I think I’ve seen every other cat behavior question except this one.
My cat has a habit of attempting to bury his food. He’ll walk all the way around the bowl, doing the paw-scratch thing on the floor like he’s in his litterbox. He doesn’t do it every time, and it’s not limited to his food- he’ll also do it when Mr. Kitty or I put a bowl on the floor with the remnants of a spicy meal (not for the cats to eat, but just as a temporary stop on the way to the kitchen sink). He’ll then walk off with his tail stuck straight up in the air.
We haven’t changed his food- both cats get Purina Indoor cat food, and he’s got a clean bill of health except for the occasional flareup of his [sub]cat herpes[/sub].
Is he expressing his disdain for the food? Is he trying to cover it up to keep it from our other cat? What on earth is going through his fuzzy little empty head?
My educated guess would be that he is trying to save it for the hard times to come :rolleyes: . I feed my cats on the kitchen counter to keep the dogs out of the cat food , and my female cat , Ruby is the worse one about trying to cover it when she has had her fill. The bad thing is, she has figured out how to shove the bowl back against the wall and toss the wall phone cord and cell phone recharger into the food :wally . Nothin’ like cleaning cat food off the phone cord…
Hmmm, that’s odd, because now and then, one of our cats does that around the **water ** dish. Certainly he’s not trying to bury the water, is he? Never could figure out what he’s thinking either.
He’s saving it for later OR he just doesn’t like it.
One of my cats does this every morning with her wet food morning treat. If I happen to give her too much, she eats what she can then ‘buries’ it. If she doesn’t like the chosen flavour, she ‘buries’ it and stalks off to beat up one of the other cats.
I’ve seen some nature shows that show tigers burying half eaten carcasses and then come back to them later.
It’s difficult to say what the cat is doing exactly, as animal behaviour studies would have to show that in the wild, cats would be likely to honestly hide their food by burying it or covering it. It has been suggested in one of my books that the “covering” reaction is a smell-triggered one, and if the food has some chemical smell or smell in the food product that reminds them of something in excrement, that triggers the response. I do not know that anyone has proof of this, however.
My Fat Cat, when he was a kitten, had peculiar behavior of eating from his bowl, and if you approached him too closely, he would hiss and stick out his right paw, covering partially the bowl next to him, as if to keep you from eating that food too. This disconcerted Thin Cat to the point where we had to move their bowls apart by several feet. Who can say why that behaviour came about? Cats are odd.