Annoying cry when I'm prepping food

lovesmekitties

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I have a kitty that's coming up on 4 months old named JohnnyMac.  He has what I would call a presumptuous personality, not easily frightened and readily invades his brother's space to snuggle or tackle them when they are sleeping.  Even the way he lays with his legs crossed has something presumptous about it.  We really enjoy him, but the minute I step into the kitchen and he spies me at the sink, he goes ballistic. 

I feed him 4x a day.  I feed raw, so I warm the meat to room temp in a baggie inside a bowl of warm water and it takes some time.  The cry he makes is shocking.  It's demanding for sure - long, drawn out and scolding.  My husband and I were amazed the first time we heard it, that such a big sound could come out of a little kitten!  He was climbing the drawer pulls to get on the counter but I moved to the other side of the sink where there's only one pull.  He still attempts to reach it, but he's not getting on the counter. 

He's doing this to some extent when I'm in the kitchen preparing human meals too, and it's really wearing on me.  Sometimes we put him in the bathroom until the food is on the floor in the dish.  It's such a habit, that today at one feeding, he only ate half, but a short time later when I went in to cook he started doing it again (and he wasn't even hungry!).  At one point, I thought maybe he needed to eat more often, so I added a feeding, but he didn't eat much.  One of my older kittens has started to copy him now too.  Not cool.

He's an adorable little purr-ball, but I dread the torture of feeding time.  Is there some way to train him?
 

mani

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I think the only way around it is to not feed him when he meows, and do when he's quiet!  (good luck with that...
)

It needs a kind of positive/negative reinforcement thing, if you can manage it. 
 
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catspaw66

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Yep, what he is doing is training YOU. If he squalls loud enough (isn't it amazing how a small kitten can make more noise than a 20 pound adult?) he gets fed. Mani has the right idea.  Noisy bad, quiet good.
 

hakeemtarabulsi

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Hi LovesMeKitties,

I already experienced the same scenario, but then we (Daddy was the first to notice!) realized that Rainbow Kid is totally deaf, and most probably that was the main cause of having him meowing in such an annoying mode, i.e. similar to deaf humans, or specially those who have weak hearing ability, when they talk louder than the normal ones.

Hence I would highly recommend to make sure that JohnnyMac doesn't have the same handicap, if we could call it so.
 
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lovesmekitties

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Thank you for your thoughts everyone.  His hearing seems to be fine, but that was worth checking.  As far as only feeding him when he's quiet, I think he would starve!  He's just not quiet long enough to reward that.  My best thought right now is just to put him in the bathroom while I'm prepping. 
 
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