We recently switched our cat to a all canned diet to deal with her food allergies. Since she’s getting a bit on the portly side, we’re feeding her exactly to her weight/caloric needs. She didn’t take to the stuff at first, but now she can’t get enough of it. Every time we step into the kitchen she gets all underfoot and harasses us with pitiful mews for food. Outside of the kitchen, she’d paw us to get our attention, and as soon as we get up she would dart to the kitchen in anticipation.
I thought I was being clever when I started scheduling alarms on the kitchen oven. I would feed her only after the alarm sounds. She made this connection pretty quickly, as she would race into the kitchen as soon as the alarm goes off, but the cat seems to have missed the if and only if part of the agreement. Now in addition to begging us for food all around the apartment, she would also make the occasional entreaty to the great oven god on her own.
Should I invest in one of those timer cat feeder things? You’re not supposed to keep wet food out for more than a couple of hours, right?
Cats are notoriously difficult to train. They aren’t pack animals like dogs, so they don’t see you as the boss. They are selfish predators, taking whatever they can get away with. Usually, they won’t do something right in front of you if they know they will get punished. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they’ll do it. They don’t seem to make the connection with future punishment either.
Good luck. I recommend consulting a professional trainer here, if it is that important to you.
What is wrong with a plump kitty anway? At my house where I group up (back in the days when houses were not packed to gether and you actually had real yards), we had an ulimited supply of dry cat food available, and at meal times they got the wet stuff.
One cat became very fat. One cat was thin. One cat was in the middle (not fat, not thin), and the last cat had as what can be best decribed as a beer belly. She just had a gut that hung down, but overall didn’t seem fat. Our cats were indoor / outdoor cats, and had plenty of room to run around outside if they wanted to.
Humans, despite having a refridgerator full of food 24/7 (not just fat americans here) are not always or frequently fat.
One thing I have been told by some pet specialists you can do when putting a cat on a diet, is to have some very health dry food avaialble all the time, and just give them the good stuff at meal times, maybe for dinner or breakfast only. The healthy food isn’t very tasty and cats will generally only eat it if they are hungry enough rather then just pigging out because its there.
We once had a problem with one of our two cats. She kept attacking our daughter (this was when she was 1) by pouncing on her and biting her and stuff.
We got her into a really good training program at the local vet though and she doesn’t cause anymore trouble! In fact, she was cured almost instantly! Only cost about sixty dollars.
(This is probably the moment when the lack of the evil emoticon has troubled me the most.)
Ah. Took me a bit to understand. I was kinda hoping there was such a thing as cat training, my GF’s cat (which is now my cat) is mean as a snake. I’m getting pretty close to “training” her in the basement with a fucking 2x4.
That’s the way to do it though, Spoofy. I’m amazed when people try to rehabilitate domesticated animals that have a track record of attacking children.
You’re doing the entire species a favor when you exterminate a specimen that has demonstrated an inability to coexist with the apex predators.
Seriously Jason, if I’m flippant and irreverant about my autistic daughter you really think I’m going to be very sober and respectful when talking about my evil cat?
The fact was that we tried for about three months to find a home but since we had her declawed in the front (probably a mistake but at the time she was clawing the shit out of our apartment) we didn’t have any luck finding anbody that would take her as an outdoor farm type cat, and since she was so damn mean we couldn’t find anybody that would take her as a pet type cat.
In the end I felt that rather than foisting off the problem on an animal shelter (if we had soft-pedaled her problems then somebody else would have been unhappy, and if we had been honest they would just have put her straight to sleep too) I might as well bear the cost of putting the poor thing down. She was not a nice pet for us and probably wouldn’t have made a nice pet for anybody else.
:(
Thankfully the other cat has always been the sweetest thing with the kids and everybody else.
And Jason, children or not, she bit EVERYBODY. She often bit my wife and I hard enough to draw blood with no provocation. I used to take fireproof gloves with me to the vet so that I could hold her down without fear of getting bitten. The vet got bitten by her at least once or twice.
I can’t say that I “miss” this cat at all, although I do feel some level of guilt because
She was a feral cat that we adopted (at about 8 weeks old) from a littler born of another feral cat that my parent’s neighbors had fed for a few years.
For the first six months of her life she lived with me in a studio apartment and I was gone all day.
When I moved in with my wife we kept the cat out of the bedroom so we could sleep. When she hacked up the carpet near the bedroom door we had to move her into a bathroom for the night.
Finally, when we adopted another feral cat (but at about two weeks…the mother was very sick and couldn’t even nurse the kittens) and cat #1 never recovered from that.
(Tip: be careful when adopting feral cats…seems like a crap shoot)
Yeah…autistic daughter (4) doesn’t tend to interact with the cat too much although she does like her. Normal daughter (2.5) LOVES the kitty and tends to “pet” her a bit aggressively sometimes but the cat is very understanding. If it gets too rough she just runs away and we remind the two year old to be gentle.
Actually, not all animal shelters just instantly put pets to sleep - the Humane Society here in Seattle only puts animals to sleep in extreme cases (Animal Aggression, Very Sick, Etc) and will hold on to pets for years until they can find a suitable home for them.
Obviously, I don’t know the whole situation, but taking what you’ve said so far, I would have given the cat to the local SPCA/Humane Society, gave them the full story, and given a donation of the amount it would have cost me to put the cat to sleep. The cat maybe gets a new home, and if not you still got to pay to kill it.
But as mentioned, Guido, the cat was aggressive. That was one of the things you said they would put the animal to sleep for. So they just cut out the middleman. It’s a shame it had to happen. I’ve had to put three cats to sleep, but never for something like that (it was illness). I found it very difficult, personally, but then they weren’t trying to kill me either.
Sometimes you get a bad cat. I don’t know that letting someone else get clawed and bitten is the humane thing to do, either. A serious cat bite can lead to pretty massive infections, I know a lady who nearly lost her hand from one.
Sometimes an animal just doesn’t work, and needs to be put down.
In the end I felt that rather than foisting off the problem on an animal shelter (if we had soft-pedaled her problems then somebody else would have been unhappy, and if we had been honest they would just have put her straight to sleep too) I might as well bear the cost of putting the poor thing down. She was not a nice pet for us and probably wouldn’t have made a nice pet for anybody else.
First mistake was getting her declawed. Declawing, and the painful side effects, as well as denying a cat of it’s primary means of defence, only makes a bad situation worse.
Sadly, there are plenty of people that put their cats and dogs down for … heh … “cosmetic” as well as behavioural reasons. It’s a harsh reality that I’ve had to face as a vet tech that I’ve still never gotten used to.
We recently switched our cat to a all canned diet to deal with her food allergies. Since she’s getting a bit on the portly side, we’re feeding her exactly to her weight/caloric needs. She didn’t take to the stuff at first, but now she can’t get enough of it. Every time we step into the kitchen she gets all underfoot and harasses us with pitiful mews for food. Outside of the kitchen, she’d paw us to get our attention, and as soon as we get up she would dart to the kitchen in anticipation.
Wet food is pretty calorically dense, which is why you’re getting the portliness. Trying to work in a lot of playtime might help with this. The other thing you can do to try to cut down on the whining is get a spray bottle and spritz her with water when she’s being overly annoying.
Ther any kind of dry food you can mix in with the wet that you can feed her? Dry food has more carbs and will make the cat feel fuller. I’ve never been a fan of wet food, as it’s really bad for their teeth.
