When your ball of fuzz is eating out regularly, do you drop the amount of food that you give him/her?

Oli bought me yet another fragment of half eaten rat this morning, and has done pretty much every other morning for the past 2 weeks. On the plus side, he is leaving the birds alone (or at last eating them outside).

He’s putting on weight, and I’ve dropped his food (Royal Canin fit 32)by almost half. He’s gone from 4 KG when he had his nuts chopped off in January to a bit over 5 KG now. He’s up to date with his jabs, flead and recently wormed.

I’m concerned that I’m getting into a cycle of him hunting because he’s hungry, and me not feeding him (causing him to get more hungry) because he is hunting.

Suggestions appreciated!

Your cat is obviously a public spirited soul, helping to control the rat population and all that. You need to embrace it 😀

Standard operating procedure, if you’re bugged by the rivers of blood is a collar with a bell on. I suspect that any moggie bad ass enough to be bringing down rats will make short work of a collar though 😀

How old is he? 5KG is big for a cat but we’ve got 3 that are >5KG, the later their balls are chopped off the bugger they are, generally.

A bell made no difference to our cat. I think good hunters simply learn to live with it. She would remove it every couple of months but the stream of headless animals never relented.

We just put the same amount of food out when she was most prolific, I assumed others cats just ate the surplus. Both our cats are whipcord thin though. We thought there was something wrong with tiggy but the vet says no. When people stroke her they go ‘ooh, I can feel your bones’ and then look at us in a way that suggests we’re bad owners.

Obviously that’s before tiggy tears half their arm off.

I’m really happy that he’s munching on the local rats, and as hunting is a natural instinct, it’s not something I want to discourage as such. I’ve tried the collar/bell approach in an attempt to reduce his successes, but it didn’t seem to stop him, and I got sick of replacing the ones he “lost”

He’s a year old, and relatively small framed, when he was 4 KG it was was all muscle and he was quite old when he had his bits removed.

I don’t want him to get fat so want to try and sort this early on before it becomes a problem.

A couple of pictures (not for the delicate) of his latest efforts. I have size 9 feet for scale (28cm or so)

http://imgur.com/a/DSiLn

And here’s an almost cute piccy of the monster

Someone needs to produce miniature air horns (you know, the hand operated rubber bulb types you get on bicycles) that can be strapped to cats’ paws. Not only would this ruin any hunting opportunities, the comedy value of a sleek sophisticated graceful snobbish cat walking along going honk, HONK, hoonk, hnk can’t be overstated.

Had our two weighed the other week at their annual checkup and they were 4kg and 5kg, 5kg being about 1kg over weight, so George is now on a diet. They still bring things in, eg a mouse on the living room carpet this morning, but they just play with them rather than eat them (that I know of). Although a neighbour has complained that they keep helping themselves to fish from his pond….

from your pics, that rat doesn’t look eaten, just toyed with!

Feed away.

My guess is that a cat out hunting for food, and catching the occasional animal, will need more food than one asleep on the sofa.

I like the idea of the airhorns 🙂

The first pictured rat was presented to me as a gift I think it was missing most of the back of its head but otherwise intact He looked so proud 🙂
The 2nd rat fragment was quite a bit smaller (only about 15cm when complete), and was this mornings moist offering at around 5am.

Generally rat 2 is more (or less) representative of what gets left in my lounge, or bought up to my bed most mornings.

The second picture is definitely of an eaten rat!

Does he mither you for food? We’ve got 4 cats here and it’s pretty obvious when they’re hungry, you can’t walk from one side of the kitchen to the other without doing a Michael Flatley impression (they then piss off outside/to bed for the next 23 hours)

The first pictured rat was presented to me as a gift I think it was missing most of the back of its head but otherwise intact He looked so proud

So conversely, he is worried about your rat deficient diet then.

If I were getting rat No. 2 brought to my bed in the morning I would keep a closed door between me and Mr Cat.

(they then piss off outside/to bed/someone elses house for the next 23 hours)

Fixed that for you. 😉

Does he mither you for food? We’ve got 4 cats here and it’s pretty obvious when they’re hungry,

All the time! I can’t eat in the same room as him or he’ll try and swipe stuff off my plate, fork or even try and take it from my mouth.

I can’t let him in the kitchen or he’ll try and get into the cupboards after something to eat too. He’s always on the lookout for something to eat, and if he finds something he’s not seen before, it goes in the mouth first to see if it’s food.

He has been treated for worms. He doesn’t crap inside any more so it’s hard to check, but the last time I used this stuff and he was using a litter tray, it was very effective in removing parasites. He seems 100% healthy apart from his apparent starvation.

If I were getting rat No. 2 brought to my bed in the morning I would keep a closed door between me and Mr Cat.

It’s not so bad, and it is kind of endearing in a way, apart from when the damp bits brush against a cheek, or he leaves something under the duvet to roll onto!

I found a somewhat distressed bird in the sink the other morning, hiding under the washing up bowl. I knew he was hiding somewhere as there was a combination of feathers and bird poo all over the kitchen floor – suggesting he’d been flying around. Released him into a neighbour’s garden, but I don’t think he’ll last long.

What food are you using? We give our James Welbeloved dry food as its very low in fat. Plus he’ll only eat what he needs rather than yom down the whole bowl regardless.

My understanding is that they’ll kill pretty much regardless of whether they’re hungry or not. There’s also no telling whether the other half was eaten or left somewhere. If he’s a young and active cat I wouldn’t worry too much.

We don’t stop putting food down for ours after she’s killed something (which is pretty often at the moment).

She used to jsut leave it as a present, but now she eats it and just leaves the odd foot and the head.

If she doesn’t like a particular food she’ll let us know by ignoring it and then being a pain every time you go near her food cupboard. She’s the fussiest cat I’ve ever known but is a pretty good hunter despite being small.

We used to give our cat one of those packets of semi moist food, rather than a tin of cat food. You have an idea of portion control then.

The cat stopped eating it one day and Whiskers said they had changed the recipe a bit. We had to find something else after that as the cat wouldn’t touch it.

We have two cats to keep the mice down. Bloody things. The cats that is, not the mice.

I try to feed tham as little as possible, I have I think overfed them a bit before, I put a very small amount in their bowls when they ask for it morning and evenings mainly. Also helps stop other cats in the neighbourhood crashing the party and getting free nibbles on us.

Its spring so now they are covered in ticks, what a delight they are.

If our cats are anything to go by, you could put a constant supply of food on a conveyor belt in front of them, and they’d only stop eating when the physical effort got too much, and they needed a kip.

They may occasionally nip outside to randomly butcher the local wildlife, just to see the looks of terror on their faces as they breathed their last