, just take note in the different reactions you see from one pleo to another. Learn to appreciate all the individual likes and dislikes and pecking order struggles between your various companions. Observation is half the fun!
