It's very possible I'm worrying over nothing, but my cat has an incredible appetite, most of the time. She wakes me up every morning begging for breakfast, and in the evening for her dinner as soon as I walk in the door. She meows very loudly until I place it in front of her, and scarfs all her food down within minutes. But lately she has not been begging for food at all, and when I place it in front of her she sniffs it and walks away. She is 13 and has IBS so I switched her to a mostly raw diet (Stella & Chewy's freeze-dried, which has worked wonders!) and supplement it with high quality canned food to keep the cost down. Some meals she doesn't touch her food barely at all, and other times it seems like she's started grazing. She does end up eating most of the food I've given her, but I've never known her to do this in 13 years, and for being so food-driven most of the time, it seems very strange. One day she even stood over her bowl and scratched at the wall above, as if she was burying it. It's the same food I've been feeding her for months-years.
Some things of note, my fiancee and I recently had a patio put in (about three weeks ago), that was several days of strangers in the backyard, and noise, but there was no strange eating habits then. The week after it was completed, we went out of town for a long weekend and his mother (who she doesn't know well) came to feed her. She fed her slightly later than typical, but still twice a day, and exactly what I've been feeding her. She seemed to have a loss of appetite from the point we got home, on, so this has been the case for about a week and a half. We've gone out of town before and this has never happened before. Her behaviour has been exactly the same otherwise. She's very playful, cuddly, purrs a lot, isn't hiding or howling, and her bowel movements and water intake seems the same as always.
Is it possible that things are just slightly out of whack for her and we just need to wait to let things go back to normal? Is she just getting older and loss of appetite/wanting to eat smaller meals goes along with that? If she did decide to make the change over to "grazing", does anyone have a suggestion of a high quality (grain free) food that can be left out for hours at a time? I get nervous when she doesn't eat her raw food quickly (and canned too, but to a lesser extent) because I don't want it to sit out too long and go bad.
Thank you in advance!
Some things of note, my fiancee and I recently had a patio put in (about three weeks ago), that was several days of strangers in the backyard, and noise, but there was no strange eating habits then. The week after it was completed, we went out of town for a long weekend and his mother (who she doesn't know well) came to feed her. She fed her slightly later than typical, but still twice a day, and exactly what I've been feeding her. She seemed to have a loss of appetite from the point we got home, on, so this has been the case for about a week and a half. We've gone out of town before and this has never happened before. Her behaviour has been exactly the same otherwise. She's very playful, cuddly, purrs a lot, isn't hiding or howling, and her bowel movements and water intake seems the same as always.
Is it possible that things are just slightly out of whack for her and we just need to wait to let things go back to normal? Is she just getting older and loss of appetite/wanting to eat smaller meals goes along with that? If she did decide to make the change over to "grazing", does anyone have a suggestion of a high quality (grain free) food that can be left out for hours at a time? I get nervous when she doesn't eat her raw food quickly (and canned too, but to a lesser extent) because I don't want it to sit out too long and go bad.
Thank you in advance!
