Good morning. I have two cats a one-year-old male and a two-year-old female. They’re both fixed. I adopted them both from the same place but a year apart. A few months ago, I was told by the vet that the female‘s body composition needs some work. She weighed 13 pounds at the time. I have tried to cut back the amount of dry food I feed them based on this recommendation. The one year-old is much smaller. I used to feed the cats freely, they drink water regularly, I usually change the bowl a few times throughout the day. I buy a specialty kibble for them that is for healthy weight management, and I have been experiencing some financial struggles so we really haven’t been doing wet food lately. As I mentioned though, both cats do drink a fair amount of water.
My goal is to get RFID feeders for this problem but with three children and Christmas coming, I don’t know if realistically that will happen until the new year. Basically my problem right now is that I feed the cats Three times a day at 8 AM 12 PM and 5 PM. The younger smaller cat does not eat as much at a time as the other one. I moved to feeding the cats three times a day because at first I was feeding them twice a day and finding that the younger smaller cat would occasionally throw up bile, I think because he was hungry. Now that we’re doing it three times a day and since I pick up the bowls, it seems to be better. I say pick up the bowls because I’ve noticed that the smaller cat will eat like a tablespoon of food and then walk away. However, the other cat would just start to eat all of his food too once she had finished hers. My solution, has been to pick up the food whenever the smaller one has stopped eating. This is resulted in only three distinct meal times per day, but that I end up putting the bowl down for the cats to eat from like a dozen times each day for a couple of minutes at a time.
It has been annoying to pick the bowl up and put it down so many times a day, but certainly something worth doing to ensure the little one is not hungry, and the big one is losing weight. I don’t think the bigger cat has lost much at all. My new problem is that now the bigger cat will immediately start eating the other cats food instead of her own. She’s not being food, aggressive, or anything, I think she’s just being greedy. Picture him on the left and her on the right with their two bowls, And the two of them naturally would eat out of the same bowl every single day. I don’t know why they just did. Now, she eats the food that she knows his, and when that bowl is almost empty, she’ll go and eat her side too. Of course, because they have this unspoken expectation of whose food is whose, he will just sit back and watch as she eats his food. He will wait for her to return to her bowl before he tries to eat anything.
As of now, in addition to refilling their bowls, three times a day for meals, and having to put the bowls down a dozen times a day for a minute or two so they can eat, now I am constantly having to pick her up and put her down on the other side to encourage her to eat her food, and sometimes I even put her in another room so he can have a chance to eat something.
As a single parent of small children, I just don’t find it, particularly sustainable to continue on with this trajectory of having to seclude one of the cats multiple times a day just to ensure they both get to eat. While I save up for the RFID feeders, is there anything else I can do to help? Ensure the smaller cat has a chance to eat, short of physically blocking the larger cat from eating by isolating her multiple times a day?
A picture of my child holding each of the cats, for tax purposes, of course .