I have 2 cats that wake up sometime in the 2 hours before sunrise, disrupting my sleep pattern. They start meowing outside my door and won’t stop until I get up and add food to their bowl. How can I get this to stop? Ignoring them doesn’t seem to work, they just get more boisterous.
I don’t think they’re hungry. I feed them liberally before bedtime and sometimes there’s even food in the bowl when they wake me up at night. I find it strange that they would wake me to let me know the “food is low.”
This is costing me a lot of sleep… please help. Can’t get rid of them, they are my wife’s and I do love the little bastards otherwise.
Boy am I going to be watching this thread closely.
I know it won’t encourage you, but my remedy is to cave in completely to my cat’s every demand; because he is relentless, and ignoring him only incites him.
I was going to suggest buying one of the dispenser type bowls that automatically refills, but then I remembered that while we have one, it doesn’t stop the cats from trying valiantly to convert us to morning people. It might work for YOU, though.
The one we have has sort of a “tower” that screws into the dispenser bowl, and we can fit about 7 pounds of dry cat food in the “tower” part. We got it at Petco, I think.
That said, we have three of them and do our best to play with them hard in the early evening. We figure if we can start to tire them out in the early evening, but keep them awake, when comes time for bed we fill the food buckets and water trough. They feed their pretty little faces as we go to bed, they play a bit more and finally call it a night.
While they often get up later in the night, they don’t bother us. Much. Except when one or more of then climb onto us and s c r e a m for attention. At 4:00 am.
Hey, look at it this way. They don’t take money out of my wallet, I never have to hand over the car keys and the phone is always available.
Do they each have a proper little kitty bed with blanket and teddybear?
If yes, and they’re still bugging you, you need to stop giving them an incentive to wake you (food), and give them a gentle reminder that you are not to be messed wih in the pre-dawn hours. I’ve used a squirt gun for that purpose, and it doesn’t take many shots before they get the point.
You probably don’t want to hear this, but once you put food in their bowl in reaction to their meowing, it’s going to be extremely difficult to reverse that behavior, because you have reinforced it. Even if you stop doing it now, it will take a long time for them to lose the mental connection that “meowing 2 hours before sunrise equals food”. I remember from psych class that experiments have been done where animals received food from pushing on a lever. After the animal learned the behavior, the people running the experiment would make the food appear very sporadically, maybe only every 10th or 100th time (or whatever) the animal pushed the lever. But once the animals learned the behavior, they wouldn’t quit. They would sit there an push that lever 100s of times until they finally got a treat.
My cats would do this, until one day i bought a squirt gun, filled it with water, and kept it at my bedside. When they would meow and scratch, I would open the bedroom door a bit, squirt 'em good until they ran, and closed the door. At first it took them about three squirts (as in, they would run away, then come back in a few minutes, get squirted, run away, come back and get squirted…). Then it would taper off to one squirt occasionally. Now they don’t do it at all. They hate to be squirted in the face with water.
Hey! That’s my technique! Yeah, I don’t have any answers either. My inability to tolerate incessant cat whining is the reason my big guy is aroudn 20 pounds…
I seem to recall this problem coming up on this board in the past, and one of the more intriguing solutions I remember was the following: place your vacuum cleaner outside the bedroom door. Turn it on, but leave it unplugged. Run the cord under the (closed) door and into your room. When the cats start meowing outside your door in the morning, plug in the vacuum cleaner. Repeat as necessary.
Ah, here we go. This technique was pioneered by the inimitable Una Persson.
I think this came up on SDMB before and my favorite was someone who said “put the great eater of kitties (vaccuum) in the on position but unplugged inside your door, when they start meowing or scraping on the door plug the vaccuum in.”
My cats like to play at night, and only after a few months of what I call the “Pillow Monster” - me running down the hall after them with my pillow - has the playing subsided. That or I just sleep through it now (the latter is more likely).
Yeah, I don’t have any answers either. My inability to tolerate incessant cat whining is the reason my big guy is aroudn 20 pounds…