I sat down this morning, it was abeautiful morning here in Connecticut. A breezy 50 degrees, wind coming off Long Island Sound…Very nice indeed. I was sitting at our kitchen tablen when one of our little siamese attack kittens came wandering into the breakfast area looking for a bite of my Cheerios, which he usually bats around the tile floor for a while, then eats…
We went around this circuit twice this morning, he kept coming back for more cheerios. I noticed his food dishes were empty. That’s unusual, they usually have plenty of food in there for them to eat all day long. I replenished his food and said to him - Ok Loki, there you go…
He looked at me, looked at the bowl and proceeded to ask for more cheerios. This got me thinking, does he not like the food we give him? I wonder.
We feed our indoor siamese attack cats Royal Canin indoor cat food.It’s the only one where Loki won’t puke it up more often than not. Our female has an Iron Stomach and will eat anything. We went through hell trying to feed our cats what we thought they would like, we went from science diet, to Purina, to Friskies, back to Science Diet and now we have settled with Royal Canin. We have even elevated their feeding dishes so they are not bending over too far to eat…this was advice from our vet Apparently it helps prevent getting air into their stomachs when they have their head inverted down to eat…this helped the regurgitation from our male cat…
So I wonder do cats turn their heads to crap food and gobble up the stuff they like? How do you really know if your cat is eating something they like instead of something they hate? Is it necessity? Meaning do they eat it because it’s all they get? I wish there was a way to know if they actually liked what they were getting fed.
Many, though not all, cats will avoid food they dislike, even if it means starving. I once ran out of food one morning and wouldn’t be able to get any from the store until that evening, so I ran to the convenience store across the street and grabbed a bag of cheap stuff. My cats wouldn’t touch the stuff. I ended up tossing it, and I don’t think they ever ate a bite of it.
Loki probably just finished the bowl of food before you came into the kitchen and was eating the Cheerios for fun.
I don’t know, but bear in mind that your cat can’t tell you what it likes, and that processed cat food is marketed at the animal that pays for it, not the one that eats it. “Seafood Platter” might sound appetising, but maybe Puss would prefer “Dead Pigeon Deluxe”.
Well, with my kitty, it’s quite easy to tell. He just won’t eat food he does not like. He refuses canned food, or any “moist” cat food. He rejects most of the cheap brands of cat food, but doesn’t always like the really expensive stuff, either. He will eat table scraps, but not if you put them in his dish on top of his dry food. Oh, he won’t eat stale food, either. And if there’s a “bald patch” in the bottom of his dish, surrounded by fresh food, he will stand by his bowl and yowl until I fill up the empty part.
We paid some pretty big bucks for some cat food one time that he decided he didn’t like. Hubby said “Just leave it there; he’ll eat it when he’s hungry enough”. But he didn’t. He fed himself by hunting until we took the “yucky” stuff away, and put down something he liked.
He is, without a doubt, the pickiest damned cat I’ve ever had.
Our girls will eat just about anything, although they do have preferences. Their everyday dry free-feed mix is Purina One, mixed with Iams Hairball/Weight Control, with the odd bag of Multi-Cat thrown in for good measure. In the evening they split 1 envelope of wet food. We started them on Science Diet, which they just poked at. Finally they got Friskies, which they gobble up like starving teenagers. Must be the McDonalds of cat food.
I’ve had months where here was no money for anything but the dollar store special cat food. My cats both ate the first bag of it with no complaint but then grew to hate it. I felt kind of bad about it but there wasn’t a lot I could do. I was living on the human equivalent. They sometimes went a day without eating but apparently they got hungry enough and choked it down. I had about 1/4 bag left when I bought a bag of the usual so I mixed them together. They ate around the bad stuff when any of it ended up in the bowl.
Our cats eat pretty much anything we give them. And Quicksilver likes to share the occasional fudgesicle with me! Some are fussy and some aren’t. It just depends on the cat.
Sounds exactly like what we do at home. I don’t know about the Friskies bit, but I do know our cats LOVE friskies wet food. And we split a can of it every night as well. The Sliced Chicken Dinner is what they love the most.
Mine pretend to like any brand the first time I buy it, but if I get it again it sits there in the bowl til it rots. They actually seem to like the grocery store brand, but my husband claims that it stinks. I’m about to go back and try Iams again. I believe they used to eat it, but I quit buying it because I had to make a special trip for it. My grocery store recently started to carry it, so I guess I’ll go back to spending the extra cash.
Our man-child boy-cat, Owen, does this exact same thing. Owen loves people-food. Well, Owen just loves food, really. He’ll snarf stuff right off our forks if we’re not careful (and sometimes even when we are). Every day at dinner time, we always check to make sure his bowl is full before we eat our own supper, and he still acts like he’s homeless and feral and starving when he sees that we have plates. And I assure you: that cat will eat any-damn-thing we put in front of him, plus assorted random stuff that he finds of the floor (e.g., bugs, lint, pen caps, other cats’ hairballs, etc.).
So, it might not be a question of Loki not liking his own food, but of him just preferring yours.
Every few months, maybe three times a year, my kitty will start having puking episodes where he starts puking up undigested cat food. When this happens, the “cure” is to feed him a bag of Iams. He can go through one bag, and happily eat the cheaper stuff for some space of months without harm. Then he’ll start horking again, and I’ll know it’s time to take out a second mortgage and buy him more Iams.
Well, do you like everything you eat equally? Do you only eat your favorite foods, or do you balance your choices between what you live to eat and what you eat to live?
As long as you buy a good brand of kitty food, think of any people food as ice cream for kitties.
Ophelia isn’t too fussy, she likes moist food as long as it’s in jelly and she prefers fish-based food to meat-based equivalents. She’ll eat dry food if there’s nothing else but she isn’t all that keen on it. And if there are cat treats around then she’ll wolf those down.
Shadow is a bit more difficult and I’m still trying to work out what he really likes. When he first came to us, he would only eat dry food then he started scavenging out of Ophie’s bowl but when I put the same food into his bowl instead, he didn’t want it.
He was the same with the dry food upstairs - the main food bowls are down in the hallway but there’s also dry food upstairs for them. He’ll eat that, but only from the separate bowl that we put down for him, he won’t eat from the other bowl that was there before, presumably because Ophie’s told him that’s hers.
He loves fish though - any kind of tinned fish but the current favourite is pilchards in tomato sauce. I also bought some quite revolting-looking Cherish cat food that’s got large fish pieces in it and he’ll happily tuck into that but only if it’s on a plate on the kitchen floor. If I put it in his bowl, he doesn’t want to know.
People food is all good as far as he’s concerned, to the point where he will sit on the open door of the grill and attempt to pull out whatever’s under there. One day he’ll manage it and that will be remembered as the day Shadow burned himself on the grill!
Sometimes I believe cats just don’t like change. We always bought the same brand of cat food for my first cat, but there were two flavors. If she had been eating tuna flavor and we picked up chicken, she would turn her nose up for a day or two, then eat the new food when she got hungry enough. At the end of that bag, if we switched back to tuna flavor, she’d have the same non-eating snit over the flavor change. It wasn’t that she appeared to prefer one food over the other, she just didn’t like switching.
Solfy, that’s the reason we started our girls on mixed flavors and brands from the very beginning. That way they are used to the flavor changing every now and then, and aren’t picky about it.
Too funny! Are you sure you’re not me? I also have an Owen (an orange tabby) who will eat absolutely anything (including uncooked pasta noodles once - I’m still not sure how he managed to chew them). As can be expected, he’s a big boy. I was telling people that he could be a pumpkin for Halloween : I wouldn’t even need a costume, he’s already orange and round.
Strangely enough, my other cat is very picky and skinny. If I didn’t think that Cosmo might starve, I would be restricting Owen’s food intake. It’s hard to have two with opposite eating habits.
When one of my kids was in third (?) grade, we did a science fair project entitled “Do Cats Prefer More Expensive Food?”, and this was our conclusion as well. The vet we consulted also said she wasn’t surprised that our kitties liked the cheap stuff best…apparently it’s the kitty equivalent of junk food, as picunurse said.
I have to question your deadly accuracy here. Any studies handy on the subject? I think that, when faced with food they don’t like, cats will look for other available nourishment, but I refuse to believe that if you put a cat in an environment with no other food available, it will let itself starve next to a plate full of food. It’s just that they are more stubborn (and loud) than their human roommates.
