I have several pages on minimising wet cat food waste. One concerns ensuring that your cat eats all the wet cat food provided. Click here if that interests you. The method is presented in an infographic.
This is another ‘tip’. Although I confess that I am not a great fan of giving tips. It is more about simply telling others what I do to reduce wet cat food waste, which I think is an important area of cat caregiving. Readers can take it or leave it. I’d love more visitors to share their personal thoughts on issues such as this. Please do.
This tip applies to indoor/outdoor cats. And I realise that not every cat is an indoor/outdoor cat. In fact, there are more and more full-time indoor cats nowadays.
I have found that if my cat rejects the wet cat food that I have put down for him, he may accept it a little later if he discovers the food in the back garden where I’ve put it.
And when he accepts it, he eats it or at least part of it. The remainder can then go to the foxes who I know come through my back garden.
The theory behind this policy is that when cats are outside, they revert to their wild cat mentality. Although the wildcat is not a scavenger per se they do occasionally scavenge and outside my cat is a true predator. He reverts to a kind of survival mode and all his feline instincts are on display.
And in that mode, he’s far more likely to be willing to eat food that he can scavenge and which happens to be the exact same food that I gave him an hour or so before which he rejected.
This works occasionally from my personal experience. And interestingly, if you leave the food outside long enough the food bowl is more or less completely cleaned of all food because other animals or insects take their bit as well; if my cat has left some. Sometimes it is hardly necessary to clean the foot bowl afterwards.
I believe that we all need strategies as cat caregivers to minimise good food waste. It isn’t just about the smell that leftover wet food producers, it’s about monetary waste as well.
For me, the smell is perhaps the worst problem. It is difficult sometimes to know what to do with the food and my idea above I think is a good resolution of the problem. And I use 50 g wet food sachets which make it more likely that my cat will eat all the food given to him at one sitting.
What to do with the sachets? Firstly, I make sure that all the food is removed from the sachet when I feed my cat. I achieve this by scooping it out with a teaspoon rather than squeezing it out. I have decided not to box it up and try to contain the smell but leave the sachets loosely stacked in a bowl before putting them into a plastic bag and throwing them out in the trashcan.
Perhaps the key here is to make sure that all the food is removed from the sachet and not to squeeze it out. If you squeeze wet food out of a sachet inevitably a small proportion will be left inside which is both waste and source of odour. And even if you throw away that individual sachet into the waste bin it will create an odour within the waste bin which I think you want to avoid depending upon where the waste bin is but it makes sense to avoid that kind of odour in any case.
I also have a page on disposing of waste wet cat food if all else fails. It is a personal method which I sometimes use. Click here if that interests you.
