I find bigger bowels where their whiskers dont touch rim as much is a big favorite for my cats. Their water bowel is frankly huge. Food trays kinda flat but gotta put it on the floor for one picky boi.
Autocorrect changed the meaning of this initially. “Bowels” and rims, oh my.
My cat is the messiest eater you’ve ever seen. I tried a lickmat with him but he just sprays it everywhere. Bloody carnage.
Oh my the carnage ☺️
Treats:
This is the answer.
My cat is 18, and she has become extraordinarily picky in the past year. The only thing she will eat reliably is Churu. She gets her medicine mixed in it twice a day, which means that now she wakes me up at 5 a.m. daily to beg for her breakfast.
I have the only cat in the world who could take or leave Churu.
Out of our 4, two are obsessed with it and 2 just don’t care. I think it’s the smell.
Mine too. Sniffed it and wandered off. Tried 2 flavours.
Dreamies work though
you are not alone! i ended up mixing them in with wet food just to get rid of them. (the churus, not the cats)
A Webbox treat stick.
I want… Subservience
Don’t put cats food dishes near their water dishes, it isn’t a mystery
Chicken, fish, milk, cottage
Shit that’s how my life feels basically at all times.
That fourth thing is hunger. It only comes when the cat is fed on a schedule, as opposed to free-fed with multiple piles of food out all day. Feed in a schedule and you’ll suddenly see (healthy, right-weight) interested felines licking empty bowls.
You’ll also never sleep in again. That worked for me though. That little asshole kept me from being late to work on many occasions when I forgot to charge my phone.
Lol. 😂 I hear you. I feed at 10am and 10pm (with a 90 minute variance to keep them from getting to good at timekeeping). After almost a decade, I figured out a way to sleep in! Course, they still whine at night starting at 8pm sometimes, but my vet says my cats are unusually fit and a good weight, so I know I’m not starving them like they want me to believe. Their chirps and whines have gotten more and more elaborate and detailed on the last three years.
Yeah, I had to leave for work at 6 during the week so that was when he got fed. If I wasn’t awake by 5:30 He was on my chest licking/biting my face. I could have set my clock by it. He had a crazy sense of time.
Raw and wrigglin’!
Your mind will be blown once you learn about ‘different flavours’. I wish I could ask my cat which he prefers.
Couldn’t you have multiple flavors out to eat in order and see which one they eat first?
I don’t have a pet but I think I’d do that. Food is mostly fuel for pets so they’ll eat what’s available unless there’s a problem. These things are manufactured to be appealing to your kitties. If they won’t eat it you won’t buy it.
a cats favorite flavor is whatever they feel like it is at any particular moment
And/or whatever you’ve just given up on and thrown away
Mine goes off fish every now and then. Sometimes during these times she will still eat salmon, but not tuna, cod or her freeze dried minor treats.
Other times I have to be careful not to get my hand attacked for not putting the fish dish down fast enough.
The other night she had chicken “stew” for first dinner, reluctantly. When I tried to serve the same flavor for 3am dinner, she sniffed it and then reached out and scratched my leg and yelled at me.
I haven’t gotten rid of that flavor, she may change her mind later.
She’s currently only excited about beef and rabbit flavor. I’m extremely disturbed about canned rabbit, so I hope she starts accepting poultry again soon.
Holy crap that’s nuts
Wait… Now I’m remembering about that dog that got trained to talk with a sound board.
If you had that for a cat with water, chicken, fish and beef I wonder if it would work…
Edit: It can be done…
What Whisker likes today might not be appealing to him tomorrow, and he will ask for it in 2 months when you thought he didn’t like it. Don’t get me started on which brands he favors depending on which direction the wind blows. That being said, I got mine to eat his wet food by mixing pumpkin purée for human babies with it. It worked for almost an entire week.
Fun fact, pumpkin purée is the #1 vet recommended cat laxative.
That is a fun fact!
I could present him with multiple options at once, but since he only gets wet food, this would involve a lot of waste.
There’s also the added problem of changing taste. Depending on my mood, I prefer different food on different days. Until proven otherwise, I just assume the same for him, which is why I would ideally have everything in stock and he could choose every day.
Maybe I should get more cats, give them multiple options and see who goes for what. Ideally, everything gets eaten and I learn more about their preferences.
Maybe you can try to associate the food with a label? So that the cats can point at a label or color or whatever the association with a flavor is, to show you what it wants in the Moment?
I do this, and it’s still only like a 60% chance it’ll appeal to my cat in the moment. I just let it sit until she either eats it or it’s been 6+ hours (she’ll generally eat it within 1-2 hours, though). I use wet food pouches, and only put a little in the dish at a time, so it’s not a huge waste, but it’s annoying when she chooses a flavor and still doesn’t want it.
Evey time I entertain the thought about adopting a cat I think about stuff like this and nope right out.
If a person would act like that you would hate their guts :D
Tbh, it’s not even a question in my mind about whether she’s worth the hassle. I’m not an especially patient person, and I grew up with very tolerant and well behaved dogs, so I had much the same thought before I adopted my cat, but she’s absolutely delightful. She’s sometimes picky, but she communicates pretty well to me, so what she’s thinking is not normally a mystery.
Coming home to her climbing all over me and aggressively nuzzling my face is one of my favorite things in life and it’s totally worth a little guesswork on her preferences. That obviously isn’t totally universal, but I didn’t consider myself a cat person before, so it might be true for you as well.
I decided to get a cat after hanging out with my sister’s friendly cats and realizing that I do love cats, as long as they’re not the shitty stereotype I had of a standoffish, hissing, scratching asshole.
I finally figured out mine doesn’t have a favorite and he rotates through multiple flavors. Variety is the spice of life and all that. I mostly have it figured out now and only have to give away about a bag a month. Took nearly $200 of food research to get here though I hope he knows how much I care
I’m tortured by my reflection. Our sustenance craves alteration.
I read that as alliteration, which works wonderfully!
It looks like a human looking into the fridge full of food but finding nothing to eat
Me, every day.
He’s lookin in the pantry for whatever magical thing you’re eating comes from
The fourth thing is milk.
Never give cats milk, it’s bad for them.
My cat is a very bad eater (doesn’t hate his food, just doesn’t eat enough). The other day he was s c r e a m i n g at me while I ate a piece of cheddar cheese*. I bit off the tiniest corner (like 2-3 mm wide, seriously tiny) and gave it him. Never seen him go so wild at a piece of food. I fear I have created a cheese monster and will never know another moment of peace while eating cheese.
*Low-lactose cheese is okay as an infrequent treat. It’s the lactose in milk that’s bad for cats.
I was making a macaroni cheese and had just grated the cheese, turned around to put the block back in the fridge and when I turned back, Greebo was face down in the cheese munching his way through it. I stopped him and because of the lactose thing, checked with the vet who said to look out for constipation or diarrhoea but he was fine, and I was a lot more careful after that.
I wan da fishy