I am a bit tired of seeing posts on Tumblr making fun of cats who act hungry even when their bowl is almost full. Those are funny and good-natured posts, but every cat guardian should realize that cats, just like people, don’t generally do anything unless they have to (or have a good reason to).
One of the reasons might be that it’s just…..hard to get all the food out? Especially if the sides of the bowl are near vertical. Like, think about how would you get food from the “corners” of a bowl with steep sides if you had to do it with your mouth? Like, your chin is….in the way… And the smaller the bowl is, the more food ends up in those “corners”. Yesterday I watched a cat trying to eat food beyond the center of the bowl for like 5 minutes, and failing miserably (albeit hilariously).
But there’s something else I want to talk about.
Another reason your cat might not be getting all the food from the bowl is something that’s usually called “whisker fatigue” or “whisker stress”. Here’s a quote from PetMD:
You can think of whisker fatigue as an information overload that stresses out your cat. Because whisker hairs are so sensitive, every time your cat comes into contact with an object or detects movement, even a small change in air current or a slight brush against her face, messages are transmitted from those sensory organs at the base of her whiskers to her brain[..]. That barrage of “messages” could stress out your cat, eventually causing what some people call whisker fatigue.
So basically if your cat’s whiskers have to be constantly touching the bowl for her to get all the food out, it might be a little like looking at your uncle’s internet explorer: pop-ups everywhere!
This also might be a reason why your cat takes food out of the bowl and drops it on the floor to eat.
Not all cats experience this, but some cats are definitely helped by giving them a flat dish.
There’s a cat, Julie, at the shelter where I work, who would literally show signs of pain when getting her kibble from a regular bowl. If she ate at all, she would eat very slowly, sometimes taking every kibble out of the bowl with her paw, and then eating it from the floor. It stopped completely when I switched her to a flat bowl. My own cat used to take her wet food out of the bowl, throw on the floor, and then eat from the floor, which of course resulted in huge mess (wet food…on the floor…). Again, she stopped when I got her a flat dish.
There are special dishes sold on amazon (search for “flat cat bowl” or “whisker stress bowl”), but it can also be, like, a plate.
Every “weird" cat behavior has a reason.
The wider a dish, the easier it is. We use plastic food tubs bc they’re wide and easy to replace or alter as needed. Some of ours still take food out of them sometimes but mostly when it’s down to the last few biscuits.
We avoid using conventional bowls and stuff for the cats bc we’ve found a lot of them tend to be kinda crap for the purpose.
(via propheticfire)
