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feeding the sprats
Mar. 18th, 2010 07:33 amAfter several months in charge of it, I've worked out some principles of cat-feeding. Once we had self-feeding cats; we just set out a feeder tower with dried food in it, and the cats noshed when hungry. But that worked better with earlier cats than this pair. (I am also hoping someday to rediscover the self-playing cat.)
Pandora is very thin, and always has been, but the more so as she suffers from intestinal inflammation. She's supposed to be on prescription wet food with powdered medication added. Pippin is on dry food, on which, though he doesn't seem to eat that much, he has grown very chubby. (Were you to visit, you'd likely see a very large orange lump sitting under the piano, if it did not invariably dash upstairs into the closet - he still runs fast - on any sign of the prospect of visitors, even before we notice them coming up the walk. We call him the Early Warning Cat.)
One problem is that Pandora gets fussy and tired of any given flavor of wet food, and even when not so is inclined to scarf on Pippin's instead. What I've discovered is that if I feed Pandora less of it, she's likely to eat more than if I give her more. Among other things, it makes the medicine go down, and she seems to vomit and spit up less under this regime. (Though not less enough to suit us. I will spare you any discussion of the other end, though that also occupies a lot of my attention.)
It also means she nags me more, in the form of wandering underfoot and meowing, but I don't mind being nagged for a legitimate purpose at the right time, which is usually about 7 a.m. if I'm already up, and then again at dinnertime.
What I've taken to doing is giving Pandora a large spoonful of the wet food in her dish, and then waiting an hour or so to see if she's finished, before putting out the Pippin food. Pandora then comes and eats it anyway. It can be amusing to watch Pippin, who is about three times her size, sitting there waiting for her to finish. But she is Thing One, and can cuff and hiss at Thing Two but not the reverse. I can't chase Pandora off; that would frighten off Pippin too if he's there, and she'd just come back if he isn't.
Pandora is very thin, and always has been, but the more so as she suffers from intestinal inflammation. She's supposed to be on prescription wet food with powdered medication added. Pippin is on dry food, on which, though he doesn't seem to eat that much, he has grown very chubby. (Were you to visit, you'd likely see a very large orange lump sitting under the piano, if it did not invariably dash upstairs into the closet - he still runs fast - on any sign of the prospect of visitors, even before we notice them coming up the walk. We call him the Early Warning Cat.)
One problem is that Pandora gets fussy and tired of any given flavor of wet food, and even when not so is inclined to scarf on Pippin's instead. What I've discovered is that if I feed Pandora less of it, she's likely to eat more than if I give her more. Among other things, it makes the medicine go down, and she seems to vomit and spit up less under this regime. (Though not less enough to suit us. I will spare you any discussion of the other end, though that also occupies a lot of my attention.)
It also means she nags me more, in the form of wandering underfoot and meowing, but I don't mind being nagged for a legitimate purpose at the right time, which is usually about 7 a.m. if I'm already up, and then again at dinnertime.
What I've taken to doing is giving Pandora a large spoonful of the wet food in her dish, and then waiting an hour or so to see if she's finished, before putting out the Pippin food. Pandora then comes and eats it anyway. It can be amusing to watch Pippin, who is about three times her size, sitting there waiting for her to finish. But she is Thing One, and can cuff and hiss at Thing Two but not the reverse. I can't chase Pandora off; that would frighten off Pippin too if he's there, and she'd just come back if he isn't.
