I wanna try an experiment but I’d also like others experience here.
I’ve noticed certain cats eat tok fast and also go back to extra food. I feel like if the overeaters/gulpers were let to eat last and then all food leftovers were removed afterwards we might have less instances of vomiting afterwards.
What say you, cat-owning Lemmings?
I’ve always just left bowls of food out for my animals. Gets topped up every 4ish days. Fresh water every morning though.
Everyone’s mileage will vary though, some dogs and cats just can’t be left with food. They’ll eat till the vomit. I don’t think there’s any way to fix it, just roll with it.
Depends a lot on the environment when they were young, I wager. Could also just be nature more than nurture and some animals are just more food motivated than others from birth
That sounds overindulgent to the point its literally the opposite of my problem. I feel the one cat is eating too much + too fast to the extent its causing them to vomit it up making it all fruitless anyway
Uuhh, I do the same as Schmidt and leave the food out. It works fine NOW, but let me tell you about when it failed. I’ve had different cats for decades and never had a problem until my current cat, who was listed at the shelter as ‘shy’. They told me she’d escaped people multiple times and they’d only managed to get her out of the walls the previous day (after she’d been hiding in them for over a week). She was adult, but small and thin and harboring a deep hatred for being confined (she isn’t ‘shy’, she’s extremely willful). We brought her home and she immediately found a hiding spot behind the oven, near the food and water that was out for the finicky older cat. For the first week, the only way we knew the new cat was still in the house was because we’d wake up, find the cat bowl empty and a big pile of cat vomit on the floor. We’d clean up the vomit, fill the bowl, and generally leave the kitchen alone as much as possible. After that initial week, the cat figured out that there would always be food. She would not starve. She did not need to gorge, and gorging was not comfy. Eventually she came out and accepted her new ‘family’. She continued to over-eat a bit too much for several months, but she settled on a chunky weight and has stayed at it for several years now.
Now I have a theory: I suspect that cats who experience food insecurity are far more likely to gorge themselves, and may never stop as long as they suspect their food supply is limited. If you want to test that theory with your own cats, I would be interested in hearing the results.