I’ve never had a problem leaving cats for up to a week.
Luckily, my cats have never been the kind that I have to feed at specific times, so a large bowl of food (or 2) left out works fine.
If I’m going to be more then maybe 3 days, I’ll make sure that all of the toilet bowls are left open, and I’ll usually leave one of the sinks or tubs with a slow dribble going.
Do make sure that doors won’t blow shut and trap the cat. Either block it open, or close it off all together.
Don’t be surprised if the cats are either clingy or a bit standoffish for a while when you get home.
CrazyCatLady here. My computer has gone belly-up, and his computer won’t let me log him out and myself in.
If your cats don’t adjust to change all that well, I would not leave them alone for five days, especially since you don’t know how they react to you going away. If your cats are the type who quit eating when their routine is disrupted, or the type who start puking when they’re stressed, or prone to stress colitis, it’s dangerous to leave them completely without supervision for such a long period. A cat won’t starve in five days, but an animal who is vomiting or having diarrhea can die of dehydration in much less time than that. Cats can and do eat things that are toxic, or that aren’t meant for ingestion. A cat with a foreign body can perforate a bowel and die within 48 hours. A cat can time a jump wrong and get a break or a dislocation. Cats can throw clots and die just out of the blue. You should have someone at least look in to make sure they’re alive and relatively well every day or two, if not for them then for yourself. It’s pretty damn horrifying to come home and find your pet dead, especially when they’ve been that way for some time.
If you don’t have any neighbors or coworkers or classmates who could tend the kitties (most of those folks are glad to do it for nothing), call your vet. (Don’t go giving me any crap about not having a vet, either–if your kitties haven’t been due for their shots yet, they will be soon enough, so you might as well start shopping around now.) In the very unlikely event they don’t have someone on staff who’s willing to petsit, they’ll generally be able to point you toward someone who will. Healthy kitty petsitting is usually pretty cheap as petsitting goes. I used to charge $5 to check on one healthy cat once a day, unless they lived way out in BFE. The price went up depending on how many cats you had, whether they needed meds or other special stuff, what else you needed done, how far out of my way it was, etc.
When my cat was fairly young (less than one year), I had to leave her for several days. When I got back, there had been a shift in her pesonality. She had gone from extremely friendly to a little standoffish. For example, before she would jump in bed with me each night and sleep with her head on the pillow. Once I got back, she would no longer do that.
That may have been part of her natural evolution from kitten to cat, hastened by my absence, but nonetheless it was there.
After that my next door neighbor and I introduced our cats to one another and kept them together at one of our apartments.
We have a self-feeder and self-waterer so that we can leave our two cats for several days.
When you have multiple cats, they do good job of keeping each other company and don’t miss humans very much as long as they have food and water. But I can definitely see where an “only” cat might have a problem being left alone.
Make sure to clean the litter box just before you leave.
I forgot about this. I left my cats alone once for three days. When I came back, I found them locked in the bathroom together. They shut the door on themselves. Fortunately, they had the toilet to drink out of.
After that, I’d put a heavy weight (like a brick) in front of doors to keep them open if I had to leave them overnight. I highly recommend this.
