I have always been of the mind that my cats should take what they get and be happy about it. Apparently, this is the wrong attitude. Some pets require interactive pet feeders, which make meal time an intellectual challenge. These devices pose puzzles and provide interesting hidey-holes that one’s pet must master before being rewarded with pellets of tuna or beef.
The interactive feeding station for cats is supposed to stimulate the cat’s natural instinct to seek and hunt, something our civilized kitties have lost over generations of coddling. Personally, I don’t know if encouraging the wild side in pets is a good thing. I had enough trouble handling the tame ones. Let’s see, there was:
- Stormy, the dog, was rescued in a thunderstorm, of course. She required an immense amount of expensive dental work, and that was BEFORE she ate the deck.
- Luna and Eclipse, the cat sisters, alternately grew fatter and skinnier, until it was tough to tell who was eating what. After Eclipse died, Luna aged into a slow and snooty grazer. Always aloof as opposed to her cuddly sister, Luna took on some of Eclipse’s personality in her later years, seeking attention at all hours of the day, even when it meant flopping on the keyboard or the middle of the dictionary to get it. Then the Intruder came to live with us, and Luna became an entirely different cat.
- Midori (a.k.a. the Intruder) was a cat child, always bugging the older cat to play and never staying Luna-slapped for long. Midori considered ALL food to be “mine, mine, mine.” The cute Siamese would have eaten until she exploded, I am sure. So her owner (my daughter who was living with us while attending grad school) put her on strictly proportioned and timed meals. I had to lock Luna and her meal bowl away in my bedroom at night to keep Luna’s kibble safe from Midori.
Luna has passed since those days, and Midori has her own house to terrorize now. My daughter has invested in an automatic feeder. At various times during the day, it dumps food into a bowl, which contains a golf ball. Midori has to chase her food around the ball, which slows the little gnosher down and, my daughter hopes, helps with her digestion.
That is as high tech as Midori’s interactivity is going to get. Because Midori is a smart one. I shudder to think what she could do with an interactive feeding station at her beck and paw. Rule the world perhaps.
Love the golf ball idea. I’m going to try it today. Thanks!
Sometimes it takes a lot of thinking to outsmart our pets. Hope it slows down your kitty speed-eater.
This had me in stitches. All my cats think about when they see me if whether I’m going to feed them. I actually bought a pink food ball thing with holes in it so my cats would chase it around hoping the fat one would lost weight. Instead I had little bits of cat food on the floor that were apparently too small for them to bother with. I try to resist feeding them on demand and pretend to be tough, but I’m sort of a pushover.
I fear my daughter’s cat would weigh 50 pounds without the golf ball. She will eat 20 times a day if they let her. Of course, not all of it stays down, but that is another story.