I don't mean what you use to chop down your feces, but an object that you realized only your family has and people would raise their eyebrows at. Best if said object has a sole purpose.
We have a fork specifically for cat food. It’s different from all our other forks (we bought it separately) and it’s used exclusively for ‘mashing’ and dividing wet cat food.
We love our cats and we love to give them the food they like but wet cat food is disgusting and we’d rather not risk ‘cross contamination’.
EDIT: I know contamination isn’t t actually a thing but keeping a separate cat fork is a victimless crime ok?
I use a regular fork when mashing dog food, and the fork goes directly into the dishwasher afterwards. I can't fathom what kind of cross contamination that would lead to.
I've always called any fork that doesn't match the set the "dog fork", since when I grew up this was basically why we had the smaller, weird fork for our dogs and cats.
I've not had a dog since I was a kid, but any time my wife has accidentally brought cutlery from her work place that ends up in our drawer, I call it the dog fork.
We have a similar spoon for dog food. My wife wasn't paying attention and it got ripped up in the garbage disposal several years ago. It is easily identified by its jagged edges.
Try not buying paté and use chunks or slivers instead. Also pet food is made with the meat from stores like Walmart that was getting too close to the expiration date. It should be totally safe for humans to consume and doesn't have a risk of contaminating you and making you sick.
We've got something similar. The fork we have came in a pack of two. The one we don't use for cat food is in the drawer with all the other forks and nobody ever uses it.
You are lucky. My mom used the same dishes we used ourselves for the cat food and would rinse them off in the sink with a sponge. And she used a different dish every time so no bowl or plate in the house was safe. Made me feel icky eating dinner out of a cat food bowl but she thought I was strange for caring.
Enamel is non-porous afaik so you're completely safe. That's one of those natural human responses that's actually unwarranted if you consider modern materials (and the fact that cat food is really just meat)