Cat Needs to Be Supervised While Eating
by Michael
This cat, Ramses, needs to be supervised! Watch those pork chops...! Photoby caddymob (Flickr)
There is a cat in the cat news who needs to be supervised while eating. The news story says that "he cannot be left unattended with food". I have never seen that said before. His name is Higgins. He is a two year old black, long haired cat of substantial size, weighing 11 kg (that is 24 pounds). Twenty-four pounds is the wright of a F2 Savannah cat and about as heavy as it gets for a domestic cat unless very overweight. And Higgins is overweight but not obese (I say).
He is up for adoption by the RSPCA in England. Nothing really extraordinary about being a rescue cat up for adoption and overweight.
But does your cat need to be supervised while eating to make sure he or she stops when enough has been eaten? This might be necessary if you have more than one cat and food is put out for several at one time.
It is a thought. Back in the old days I thought that cats were self regulating when it came to eating. It sort of sounds natural for a cat to eat only what you want. And cats act naturally don't they? It is only people who eat for pleasure and not solely for survival. Isn't it? No I am afraid not.
It seems that cats have caught our habits. You know cats learn from watching their mothers. Maybe they are learning by watching us overeat? Unlikely. If a person is fat is the cat fat? Sometimes perhaps, but it is just as likely that the fat person who cannot diet (no criticism as it is part of the human condition) will diet their cat as a substitute for dieting themselves.
Wild cats never need to be supervised while eating! They are lucky to get the food in the first place.
A cat needs to be supervised while eating (a pretty tiresome thing to do) if he doesn't know when to stop. Provided the cat has no medical condition, this can only be due to boredom (the cat is seeking a stimulus) together with a lack of activity (indoors all the time for example). So it seems that the modern domestic cat does eat for pleasure. Or the over eating is due to a childhood during which the kitten received inadequate supplies of mother's milk and subsequently is obsessed about food!
Finally, is it fair to say that some modern cat foods encourage over eating due to the chemicals the manufacturers put in it to make it very palatable through smell and taste (I am thinking jelly that surrounds the cardboard food or the carbohydrates that are used in the manufacture of "kibble").
It is hard to diet a cat and yourself at the same time. Cats are very persistent. They normally win arguments.
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