Is my crying cat REALLY always hungry?

[emmylou]

Originally Posted by meditatingmind

I think she may very well be hungry, and I gave her an increased amount of food yesterday, but there also seems to be something else going on, since she would still follow me and cry even when there was food left in her bowl. She'd still lead me to her bowl as before, meowing like crazy, but it was never empty.

I agree, that sounds like something else. It sounds like she doesn't like the food. She was probably eating another brand before, and she finds this less tasty... or maybe less filling. Or it could be the meat. I've had cats that preferred fish and wouldn't eat chicken or beef, and cats that would only eat chicken.

Try experimenting with a few other brands and flavors, and see what you can figure out.

 

[goldenkitty45]

Cats are notorious about convincing a person they are "starving to death...FEED ME".

If the vet feels the cat is proper weight for the body build, then no she is NOT starving to death. I raised rexes - they are masters of this. I do warn potential owners that rexes will eat 24/7 if you let them and they cannot be free fed as adult cats!

Give an occasional treat but ignore the pleading cry. Instead of food, get a few cat toys and have some interactive time. It may be more of a cry for attention for playing then for eating.

 

[meditatingmind]

Originally Posted by emmylou

I agree, that sounds like something else. It sounds like she doesn't like the food. She was probably eating another brand before, and she finds this less tasty... or maybe less filling. Or it could be the meat. I've had cats that preferred fish and wouldn't eat chicken or beef, and cats that would only eat chicken.

Try experimenting with a few other brands and flavors, and see what you can figure out.

Hi Emmylou-

Thanks for your advice! I don't know if you saw it or not, but earlier in the thread I explained what we're feeding her. Tomorrow will be 2 weeks since we brought her home from the shelter. She was a shelter cat for 3 months, during which time she was fed HSD Adult cat. The shelter sent us home with a free bag of the same food, and the vet gave us another, so we've got two bags now. Even though HSD is pretty poor in terms of nutrition, we're going to go ahead and use it until it runs out. She has shown no signs whatsoever of not liking any food we've given her. She's still getting the exact same dry food she's been eating for months, and she likes all kinds of wet we give her. When I talked about crying while there was still food in her bowl, I meant that I have been trying to do a modified free feeding the last few days, so I've been putting way more food in her bowl than she could eat in one sitting. She goes and eats ravenously until she obviously feels full, leaving plenty of food her bowl. But she still comes and cries. All I was saying was that that fact made me wonder if it's not solely food issues that are prompting this behavior. If she didn't like the food, she wouldn't eat it, no matter how hungry she was... right? Wrong?

 

[meditatingmind]

Originally Posted by GoldenKitty45

Cats are notorious about convincing a person they are "starving to death...FEED ME".

If the vet feels the cat is proper weight for the body build, then no she is NOT starving to death. I raised rexes - they are masters of this. I do warn potential owners that rexes will eat 24/7 if you let them and they cannot be free fed as adult cats!

Give an occasional treat but ignore the pleading cry. Instead of food, get a few cat toys and have some interactive time. It may be more of a cry for attention for playing then for eating.

Hi GoldenKitty45! Thanks for writing... Leo has a lot of toys, and I think we're giving her enough interactive time. I work from home a lot, so she's rarely alone in the house. I take breaks throughout the day and engage her in active play, and DH does the same when he gets home from work. Even when I'm not actively playing with her, I talk to her a lot. She amuses herself, too, playing with her toys when I'm not involved. And like a normal cat, she naps a lot in the afternoons. I hope she's getting enough stimulation.

The good news is that since I've been feeding her more, she has stopped crying at the door at night (or at least we haven't heard her the last two nights). But she still follows me around meowing during the day.

That free feeding works at all kind of surprises me. I would have thought that cats would have an instinctual drive to eat as much as they could whenever food was available. They do hunt, so they're not total opportunistic eaters, but still - they may go a while between successful catches, so it seems as though it would be to their advantage to eat as much as possible to tide them over through lean days. Wonder why it works for some and not others? Genetics/breed (as with the Rexes), or more environmentally controlled behavior? Really interesting stuff.

 

[goldenkitty45]

My first cat, Mitten (mixed breed) was the only one I could free feed and he would not overeat.

IMO its better to schedule meals cause you really know how much they eat or are not eating. With free feed, you don't notices changes as well till they are overweight - then its hard to get that weight off.

 

[muzz]

2 tsp of wet food mixed with water? That doesn't sound like anywhere near enough.

The cats I've had in my life have always had a sachet of food (with some dry food crunchies on it) in the morning & another in the evening & a spoonful for the night.

 

[losna]

If you're serious about the raw feeding, it's much easier than it's made out to be. I get ground whole prey from mypetcarnivore.com for my kitties. I mix in the supplements (I went to costco and bought a big tub of vitamins that have the proper amount for 2 pounds of meat for a cat and then just break a capsule and mix it in easy as pie when I open the tub), and presto. A scoop for each meal. It costs me about $60-70 a month for three cats, one of which eats twice as much as the other two - I should say this about what it will cost me once I get the newest one on raw feeding. It'd be much less if I gave them all chicken, but I buy chicken, pork and rabbit.

The trickiest parts are just doing the research so you feel confident you know what you're doing, and figuring out how much to feed them, which is based on weight and their activity level. But there is a forum on this site about raw feeding, and lots of helpful people there to help you do that, and decide if it's what you want to do. 

If you do go raw, you'll be glad you did based on just the litter box cleaning! Let alone the other benefits like silky soft fur.

 

I'm glad you started feeding her more, what was described in the first post didn't sound like enough food to me.