Expert: Norman Auspitz - 9/15/2011

Question
Hi there,

I have 2 cats, that my husband and I purchased from the Humane Society. Their history is very limited and other than the fact that we have a fairly good idea of their age, we know nothing about them. We are feeding them a 1/4 cup of kibble and half a can of wet food, that we purchased from our vets.  At last visit, they are both good, healthy weights for their sizes.  

Our male cat is a very fast and greedy eater.  He will gobble down his meal and will immediately go to our female's dish and eat hers if we are not watching. She on the other hand, is a very longwinded eater. The other day it took her over 3 hours to eat. She's not interested in food, and I feel that she is waiting to see if something better comes along. The problem is that we are having to consistently watch our male cat, which makes for long nights of yelling at him and squirting him with the water bottle.

Even separating them doesn't help, because she becomes fixated on his location, crying and meowing, that she still doesn't eat.

Can you please help us, as it is not becoming a bone of contention between me and my husband.  At the moment, I'm feeling like the only option is to get rid of the cat...and I'm not the biggest fan of that idea!

Courtney Jarman

Answer
Courtney,

I am assuming that, since they came from the local humane society, they are neutered/spayed.

Lots of people (including us) have trouble with cats that eat at different rates. Our answer has been to feed them in separate cages (we use wire dog crates). We have them stacked on one another with something in between, so they cannot see each other.

We also put the food in the cages and give them no more than half an hour to eat, so they learn that if they do not eat it then, they do not get anything else until the next feeding, and we do feed twice a day.

BTW, yelling, squirt bottles and any other form of negative discipline does not work well with cats. They just do not react well to negative reinforcement.

Try the cage thing and see what happens. Also, if you are in an area where there can be sever weather, having the wire crates is a good thing in case of hurricanes, tornados, and the like.

Please let me know what happens.

Best regards... Norm.