Diet control in a multi-cat household

A few months ago one of my cats started getting territorial over food. The result was that she put on weight whilst the other cat started losing weight. Through this I discovered the difficulties of controlling diet in a multi-cat household.

Usually mine are free fed dry food with complementary wet food and until recently this had worked just fine with the cats moderating their own intake. Aside from one time that we ventured into a pure wet food diet and one cat lost too much weight, this has worked well for my particular cats. But with one suddenly guarding and scarfing all the food in secret things went a bit wrong.

First up, monitoring the cats’ eating was extremely stressful and ineffective. Routine feeding, where you feed the cats at a specific time, caused chaos in bengal world and produced very shouty, angry cats. It also did nothing to stop chonky-cat from eating all the food whilst fending off slim-cat. I tried additional feedings for the slimmer cat, which worked well for him but still had trouble monitoring chonky-cat. I suspect this would work better when you can shut the cats away from each other and feed them individually. I recommend it as a first step, it’s just unfortunate that my cats are very highly strung and it didn’t quite work for us.

I knew from the previous instance, guided by my vet, that wet food has less calories than dry food and switching can sometimes go wrong as the cat doesn’t eat enough of the new food to gain the required calories. This can be used to your advantage but make sure you start with schedule feeding if you’re introducing wet food to avoid manic cat syndrome. You may have to be firm and stand your ground but it will work with consistency. This worked great for the cats and I was able to reduce biscuit consumption and monitor wet food portions. There were still some issues with food stealing but slim-cat stood his ground more often to get the wet food. I supplemented his diet with extra biscuits and treats to make sure he wasn’t losing any weight.

Although the problem is reduced it is still ongoing and our vet recommended a microchip feeder for the biscuits. This type of feeder will only open when the programmed microchip is nearby, controlling what food the specific cat has access to. This sounds incredibly handy and I’ll update once we’ve had chance to try one out.

You can find a list of recommended portions by cat weight here to see how much your cat should be eating.

If you know any tricks to help control the diet of highly strung shouty cats please do leave a comment below