I have two cats, Joey and Oliver. They are super cute and fluffy and I love them, but right now they are driving me so crazy I am almost pulling out my hair!
I feed them in separate rooms because Oliver used to push Joey out of the way and eat his food, so I decided that they needed to be separated so that Joey could get plenty to eat and Oliver wouldn’t end up weighing 700 lbs. Instead of embracing this new feeding process (by new I mean several weeks old now) Joey eats a few bites and then goes to watch Oliver eat in the other room. Once Oliver has eaten all of his food he goes in and eats all of Joey’s food and Joey just watches him. Then half an hour later he is starving and rather than standing by his food dish to indicate that he would like to eat he jumps up on the bed and knocks things off the night stand one by one until I come in there to see what the hell he is doing. At that point he jumps off the bed and slinks low to the ground and tries to hide, so it is obvious he knows he is being a douche.
I have tried shutting Joey in the bathroom for 10 minutes or so after he starts his game of knocking everything over, I have tried feeding them only when they are behaving properly, I have tried shutting them into their separate rooms while they eat, and I have tried free feeding them but nothing is helping.
How can I make him eat when I feed him and stop literally waiting until Oliver has had his fill? And if I can’t do that, how can I train him to stop destroying things to tell me he is hungry?
Huh. That’s kind of tough - you have a glutton and a grazer.
If you wanted to get fancy you could have a sepearate space with a cat door openable only to Joey via a microchipped collar. Such things exist. But it does seem to be an overly dramatic solution.
My inclination would be to try toughing it out. Give Joey a smaller portion so Oliver doesn’t get grotesquely fat when scarfing up the leftovers and ignore Joey’s importuning between feedings. When he gets hungry enough, he should learn to adjust to the feast or famine feeding regimen.
You’d have to be careful to monitor this, though. Cats that go off their feed entirely for too long ( like more than a couple of days ) risk real health problems.
I have two suggestions for you to try. I developed these for cats that eat too fast and throw up, so I am not sure if they will help, but they might.
First, try feeding them both several small meals instead of one big one, so if Joey only wants a few bites at a time, only give them both a few bites at a time. Second, take a plastic bottle or some other clean container that they can roll around and fill it with cat food, make a hole in it just big enough for a few bits to fall out at a time. They used to make a ball that was ideal, but I haven’t seen one lately. Ideally, the cats get treats and exercise both, but you’ll need to supervise them to make sure they don’t chew on the plastic.
Our two girls were similar - one grazer, one glutton. When they first came together as adult cats, the glutton ate everything in sight. Over time, they have stabilized. We do feed them two meals a day, and the grazer pretty much gets snacks on demand. They each have their bowl, but we make no attempt to keep them out of each other’s bowls. Feeding the grazer on demand has worked fairly well - if she’s hungry enough to bug us, chances are good she’ll eat all the food and not leave it for Miss Piggy. The glutton gets her two squares a day (and whatever the grazer leaves).
Hmm, lots of good ideas here. I can’t really give them smaller meals throughout the day because I work 5 days a week with a 2 hour commute each way, so 12 hours a day there is no one here to give them smaller meals during those hours.
If I had unlimited money I would totally set up that microchip-pet door thing, but that is a very expensive option. Sounds excellent though.
I don’t mind waiting for Joey to bug me for food but the WAY he chooses to get my attention to feed him really sucks. I can’t have him breaking my alarm clock and knocking my lotion under the bed because he wants to eat, you know?
Do this twice a day, morning and evening: Keep feeding them in separate rooms, but choose rooms where they cannot see each other. Put the food down for a half hour and then take it up. Set a timer to go off at the twenty minute mark. Give them no other food until they figure it out. This should take no more than week.
The knocking things off should be treated as a separate problem: either a squirt bottle or shutting him out of the bedroom comes to mind.
You can try training him out of this behaviour, but cats aren’t stupid - if it gets your attention, they know it. My cat likes to scratch the doorjambs when she wants me to chase her, because she knows I don’t like her scratching the house up. I’d get in the habit of keeping them both out of the bedroom, and not leaving anything breakable for him to knock off in other rooms. You can train cats to some degree, but you also have to adapt to them and their crazy, fuzzy ways.
I fed the grazer on top of the fridge because the glutton was already so fat that he couldn’t jump up there. They got different kinds of food too. Regular for grazer and diet for porky. The glutton also ate the dogs food.
That sounds like a good solution, t-bonham. Our girls get a set amount of food (all dry), and they had to work it out between them who got what. Miss Piggy got a little fatter for a short while, but they’ve been exactly the same weight for years now.
My fear is that with an automatic feeder Oliver will quickly learn to be standing there when the food is dispensed and will not leave any for Joey and I won’t be there to know which cat ate what and then have no clue who is crying because they are actually hungry and who is crying because they are a fuzzy bastard when I get home from work. I suppose I could get two automatic feeders, but that is a lot of money to shell out for a solution that might not even work. If I were a gazillionare I would totally look into automatic feeders within their individual microchipped pet doors. And they would each have their own tiny monkey butler.
