Getting rid of uneaten wet cat food is a very, very important part of a cat caregiver’s life 😉! How’d you do it efficiently with the minimum of fuss and effort? I have devised my own method which may surprise people. People will disagree with me strongly. They will criticise me and think I’m quite mad. I think I am doing things efficiently. It happened entirely instinctively. I call it the feline Tower of Babel.

The photograph that I have just taken shows you what I mean. Before I explain, I need to mention that the Tower of Babel is not real. It is a story which helps to explain the origin of a custom or other phenomenon. In this instance the Tower of Babel explains the origins of the wide range of languages employed by humans.
That’s not relevant, really, to this article. Like many other domestic cats, if not all domestic cats, mine leaves some wet cat food in the bowl. It varies. Sometimes he leaves quite a lot and sometimes very little. But it is unusual for the bowl to be entirely cleaned up with not even a morsel of wet cat food left. I think, by the way, this is because even when cats are hungry and enjoying their wet cat food their poor close-range eyesight means that they don’t see what’s left. Either that or it’s just bad manners 😉.
You can get rid of what’s left in the bowl every time it happens. You can scrape it into a bin and close the bin lid. Of course, it will smell and it means you have got to fiddle around for a few minutes to do that. What I do is to stack up the bowls, facing each other which creates an enclosed space. This stops the smell of the cat food getting out into the atmosphere. And when I’ve stacked up say five bowls, I then clean them up in one go. I scrape off the wet cat food – which has stayed moist because it’s in an enclosed space and therefore easier to scrape off – into tinfoil which I fold over. I place the tinfoil containing the waste cat food into my waste bin.
Getting rid of waste cat food this way, I believe, saves me quite a lot of time because I do it all in one go in a systematic way. I like to do things systematically and methodically because nearly all of my life nowadays is about maintenance. About maintaining my health, my cat, my home and so on. Maintenance can be boring. We need to minimise the amount of time we spend maintaining things to try and free up time to do things that we want to do. And that is why I have the Tower of Babel (feline version).
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Each person will have their own method but I like mine. I think it is quite a refined system of dealing with what is a slightly irritating aspect of cat caregiving. Of course, one aspect of minimising the amount of wet cat food waste is to carefully judge when your cat is in the mood to eat most of it.
I don’t know about anybody else but sometimes I make a misjudgement and he will leave nearly all of the wet cat food in his bowl. On these occasions he asks for food and so I give it to him. However, what he is asking for is not the kind of food that I have given him. Or he thinks that he wants food but actually doesn’t. This is because we get into a routine and at certain points in the routines he instinctively asks for food. He does this without thinking. He’s not doing it because he’s hungry but because it fits into that rhythm and routine.
I have picked up on this and therefore am more circumspect about dishing out wet cat food at certain times of the day.
This article brings to mind a whole range of cat caregiving issues. There is the constant discussion about whether you should feed your cat twice, three times or five or more times a day. There’s the question as to whether the wet cat food sachets provided by manufacturers are too big. Sometimes they are. Modern versions of wet cat food in sachets are in smaller sizes. To me, this is much more preferable and it is much more likely my cat will eat up the entire bowl (but always leave a tiny bit left).
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And there is a discussion about free-grazing or providing your cat with food at a certain time of day only. In other words, controlling your cat’s eating. Jackson Galaxy prefers this method. I have a hybrid method when he grazes at night on high quality dental care dry cat food and in the daytime, I provide him with wet at certain times of the day.
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Postscript: there is an important afterthought about wasting wet cat food. There is an ecological and environmental dimension. Humans are very wasteful. The amount of food that we throw away (our food) is enormous. It is shockingly bad. We don’t want to waste food if we can help it. There is a big argument about the damage that pet food does to the environment and in doing so contributes to global warming. Having a companion animal has an impact upon global warming. Essentially it damages the environment. This happens somewhere else, thousands of miles away. We don’t see it but it’s happening. The same goes for cat litter. Somewhere the environment is being damaged particularly with respect to clay cat litter. And after use it has to be thrown away which creates more environmental damage. Modern cat caregivers need to consider these other aspects in their role of looking after their pets.
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