Furiosa's Cat Feeder (2016)

Something to be careful of is where you put it. For a while I would put them on the rugs, or hidden near rugs, and he would eat on the rug. I think this led to ingesting too much crap (fibers, hairs, whatever) which led to some, uh, clingers, shall we say. Since moving exclusively to hardwood floor areas, it has gone away.

So just leaving some bowls out didn't really work for them, they'd constantly eat each others' food or eat everything as quick as possible to keep it from the other cats, with predictable (and gross) results.

We got feeder bowls that only open with the right RFID and now they're all much happier and more food secure. Sadly there's no good ones on the market I could find that do both automatic feeding and the rfid-gating, so we still have to manually feed them but for the most part they don't care when we feed them anymore except sometimes in the morning (which is the most likely time for them to run out of food).

I’ve lived with quite a few different cats in my day. It’s simply the individual cat. Some cats overeat if allowed, some don’t. It’s certainly nice when you have one that doesn’t, but it’s nothing you did if you have one that does.

But even without worrying about eating too much, my cat definitely craves novelty and plays a lot. So I think the vet was recommending it for both reasons. He was getting too attached to going outside a lot, which I also had to curb (perhaps related).

One trick I do is to fill and hide the mice when he's eating his wet food. Nothing will distract him from that! But he's also learned that I do fill them, but won't just give it to him. He might try a quick snack when I'm filling one up but otherwise knows he'll get them somewhere else later.

I did not imply regular disruption. But take this example - I have read/heard about semi-feral cats which were regularly fed for over a year by somebody before allowing to be touched. At this rate you could make it so for wild animals typically found at human settlements like squirrels and corvids. So, no change after the beginning, yet it took a year for the cat before realizing humans are friendly.

> Honestly I think most bad behavior for cats is that third point. People think because they're smaller than dogs they're ok with tiny uninteresting spaces but that's not really how they work.

On that one I have to agree - some people are surprised their cats ignore them, but they don't play, especially to spend energy during the so called zoomies.